Ever Feel Like Time is Moving Too Fast, or Too Slow? Your Own Brain is Responsible For It

It is a widely accepted perception that time flies when we are enjoying ourselves and it drags when we are stuck in a work we do not like. Well, scientists have found out the reason for this phenomena and it is possible that our own brain might be responsible for it after all.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, neurons in our brain trick us into experiencing this weird time speed distortion, not those Christopher Nolan movies. The research shows that the subjective nature of our experiences of passing time are mediated by the responses from a group of specialised neurons in the brain.

The research results have located these neurons in the brain's supramarginal gyrus (SMG) which fire up in response to the passage of a specific length of time.The methodology used in the research was based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study which examined the biological basis for the subjective perception of time in several human participants.

The research’s significance statement mentions, “To investigate the neural basis of subjective time, we conducted an fMRI study, using an adaptation procedure that allowed us to manipulate perceived duration while holding physical duration constant.”

Scientists Masamichi J Hayashi and Richard B Ivry conducted their methodology on 18 participants which included 11 males and 7 females. The participants were asked to point out the difference between the duration of time in a test with a visual stimulus of variable duration or an auditory stimulus of fixed duration.

“These results provide strong physiological evidence that the population coding of time in the right parietal cortex reflects our subjective experience of time,” said the research. The study has also observed a correlation between our physiological measure of neural adaptation and our behavioural measure of subjective time: participants who showed the strongest modulation of duration tuning in right SMG also showed the largest behavioral aftereffect.

The research concluded the correlation between the behavioral aftereffect and the degree of duration tuning modulation in SMG. It is compatible with the hypothesis that the bias in perceived duration following duration adaptation arises from altered response properties of duration-tuned neural populations.