Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted. We spend our lives portioning it into work-time, family-time and me-time. Rarely do we sit and think about how and why we choreograph our lives through this strange medium. A lot of people only appreciate time when they have an experience that makes them realize how limited it is.
My attempts to answer these questions often involve putting people into extreme situations to explore how their experience of time is affected. Some of the participants in my experiments have been given electric shocks to induce pain, others have traversed 100-meter-high crumbling bridges , some have even spent 12 months in isolation on Antarctica. At the heart of this work is an attempt to understand how our interaction with our environment shapes our experience of time.
So, when we experience fear, joy, anxiety or sadness, emotional processing and time processing interact. This results in the sensation of time passing more speeding up or slowing down. Time really does fly when you’re having fun and drag when you're bored. Being a time-nerd, I spend a lot of time thinking about time. Before COVID, I would have said that I thought about it more than most. However, this changed during the pandemic.