Toddlers live almost completely within this mental space, so time has no past or present; it is essentially infinite. Older people, on the other hand, tend to be anywhere but the present, spending much more time worrying about the to-do list for the day ahead and reliving a hurtful comment made two weeks ago by a friend.
But how does this explain the seeming warping of time that occurs with big events like 9/11? Why does that event seem like yesterday, while others from the same time period seem so distant? This effect is probably the result of the way our memories process negative experiences. Any novel event will stand out in the memory, but negative ones, especially those that evoke great fear, will stand out in even greater detail.
Brain researchers believe this is true for a couple of reasons. First, it is a survival adaptation — our ancestors needed to remember where dangers lurked in order to avoid them. Second, our psyche needs to process these events, to make sense of them and to integrate them into our understanding of the world. So, it could be that 9/11 feels like yesterday because our minds are still consciously and unconsciously processing the tragedy, both for our own survival and for our sense of ourselves in the world.
The same holds true individually. Surprising events, including positive ones like receiving a marriage proposal or winning a prize, will likely remain more vivid in memory, and our brains will want to keep the tough moments of life, such as confrontations with bullies, car accidents, and nasty breakups, front and center in the mind, in order to deal with their lingering psychological ramifications.
David Eagleman, director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine, has considered this feature of the human brain from the physiological point of view. In an article written for the popular e-zine Edge, he explains that different kinds of sensory information are processed by different structures of the brain.
For that reason, the brain has to reconstruct the parts of each experience to have them make sense as a whole. Even at an early age, we are very good at doing this, unless the details are so nonsensical to us that we can’t make them make sense. The ones we have a difficult time reconstructing become what he calls “temporal illusions” — similar to optical illusions but with time instead of visual information.
Eagleman writes: “Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere.”
When we look at optical illusions, our brains are given contradictory information disrupting their ability to translate all the visual information in a concrete way. In temporal illusions, our brain’s ability to reconstruct time has been disrupted, so we end up with a distorted version of time that never quite matches with reality.
One more thing is known about perception of time by the human brain — humans everywhere have the same tendencies. The results of these time-perception studies have been practically identical among German, Austrian, Dutch, Japanese, and New Zealander participants. All of them experience the speeding up of time with age and the distortion of time when experiencing surprising events.
This suggests that it is a brain-based phenomenon, not something created by cultural differences. As neuroscientists unravel the many mysteries that remain about the nature of consciousness, and the nature of our brain’s existence within the time-space continuum, many questions will certainly be asked about how and why the brain perceives time as it does.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s Winter 2017 issue.
