When we are children, the days become eternal, especially if we are waiting for the arrival of the weekend, Christmas or the summer holidays to forget about obligations and do what we want, but this changes as we get older. However, even in adulthood, our perception of the passage of time is capricious, since it seems to us that the hours fly by if we are very busy or entertained, and that the clock does not tick if we feel bored.
A group of scientists has investigated how the signals that the brain receives from the body influence the perception of the passage of time and have found that our heartbeats can distort it. The heart and brain maintain constant communication because the former sends signals to the latter with each beat, providing it with key information about the state of the body. This information has allowed researchers to better understand how the weather distortions we experience can be produced.
The researchers conducted two experiments in which they presented brief events either during a beat (the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle), when the heart is contracting and sending signals to the brain, or between beats (the diastolic phase), when the heart is relaxes and does not send information to the brain. They then measured people’s perception of time by asking participants to determine whether what they perceived was longer or shorter compared to a reference duration.
“The signals from our bodies, in this case the heart, can act as a subjective pacemaker for the passage of time”
Presenting the events in diastole made the participants perceive the time to be longer than their actual duration, as if that duration had been expanded. In systole, by contrast, people perceived the event itself to be shorter, as if it were contracting in time.
Expansion and contraction of time in tune with the heart
“Our findings illustrate the point that the novelist Murakami was making in his novel Kafka on the Shore, when he wrote ‘time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the fluttering of the heart’,” explained the Dr. Irena Arslanova from the Department of Psychology at the Royal Holloway School of the University of London. “These patterns of contraction and expansion demonstrate how our perception of time is constantly influenced by our internal physiological states,” she says.
In the second experiment, the participants carried out a similar task, but with images of faces with emotional expressions. Again the same general pattern of acceleration in systole and deceleration in diastole was observed. But what was most remarkable was that when the expressions on these faces were perceived to be more emotionally intense, time generally sped up.
The results of this research have been published in the journal Psychophysiology and contribute to a more mechanistic understanding of how common time distortions arise from phasic modulations within each heartbeat. The results may have important implications considering the role that time plays in highly skilled tasks, such as driving, playing an instrument or practicing certain sports, and the influence of time perception on some mental health problems, such as depression and the anxiety.
Professor Manos Tsakiris, from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, and another of the directors of the work added that “these findings highlight the intricate relationship between what happens in our bodies and how signals from our bodies, in this case the heart, , can act as a subjective pacemaker of the passage of time”.
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