Time perception
From Psychology Wiki
Community portal · Tasks to do · News · Help
Clinical · Educational · Ind&Org · Other fields · Professional · Transpersonal · World
Assessment |
Biopsychology |
Comparative |
Cognitive |
Developmental |
Language
Personality |
Philosophy |
Research Methods |
Social |
Statistics
Cognitive Psychology: Attention · Learning · Memory · Motivation · Perception · Thinking
.
- See also: Mental chronometry and Sense of time
Even in the presence of timepieces, different individuals may judge an identical length of time to be passing at different rates.[citation needed] Commonly, this is referred to as time seeming to "fly" (a period of time seeming to pass faster than possible) or time seeming to "drag" (a period of time seeming to pass slower than possible). The psychologist Jean Piaget called this form of time perception "lived time."[citation needed]
This common experience was used to familiarize the general public to the ideas presented by Einstein's theory of relativity in a 1930 cartoon by Sidney "George" Strube:[1][2]
Man: Well, it's like this,—supposing I were to sit next to a pretty girl for half an hour it would seem like half a minute,—
Einstein: Braffo! You haf the idea!
Man: But if I were to sit on a hot stove for two seconds then it would seem like two hours.
A form of temporal illusion verifiable by experiment is the kappa effect,[3] where the interval between two events is perceived differently by different observers.
Time also appears to pass more quickly as one gets older. Stephen Hawking suggests that the perception of time is a ratio: Unit of Time : Time Lived.[citation needed] For example, one hour to a six-month-old person would be approximately "1:4032", while one hour to a 40-year-old would be "1:349,440". Therefore an hour appears much longer to a young child than to an aged adult, even though the measure of time is equal.
Contents |
[edit] Time in altered states of consciousness
Altered states of consciousness are sometimes characterized by a different estimation of time. Some psychoactive substances – such as entheogens – may also dramatically alter a person's temporal judgement. When viewed under the influence of such substances as LSD, psychedelic mushrooms and peyote, a clock may appear to be a strange reference point and a useless tool for measuring the passage of events as it does not correlate with the user's experience. At higher doses, time may appear to slow down, stop, speed up, go backwards and even seem out of sequence. A typical thought might be "I can't believe it's only 8 o'clock, but then again, what does 8 o'clock mean?" As the boundaries for experiencing time are removed, so is its relevance. Many users claim this unbounded timelessness feels like a glimpse into spiritual infinity. To imagine that one exists somewhere "outside" of time is one of the hallmark experiences of a psychedelic voyage.[citation needed] Marijuana, a milder psychedelic, may also distort the perception of time to a lesser degree.[4]
The practice of meditation, central to all Buddhist traditions, takes as its goal the reflection of the mind back upon itself, thus altering the subjective experience of time; the so called, 'entering the now', or 'the moment'.[citation needed]
[edit] Culture
Culture is another variable contributing to the perception of time. Anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf reported after studying the Hopi cultures that: "… the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions or that refer directly to what we call “time”, or to past, present, or future…"[5] Whorf's assertion has been challenged and modified. Pinker debunks Whorf's claims about time in the Hopi language, pointing out that the anthropologist Malotki (1983) has found that the Hopi do have a concept of time very similar to that of other cultures; they have units of time, and a sophisticated calendar.[6]
[edit] See also
[edit] References & Bibliography
[edit] Key texts
[edit] Books
[edit] Papers
[edit] Additional material
[edit] Books
[edit] Papers
[edit] External links
- Time and Its Discontents
- Time Perception I and II
- Time Perception Research at the University of Manchester
| This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Time. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |
Cite error:
<ref> tags exist, but no <references/> tag was found
