Exploring Temporal Illusions: How Our Perception of Time Shapes Our Lives

Just as an optical illusion is a distortion of our sense of sight, a temporal illusion is a distortion of our sense of time. Some seem small, like how a minute spent waiting in line can seem to take forever, but an entire day with friends can just fly by. Some seem deeper, like the uncanny feeling we get from recordings that make people from long ago seem more real than usual or the strange way time seems to sneak by. For example, the songs I liked as a kid—Wannabe, Mmmbop, Semi-Charmed Life—are as old to kids born today as the literal oldies were when I was born. How could that be true? Am I really that old now? I mean, I shouldn't be surprised. I know how time works, but yet, I don't.

Far from being just mistakes, these illusions are the edges of another dimension of space-time, not one given to us by physics, not one given at all, but one made by our minds. Let's begin with the different ways there are to feel time. Actually sitting down and consciously tuning into the passage of time as it happens is called feeling time prospectively. You can't do that to time that's already happened. Except you can. If I were to ask you, without looking, to guess how long you've been watching this video, you'd probably be able to come up with a guess you were reasonably confident in. Well, you arrived at that guess by feeling time retrospectively, by measuring it as it appears in your memory. Now, with that in mind, we're ready to approach our first illusion: the holiday paradox. A four-hour delay at the airport before your holiday can feel unbearably long while it's happening, but once you arrive, an exciting day at your destination can seem to fly by. Those feelings are all prospective timing.

A week later retrospectively, the delay often feels like a blip in your mind, and the day of sightseeing feels like a much longer, bigger part of your life. These are the long-short and short-long patterns of felt time. Which one you feel depends on whether what you're doing is empty or full. An empty activity is monotonous, unstimulating, unimportant to you, whereas a full activity is packed with sensations, novelty, significance, context change, and challenge. Now, I experienced this during my three days in isolation. While I was there, time dragged very, very slowly. A fear I have right now is that it's just Friday, and there's still a lot of time left. But now, years later, it's hard to believe that I spent three full days in that room. Jeez, seems like something I barely did. Well, it's believed that prospective time feels fast when an activity is full because you're not busy thinking about time. If you're not attending to it, you're busy with something else, well, you won't notice how much time has passed. But to understand retrospective illusions, let's ask a different question. Does time speed up as we get older?

Many of you may feel the same way. Looking back, my childhood feels like it lasted so long, but my 20s went by faster, and my 30s are going by even faster than that. A popular explanation is the proportion theory. It suggests that time seems to speed up as we age because each new unit of time that we live is smaller relative to all the time that came before. The year you lived as a nine-year-old was 10% of your entire existence up to that point, but when you're 30, another year is just 3% more life. Studies have found little evidence that weeks, months, or even years are retrospectively remembered as passing faster by those who are older. But decades, yes, and while it's true that the older we get, the faster we tend to think the last 10 years went by, that only appears to be the case until about the age of 50. After that, the speed of decades appears to plateau.

A leading explanation is that how long a duration feels depends on how many things in it can be recalled. In my normal life, lots of different things happen every three days. But during the three days I was in isolation, so little happened that I have few distinct memories from it. My mind sees that emptiness and perceives that it was brief. So then, looking back, because there are fewer distinct memories from more recent decades, we assume they were shorter. You know, reflecting on all of this, it's striking just how many moments are forgettable. John Koenig, the author of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, calls the awareness of how few days are memorable "olika." Over time, our specific daily perceptions of what happened conglomerate into generalized ideas about how things were: themes, moods, the big picture. What was perceptual becomes conceptual, and concepts are good. They lower cognitive load by wringing out details, leaving us with the broader, lighter just.

But they can also obscure reality, which brings us to our second distortion: chronological illusions. The world of our experience is not made of distinct entities; it's a continuity of fuzzy, overlapping blobs, and we impose concepts on it. For example, is a hot dog a sandwich? Is cereal soup? How many holes does a straw have? Those aren't questions about reality; they're questions about words we made up. Periodization is the chopping up of time into contrived pieces, like the Stone Age, the Renaissance, the '80s, the '90s. But here's the thing: when did the '80s or '90s really happen? I mean, mathematically, they refer to years that have eights or nines in the tens place. But conceptually, it's not like on January 1st, 1980, people woke up and were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, it's the '80s. Quick, everyone change your clothes!"

Concepts say too much and too little. Facts that expose their imperfections are perennial favorites on social media. In fact, I made an entire video about them. What hasn't been discussed yet is the mechanisms by which we allow them to do their dirty work. Let's dig in and see what we can find. If I asked you to lay down on the floor of a windowless, clockless room and get up after you thought a minute had passed, you'd probably do a pretty good job. But if I asked you to get up after you thought ten years had passed, that'd be hard. We lack an ability to sense and grasp long periods of time.