I also have a fascination with this, and studied Neuroscience in my undergrad!
I recall a segment from an episode of Radiolab where Neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the perception of time slowing down when you’re falling.
I also recall reading an essay from Oliver Sack’s “River of Consciousness” that was about how people with Tourette’s experience time slowed down so much so that they could catch a fly because it moves in their time. And I also vaguely recall reading that for people with Parkinson’s, or maybe just older people, they estimate/perceive that time is moving slower than it is.
Similar to you, I find that the feeling of slowing down time has to do with attention and creating distinct memories. It helps to have novelty, especially with travelling to new places that bring shared experiences with new people. Paying attention in order to write poetry puts me into the perfect space for slowing down time :)
Interesting about Tourette’s! I’m not able to find any empirical confirmation of a relationship between Tourette’s and reaction time, but I do see an association between ADHD and longer reaction times, with stimulant use lowering them to control levels.
(Incidentally: as a person with ADHD, this really just illustrates how multi-dimensional time perception is, though, as Filip Sondej below mentions. When I’m on stims, time might feel slower on a moment-to-moment basis—the opposite of how, late at night when I’m tired and have low alertness, music feels a lot faster. But I don’t feel like stims make the entire day feel slower, when I’m looking back on it. In fact the opposite is often the case, since the entire point of them is to make it easier to focus on one activity for a long period of time—which means less variety in the day.)
I also have a fascination with this, and studied Neuroscience in my undergrad!
I recall a segment from an episode of Radiolab where Neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the perception of time slowing down when you’re falling.
I also recall reading an essay from Oliver Sack’s “River of Consciousness” that was about how people with Tourette’s experience time slowed down so much so that they could catch a fly because it moves in their time. And I also vaguely recall reading that for people with Parkinson’s, or maybe just older people, they estimate/perceive that time is moving slower than it is.
Similar to you, I find that the feeling of slowing down time has to do with attention and creating distinct memories. It helps to have novelty, especially with travelling to new places that bring shared experiences with new people. Paying attention in order to write poetry puts me into the perfect space for slowing down time :)
Interesting about Tourette’s! I’m not able to find any empirical confirmation of a relationship between Tourette’s and reaction time, but I do see an association between ADHD and longer reaction times, with stimulant use lowering them to control levels.
(Incidentally: as a person with ADHD, this really just illustrates how multi-dimensional time perception is, though, as Filip Sondej below mentions. When I’m on stims, time might feel slower on a moment-to-moment basis—the opposite of how, late at night when I’m tired and have low alertness, music feels a lot faster. But I don’t feel like stims make the entire day feel slower, when I’m looking back on it. In fact the opposite is often the case, since the entire point of them is to make it easier to focus on one activity for a long period of time—which means less variety in the day.)