Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Why Good Time Flies, Boring Seems Infinite?


Fri 02 Aug 2019 | 01:47 PM
Yassmine Elsayed

It is the weekend already.. One might ask why it ends so quickly that we feel we had no rest before going back to work again.. Well, scientific researchers asked the question in their own way, that is, why does time fly when you're having fun, and why does it plod along when you're bored? 

The brain seems to make its own sense of time, depending on its expectations. According to Dr. Michael Shadlen, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, the brain can represent the probability that something is going to occur, given that it hasn't happened yet. 

Speaking to Live Science in a recent interview, Dr. Shadlen explained: “every thought has various horizons.. In a book, for example, horizons lie at the end of every syllable, the end of every word, the end of the next sentence and so on. Time moves according to how we anticipate these horizons”.

When you're really engrossed in something, “the brain anticipates the big picture and sees both the near and distant horizons, which makes time seem to flutter by,” Shadlen said. But when you're bored, you anticipate the closer horizons such as the end of a sentence instead of the end of the story; these horizons aren't knit together as a whole, and time crawls.

“There isn't a single spot in the brain that's responsible for how we perceive time in this way. Rather, any area that gives rise to thought and consciousness is likely involved in this task,” Shadlen said.

Many Mechanisms Involved

"There are almost certainly a multitude of timing mechanisms in the brain," added Joe Paton, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud Foundation, a private biomedical research foundation in Portugal. One mechanism involves the speed at which brain cells activate one another and form a network when you're performing an activity. Another mechanism involves chemicals in the brain. Paton and his colleagues found that a set of neurons that release the neurotransmitter dopamine — an important chemical involved in feeling rewarded — impacts how the brain perceives time. When you're having fun, these cells are more active, they release a lot of dopamine and your brain judges that less time has passed than actually has. When you're not having fun, these cells don't release as much dopamine, and time seems to slow down.

Why We Ask: Where Did Younger Time Go?

On his part, Dr. David Eagleman, an adjunct professor of psychology and public mental health and population sciences at Stanford University, believes that time seems to speed up as you get older. He told Live Science:  “When you're a child, everything seems novel, and thus your brain lays down dense networks to remember those events and experiences. As an adult, however, you've seen much more, so these events don't prompt the creation of such memories. So, you look back at your younger years and say, "Where did that time go?.