Life feels subjectively longer with more novel and fulfilling experiences.
By Marc Wittmann Ph.D.
Only very recently the mystery of how we experience time in the present moment has found conclusive answers. As highlighted in my recent post, the unsolved question concerning the way humans judge the duration of events while they are happening has been explained. We sense the passage of time through our bodily and emotional states. We feel time passage even when we close our eyes or use earplugs because the sense of the body always remains. Subjective time emerges through the ongoing and dynamically changing bodily sensations and related emotions. The more sensitive we are to our bodily self and the more emotional an event, the longer it appears to have lasted. The interoceptive system, including the insular cortex, creates the sense of the internal physical state—how we feel. Studies with the fMRI brain scanning technology have revealed the insular cortex to be the most important brain region for judging duration.
The above knowledge relates to short events in the range of seconds to very few minutes when we are actually attending to time. Often, however, duration is judged in retrospect, when an event has already passed. At the end of a movie, we may feel that the 90 minutes were subjectively much shorter because we were entertained. The 45 minutes in class seemed much longer when we were bored. How do we perceive time when looking back? It is all about memory content. The rule of thumb is the following: The more changing experiences we have had during a time interval, the longer subjective duration in retrospect. An uneventful week spent with our work routines passes quickly. An exciting week full of novel experiences, when we travel and explore a new place with friends, lasts subjectively much longer. This is the memory effect of retrospective time. More emotionally laden experiences expand subjective duration. Because we had so many novel experiences in a joyful context memory formation is enhanced. Life lasts subjectively longer.
Memory formation and retrospective time
Related to the effect of memory build-up and retrieval on time perception, an unprecedented study published in December 2023 by Alice Teghil and her colleagues from Sapienza University in Rome used a large battery of time perception tasks for testing patients on a continuum of Alzheimer’s disease spectrum. They confirmed the strong relationship between memory formation and retrospective time. The patients with Alzheimer’s disease performed worse than control persons on many time perception tasks, especially so when they had to retrospectively judge the duration of the test session lasting approximately an hour after it was completed. Neural atrophy in the hippocampus, the key structure for memory encoding, is the pathological hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. In a study using an fMRI scanner, the same research team from Rome had also shown that in healthy subjects the activity of neural connections of the hippocampus with other brain regions is decisive for the discrimination of duration of past events in the range of several seconds.
More building blocks for a neural model of retrospective time are accumulating. The specific brain waves that underlie the judgment of the duration of past events in the range of several minutes may have been discovered. A team from the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit of Université Paris-Saclay discovered that the relative amount of recorded alpha rhythms in the brain (oscillating with a frequency of around 10 Hz) predicted participants’ retrospective duration estimates of time intervals: across participants relative more alpha waves were associated with subjectively longer duration.
Another piece in the puzzle of retrospective time brings us back to the body and emotions. In a study led by Olga Pollatos, one group of participants had the specific instruction to focus on bodily states, and the other group was instructed to focus on certain content while watching film clips depicting different emotions: fear, amusement, and a neutral documentary. First, fear was accompanied by a subjective time dilation for both groups. Secondly, the relative overestimation of duration in the fear condition was more pronounced in the group with a focus on their bodily states. Body feelings related to emotional experiences thus expand time in the present moment (while consciously attending to time) as well as in hindsight (when attending to time only after the event is over). Emotional memories dilate time.
Slowing the passage of time
Most adults feel that time passes more quickly as we get older. In a study of ours, highlighted in a PT post, we could indeed demonstrate that with increasing age participants increasingly reported time to pass more quickly, in general, but especially for the period covering the last 10 years. How to explain this phenomenon? Memory content is again the key to an answer. Childhood, youth, and young adulthood are full of ‘firsts’ leading to memories of deep significance. When we grow older, fewer novel and meaningful events are experienced and stored in memory. As a result, subjective time relatively speeds up. We cannot experience events of our lives with the same freshness we felt when we were younger, but to some extent, we can nevertheless do something to slow down the passage of time.
In a study from 2015, we reported that compared to control participants individuals with long-term mindfulness meditation practice felt a relatively slower passage of time in general as well as estimated the last week and month to have lasted longer. Our interpretation was that this type of meditation practice directs attention to the present moment regarding the bodily self, through attending to the breathing in and out and when conducting a body scan. The ability of more mindful individuals to focus attentively on sensory experiences in everyday life and to be more aware of their feelings leads to more content in episodic memory, which in turn leads to a relative dilation of past periods of one’s life.
We do not necessarily have to become meditators to feel a stretching of our life time. As we showed in one study, individuals with stronger emotional self-regulation capacities likewise report a slower passage of life time. As an individual trait, emotional self-regulation means that one can actively cope with one’s emotions, as opposed to a mere reactive sensitivity. Individuals capable of actively regulating their emotions have more nuanced, fine-grained experiences at a given moment that are more deeply stored in long-term memory, which in turn slows down subjective time.
Back to the title of this post: How to subjectively expand our life time. The rule of thumb for understanding the subjective passage of our life time was the following: The more novel and fulfilling experiences we have, which we attend to with more interest, the more memories are built. This enhanced memory formation leads to the feeling that life has lasted longer. Many routines are important for us because they signify safety and expertise we do not want to miss. But breaking unnecessary monotonic routines, which we may only conduct because we are too comfortable, would be a way to experience meaningful change and surprise. Becoming more aware of our feelings and actively modulating them in a way that leads to more life satisfaction is a path to an emotionally richer and memorable life and at the same time to a subjectively longer life.
References
Teghil, A., Boccia, M., Di Vita, A., Zazzaro, G., Monti, M. S., Trebbastoni, A., … & D’Antonio, F. (2023). Multidimensional assessment of time perception along the continuum of Alzheimer’s Disease and evidence of alterations in subjective cognitive decline. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 22117.
Teghil, A., Bonavita, A., Procida, F., Giove, F., & Boccia, M. (2023). Intrinsic hippocampal connectivity is associated with individual differences in retrospective duration processing. Brain Structure and Function, 228(2), 687-695.
Azizi, L., Polti, I., & van Wassenhove, V. (2023). Spontaneous α Brain Dynamics Track the Episodic “When”. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(43), 7186-7197.
Pollatos, O., Laubrock, J., & Wittmann, M. (2014). Interoceptive focus shapes the experience of time. PloS one, 9(1), e86934.
Wittmann, M., Otten, S., Schötz, E., Sarikaya, A., Lehnen, H., Jo, H. G., … & Meissner, K. (2015). Subjective expansion of extended time-spans in experienced meditators. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 1586.
Wittmann, M., Otten, S., Schötz, E., Sarikaya, A., Lehnen, H., Jo, H. G., … & Meissner, K. (2015). Subjective expansion of extended time-spans in experienced meditators. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 1586.
Marc Wittmann, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany.
Originally published at Psychology Today