Time flies... How the Brain Measures Time.

Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain.

Above is a link to a fascinating article in the New York Times about how our brains work to track the passage of time. It amazes me how my recent holiday break flashed by, but waiting on my bags at the airport seemed to take forever.

The article provides some insight to why our mind is so poor at gauging time. In one interesting example, the article stated, "In another series of experiments published in Psychological Science, psychologists found that when people were tricked into believing that more time had passed than was really the case, they assumed they must have been having more fun. The perception heightened their enjoyment of music and eased their annoyance at doing menial tasks." That is, if something occupied us for more time than we expected, then we must have been engaged, and so it was fun. Our minds are so wired to make meaning of external stimuli that we often change our perception to make sense of the world!

The article addresses more than this single phenomenon and raises some unanswered questions to how our mind works to monitor time. It's worth checking out.