Felt Time

A Matter of Time

Your body does not have an internal clock that accurately ticks off the minutes of your life. Your experience of time is subjective. Time’s pace can seem to speed up or slow down, depending on such variables as your emotions and attention. For example, when you are enjoying a movie, time seems to fly. But a few minutes stuck in traffic can make time feel interminable.

Scientists believe people experience time in discrete units, a series of present moments that the brain stitches into an apparently continuous flow. Producing this flow is an essential element in cultivating a sense of self – the ego that persists through the moments and experiences of time’s jagged flow. As a result, awareness of the self is integral to the subjective pace of time, which accelerates when you “lose yourself” in an interesting task and which drags when you focus too much on yourself.

The Three-Second Present

People appear to experience time’s flow in “temporal units” that last two to three seconds. When people speak of the present moment – the now – they refer to this small window of perception. The brain’s mechanisms meld...