It is a truism that time seems to
expand or contract depending on our circumstances: In a state of terror,
seconds can stretch. A day spent in solitude can drag. When we are trying to
meet a deadline, hours race by.
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A study published this month in the journal
Psychophysiology by psychologists at Cornell University found that, when
observed at the level of microseconds, some of these distortions could be
driven by heartbeats, whose length is variable from moment to moment.
Psychologists fitted undergraduates
with electrocardiograms to measure the length of each heartbeat precisely, and
then asked them to estimate the length of brief audio tones. The psychologists
discovered that after a longer heartbeat interval, subjects tended to perceive
the tone as longer; shorter intervals led subjects to assess the tone as
shorter. After each tone, the subjects’ heartbeat intervals lengthened.
A lower heart rate appeared to
assist with perception, said Saeedeh Sadeghi, a doctoral candidate at Cornell
and the study’s lead author. “When we need to perceive things from the outside
world, the beats of the heart are noise to the cortex,” she said. “You can
sample the world more — it’s easier to get things in — when the heart is
silent.”
The study provides more evidence,
after an era of research focusing on the brain, that “there is no single part
of the brain or body that keeps time — it’s all a network,” she said. “The
brain controls the heart, and the heart, in turn, impacts the brain.”
“When we need to perceive things from the outside world, the beats of the heart are noise to the cortex.”
Interest in the perception of time
has exploded since the COVID pandemic, when activity outside the home came to
an abrupt halt for many and people worldwide found themselves facing stretches
of undifferentiated time.
A study of time perception conducted
during the first year of the lockdown in Britain found that 80 percent of
participants reported distortions in time, in different directions. On average,
older, more socially isolated people reported that time slowed, and younger,
more active people reported that it sped up.
“Our experience of time is affected
in ways which mirror, generally, our well-being,” said Ruth S. Ogden, a
psychology professor at Liverpool John Moores University and author of the
lockdown study. “People with depression experience a slowing of time, and that
slowing of time is experienced as being a worsening factor of the depression.”
The new Cornell study addresses
something different: how we perceive the passage of microseconds. Understanding
those mechanisms may help us to manage trauma, in which instantaneous
experiences are remembered as drawn out, Ogden said.
When trying to assess the importance
of an experience, she said, “our brain just looks back and says, Well, how many
memories did we make?” She added, “When you have this really rich memory,
richer than you would normally get in a 15-minute period of your life, that’s
going to trick you into thinking that it was long.”
Research into perception of time has
focused, until recently, on areas of the brain, said Hugo Critchley, a
professor of psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School who has studied
how heartbeats affect memory for words and fear responses.
“Our experience of time is affected in ways which mirror, generally, our well-being.”
“I think there’s much greater appreciation
that cognitive functions are intimately linked, perhaps even grounded in, the
control of the body, whereas most of the psychology up to the 1990s dismisses
the body as being something controlled at the level of the brain stem,” said
Critchley, who was not involved in the Cornell heartbeat study.
Previous research has investigated
how physical arousal is connected to stress processing, and emotional states
such as anxiety and panic, Critchley said. The new study expands on that by
focusing on the role of the heart in a nonemotional function, the perception of
time, which can be linked to larger distortions in thinking.
“You can’t look at cognitive
function in isolation,” he said. “Even understanding how the brain develops and
starts representing internal mental states, people are looking at the primacy
of the inescapable internal information you need to control to keep alive.”
One reason that the body may be
closely involved in the perception of time is that time is closely related to
metabolic needs, said Adam K. Anderson, a professor of psychology at Cornell
and a co-author of the new study.
“Time is a resource,” Anderson said.
“If the body was a battery, or a gas tank, it’s trying in the moment to say,
How much energy do we have? We’re going to make things seem shorter or longer
in terms of time based on how much bodily energy we have.”
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