Our question: How can people be made more aware through technology of how psychological states work to affect their perception of time?
Your brain is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces the enormous challenge of finding the best way to perceive the outside world.
The days of thinking of time as a river‚ evenly flowing, always advancing‚ are over. Research has found that time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate.
Warren Meck of Duke University argues that the brain measures long stretches of time by producing pulses. But the brain does not then count the pulses in the way a clock does. Instead, Meck suspects, it does something more elegant. It listens to the pulses as if they were music. Meck has found support for his model by recording the electrical activities of neurons and in other researchers‚ studies on people with a skewed sense of time. Certain neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, control pulsing neurons. Drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine alter the brain by flooding it with dopamine, and studies have shown that they also change the second-to-second perception of time. In one experiment at UCLA, reported in 2007, scientists rang a bell after 53 seconds of silence. Healthy people estimated on average that 67 seconds had passed. Stimulant addicts guessed 91 seconds. Other drugs have the opposite effect on dopamine and compress the subjective experience of time.
Many personal experiences as well as experimental studies confirm that situations and circumstances under which they occur play an important role in a person's psychological perception of time. Happy hours for instance are perceived by an individual as passing fast, while 20 minutes of waiting for a bus appears a lot longer. The perception of time in a given period seems closely connected with the number of new, unusual or remarkable events which take place in this period.
Periods which are filled with new things are momentarily seen as passing by quickly. Looking back they have made an impression, and now they seem much longer than less exciting periods of life.
To give an example, many people would agree that the very first days of a vacation are well remembered whereas the days or weeks thereafter seem to have passed more discreetly. For events, the aspect of the new seems to make the difference for the posterior perception of time rather than the relative length of time which it took to live the new event within its period.
It has also been documented by several independent tests, that, as one would intuitively expect, interesting time periods pass by more quickly. So for instance, showing entertaining movie clips during ten minutes to a group of people felt much shorter to them than 10 min filled with some sort of routine work. Consequently, time has been coined as a dimension of perception and experience. This is somewhat vague, because it is not clear in which way these two components are supposed to collaterate. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that the perception of time is intrinsically connected with new events which are experienced and serve as orientation.
While time periods which are filled with interesting activities pass by fast, these periods are felt in retrospection as having taken longer than less eventful periods. Hence, in retrospective, the feeling of time duration is in general different from its perception at the time (instant) of the very same period. One convincing explanation of this is that human beings remember major events of their life.
Our planned outcome to answer our question of "How can people be made more aware through technology of how psychological states work to affect their perception of time?" will take form in a piece of technology that will measure the user's pulse and display the result affecting a clock, perhaps with each beat of their heart equalling a second.
At this stage we are looking to make a infra-red finger pulse rate monitor, and use Arduino and maybe Processing to intercept the signal and display it as a digital clock on the screen.
Ideally we would like to end up with a wristwatch that displays the time on it that your heart rate is controlling, as this could lead to a lot of interesting experiments involving the wearer's psychological perception of time as they do everyday tasks. It would make them a lot more aware of the tasks they are doing and how they affect their heart rate and thus emotions, which have been proven to greatly affect a person's psychological perception of time. It would provide a direct visual link for the wearer between their environment, heart rate, emotions, and how they perceive time.
- On the Perception of Time by F. Thomas Bruss and Ludger Ru ̈schendorf Universit ́e Libre de Bruxelles and Universit ̈at Freiburg retrieved from citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.151.8139
- BRAIN TIME, June 09, by David M. Eagleman retrieved from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/eagleman09/eagleman09_index.html
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