Rambling about our Perception of Time

This article has been on my mind for a while. I want to talk about Time, how it passes, and how we pass through it.

So, there’s this saying that goes something like « how time flies when you’re having fun ». We also say that « a day that never ends » happens when we are particularly bored, or have a particularly tough day, or something along those lines. Time would be this thing that passes at a certain speed depending on our enjoyment of whatever we are doing during this said Time.

The thing is, I don’t think we actually experiment Time this way.

I’m warning you reading this, this article may be a little bit deconstructed at the beginning, but try to stick with me, and allow me to go on a few tangents before elaborating my point.

So, a few years ago, I remember reading an article about road crashes. It was showing that the overwhelming majority of car accidents were happening in a 10km radius around peoples’ homes. Apart from the ideas of drunk drivers going to & from parties, and the sheer statistic fact that accidents happen when people drive - and the majority of people drive close by their home, duh -, the article was also pointing out that there was a neurological factor in there.

Apparently, on a road that is very common to us, because we take it everyday and we know it by heart, our brain kind of puts itself in automatic mode. It filters out a lot of the informations that it receives, because it kind of doesn’t need them - it knows the road. But today, there was a deer on the road and it shouldn’t be there and BANG, too late. The time it took for the brain to switch off the automatic mode, you hit the deer already.

Still a few years ago, I think it was in Sydney Lumet’s « Making movies »  or Eric Dufour’s « La Valeur d’un film », but I’m not quite sure, I remember reading about how Hollywood invented a form of editing that would become hegemonic in filmmaking. 

Basically, the « invisible » editing that we are used to is based on the psychological fact that we - as humans - don’t experience the World in the form of a long, uninterrupted take, but rather a succession of short takes that our brains edits together naturally. Here I am focused on my keyboard typing this text. Then my attention is on my coffee. A noise outside, and my eyes look out the window and my perspective changes. Very cinematic, you can probably imagine it right now, as a succession of short takes, edited together.

The thing is, once again, our brain is filtering our perception of what is happening, selects the parts worth focusing on and doesn’t bother recording the rest.

I think that the difference in our perception of how time passes has something to do with how the information of what we see, what we live, is going to be stored -or not- in our brain.

And this information is going to be stored in our brains depending on how new this information is to our brain. Is it already used to this stimuli ? Or is it not ? As basic as this.

And this, regardless of the enjoyment you would have. Think about a busy 14 hours shift in a restaurant that goes by like nothing, because you are used to it.

And now, think about how long these same 14 hours are when you are spending them in a new city, hanging around with new people, discovering & learning things you never knew existed before.

This, we have been experiencing a lot this year. 

This whole process was new to us. 

Waking up in a new city nearly everyday. And everyday we went out to learn something new about some people, history or concepts we never heard about before. And we would often meet new persons too, have new conversations about them, their lives, or whatever the topic, it would nearly always end up being something new. 

Even learning how to travel would fill our brains with new informations. Okay, how to find out about buses in Poland ? What’s the best spot to hitchhike in this part of Iceland ? Will we be able to bike 60km today with the wind from ahead ? And where do we sleep tonight ?

And the days would seem very long.

But not in a bad way, quite the opposite!

We would actually comment about how incredibly large days would feel to us compared to before we left, despite the number of hours in those days being the same. Like we would experience life at its normal pace.

There is something nearly scary about how fast days go when you go back in a routine of some sort, actually. Like you are experiencing life in fast-forward. Yet this is the norm.

Now, I think we can take this whole thing a step further. 

This is getting philosophical, but I think we can agree we know that we are mortal, until proven otherwise. Time is at some point going to stop for us, and we know that.

And we also know don’t have a say in how fast Time passes, again, until proven otherwise. (Well actually drugs can do the trick momentarily, dilate or shrink our perception of time for a short while, but let’s take that aside for now.)

What can we do to take the most advantage of this small amount of Time we are given on this Earth?

Obviously we can act to try to live longer, but ultimately we don’t know if it will work, if we will end up having more time. Cancers do happen after all. Accidents too. 

My point is, we DO, however, have a say in how we subjectively perceive this Time.

We can decide to subjectively experience more of this given time, that seems to be passing by too fast. 

Try to avoid falling in the routine. Try to keep our brains out of the automatic mode. 

To actually record new memories because they keep on being new ones. 

To be like kids, actually.

To stay curious, and keep learning.

Sounds like a good plan to me. Are you in ?

Etienne, January 12025