A lot of questions, "we are woven from the substance of time. Time is a river that carries me away, but this river is myself; the tiger that devours me, but this tiger is myself; the fire that ashes me, but this fire is me again "- wrote Jorge Luis Borges.

Time determines our life and behavior. At the same time, no one knows exactly what it is!

No one doubts that it exists, that it "goes", because everyone sees around him various processes with changing phenomena.

All this proves that, in addition to space, there is another dimension vector. But how to measure it correctly?

To operate with recalcitrant substance, scientists came up with the so-called "observer": a character who fixes changes in the reality surrounding him, reflecting precisely the passage of time.

But as soon as everything became a little clearer, he did not keep himself waiting new question: if time cannot be noticed and comprehended without an observer, does not the observer himself create time?

Psychologists, bypassing the philosophical jungle, left only the "observer" and asked the question: how does his own perception of time depend on a particular person?

Unlike objective time, psychological time is subject to various changes.

We all know the feeling that time goes on forever. Minutes in queues or spent doing boring things seem like hours to many.

And it happens that you met with friends, and suddenly someone says: "It's already two in the morning." How?! You thought - a maximum of eleven o'clock in the evening! Time just flew by.

In general, the perception of time has many aspects: a sense of the flow of time, an assessment of the duration of what is happening in the present, past and future.

Scientists, looking at the results of research, talk about the biological "clock" in the human brain, but no one has yet found this clock.

We know so little about the perception of time because it has never been the focus of science and investment. Most of the research has been done on animals.

This is strange, because, it would seem, to unravel the mystery of time means to control it. However, something is already known, and science continues to uncover the mysteries of time.

Who is lucky in life?

The feeling of the passage of time is only an illusion of our perception, many scientists believe. If it were physical characteristic world, it would not depend on the subjective assessment of what is happening.

The following experiment, like many others, shows that our perception of time is often illusory.

Volunteers are invited to press the space bar on the keyboard, and a glowing circle appears on the monitor screen. There is an interval of 200 milliseconds between pressing a key and the appearance of the light.

Then the experimenters reduce this interval to 50 milliseconds, and then the participants are ready to swear that it was lit even before they touched the key!

You can understand how you generally perceive time by answering the question. You had an appointment for Wednesday but was pushed back two days.

Without hesitation for a long time, tell me: on what day is it rescheduled? (The answer is at the end of the article.)

The scientist discovered that time orientation influences our decisions and behavior, shaping our lives, even if we are not aware of it.

Here's a classic experiment: ten-year-olds were offered one candy but were told that if they waited five minutes, they would get two.

Two-thirds of the children succumbed to the temptation, the rest began to expect greater rewards in the future.

Fourteen years later, the participants in this experiment were found and analyzed their lives. There was an incredibly big difference between the groups with a sweet tooth and persistent ones!

Those who knew how to wait had a giant lead in grades at school, were good students, succumbed to bad habits less, got best work and earn more.

Zimbardo described six types of relationship to time and found confirmation of the influence of this relationship on all aspects of life, even in politics.

Why, for example, do northern Italians not understand southern ones? Because northerners are more future-oriented, while southerners want to enjoy the here and now, worrying less about what will happen tomorrow.

As a result of his research, Zimbardo deduced the optimal attitude to time: one must be future-oriented, have a moderate attitude towards pleasures in the present, and have a positive attitude towards one's past (try to remember mostly good things. And perceive difficulties as a useful experience).

Pessimism and fatalism are very harmful traits that give rise to helplessness and lead to depression.

Factors affecting the perception of time

The feeling of danger and the strong emotions associated with it change the perception of time, giving rise to the effect of its fading.

The fact is that in a state of stress, the body is rapidly mobilized, all nervous processes accelerate, the brain processes information at an incredible speed, as all the resources of the body are directed to get out of a life-threatening situation.

It is not surprising that in a state of such alertness, thoughts and movements are accelerated to such an extent that time actually "freezes" in comparison. This phenomenon has been well studied in combat conditions.

So, studies have shown that during shootings in 65% of cases, the police had a feeling of time slowing down.

It has also been found that earthquakes feel much longer in time than in reality.

Alan Joisos, a BBC journalist who was held hostage by a radical Islamist group for four months, said that one night he heard the news on the radio that he was being executed!

Johnson thought that his captors had broken the news in advance and would soon come to execute the sentence. Time slowed dramatically, and that night seemed like an eternity to him.

Psychologist David Eagleman medical college Baylor (USA) decided to check whether it is true that sudden acute stress and fear cause time to slow down.

He recruited volunteers who agreed to jump from a thirty-meter tower onto a net fixed below: it was safe, but very scary.

A watch was attached to their hand, on which the numbers changed at a great speed, it was impossible to see them in a normal state.

The researcher believed that if time slowed down for the volunteers, they would be able to see those numbers.

But none of this happened, and, most likely, the slowdown of subjective time is an internal illusion.

A well-known experiment by American psychologists Jean Tuenge, Caitlin Catanis and Roy Baumeister, published in 2003 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed how social rejection changes both the personality of people and their perception of time.

Volunteers were gathered in a room where they met and talked on the usual topics.

The scientists then asked each participant to choose two people with whom they would perform certain tasks.

These people were imperceptibly and randomly divided into two groups.

Some participants were told: "Sorry, this has never happened before, but no one has chosen you and you will have to work alone."

Others were told that they were so popular that everyone chose them, and it would only be fair if they worked alone.

They were then asked to estimate the length of one minute. For those who were rejected by everyone, the minute lasted a very long time, but for the popular and loved ones it flew by quickly.

Time slows down when we feel pain. But alcohol in large doses speeds up time, as well as cocaine and methamphetamine. Marijuana most often slows down time.

The American psychologist Hoglaid Hudson happened to notice that his ailing wife was complaining that he was taking too long to get her medicines, while he was only away for a minute.

He became interested and asked her to mentally measure one minute. She signaled at the 37th second.

Hoagland did several dozen experiments, establishing that the higher the body temperature, the longer the minute seemed.

Another psychologist, Alan Budley, investigated the opposite phenomenon by asking testers to swim in the cold sea.

He found that the subjective length of a minute for swimmers was two minutes of real time.

Depression and gloomy thoughts lead to a subjective feeling of time slowing down. For children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, time passes very slowly.

When a teacher asks such a child to sit quietly for at least five minutes, for him it seems unbearably long.

In schizophrenics, time changes in many different directions. But people with Tourette's syndrome (a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary motor tics and shouting of rudeness) are incredibly accurate at telling the length of time, especially those who have learned to suppress their attacks.

If you answered that the meeting was rescheduled for Friday, you are "moving" on the timeline. If you answered "Monday", then you perceive time as moving towards you.

Compared to "Friday" people, you have less control over what is happening and are more subject to the influence of the past.

Boris Zubkov is a research psychologist.

As planned. Let me briefly recall the essence of the project: I proceed from the assumption that human brain can carry out healing and rejuvenation more effectively, safely and more powerfully than anything else from the means existing today. Further, I create special computer exercises and games, the purpose of which is to convince, coax or deceive the brain to make such changes. All these exercises and games are based on cognitive psychological methods and techniques. But “in a good way” the brain does not want to do anything like that. To enhance the impact, it is necessary to create favorable conditions. This is how the room appeared as an environment for the production of well-defined parameters, a certain stress or sensory deprivation.

Every time I lock myself in a room, the following happens:

The perception of time begins to be distorted immediately. Already after 10 minutes, it begins to seem that much more has passed. In the future, this continues, but takes unpredictably different forms. Every time I think that I need to read more about it and think about it properly. After all, the perception of time is in some cases (for example, with certain diseases) a significant feature; many biological processes are tied to the perception of time. The carefree ease with which this perception changes is not an accidental feature.

The hallucinations also come pretty quickly. The visual ones are still rare and for some reason are calmly perceived, but the auditory ones are alarming and frightening. So often it seems that a monster has moved quietly behind my back, that it seems that when it appears there for real, I will not attach any importance to it. Auditory frightened, however, only until the moment when someone touched me on the shoulder, sitting with my back to the wall almost close. It was creepy.

In general, as soon as I start the experiment, the very first desire that grows and intensifies is to stop all this immediately. Reasons follow one after another, interspersed with distracting thoughts of food, sex, movies, wine, and sleep. Sleep is not forbidden, so it is easily satisfied. Then there are echelons of doubt, one by one, without interruption.

There is only one answer to all these distortions, hallucinations and doubts - to continue flying along the course, and figure it out along the way. The brain resists change as much as it can. By the way, a good illustration of what we do not know what we are capable of and what we are not capable of, find yourself in a strong field of the situation. You won't believe how much you can change in 15 minutes.

There are other, rather positive aspects of this situational background. This is a fountain of creativity: the number of ideas and their quality is significantly higher than in normal states. Creativity can simply be spread on bread.

Unexpectedly, my research is given a sort of second life. It is real, without exaggeration, a vital tool - the art of imagining the future. Maybe that's where I'll find the answers.

Also: a powerful focus on values, catching moments of truth one after another. On the way out, you look at the world differently, and you see without a doubt what is needed and what is not, and this, if you do not pretend, raises questions from others.

As a result, what I want to achieve, I have not yet achieved, but this is normal, because I just started. But already what was cut and rejected a lot of techniques and exercises with which I went down to the experiment. A couple of hours in the room stand weeks outside. I know what to do next and the process continues. I have not yet managed to test and try all the techniques and conditions, so I am sure that surprises await me. No mysticism, oriental wisdom and aroma-mother-her-therapy are needed. The world of self-knowledge, in its most correct sense, is right here, nearby, you just need to create uncomplicated conditions: rich, almost unexplored, fraught with many mysteries and discoveries.

The Delphic oracle of Greece urged "Know thyself", but we are still "Strangers to ourselves" (book title famous psychologist Timothy Wilson). A metaphor stuck to me during the experiments cunning elusive Alien who is yet to be met. He is already clapping on the back :)

A long time ago, the inhabitants of the village of Marsden in Yorkshire noticed a causal relationship that when the cuckoo arrives and begins to crow, then spring comes, with warmth and sunshine. "Ah, if only she hadn't flown anywhere," they sighed. And so they decided to quickly build stone walls around the tree on which the cuckoo was sitting in order to enclose it in a tower and stay in state of eternal spring. According to legend, they had to put the last stones at the very top of the tower, as the cuckoo flew away. In 1821, the peasants of the village of Turon, in the same Yorkshire, made the same attempt (to leave everything and go to Yorkshire), but also unsuccessfully.

Now these weaklings, instead of trying to catch her again, just have a Cuckoo Festival every year (pictured). And for the sun they themselves fly to the south.

Time determines our life and behavior. The perception of time is a strange and mysterious phenomenon: unlike objective time, psychological time is subjective and subject to the most diverse changes. Each of us knows the feeling when time stretches endlessly, then flies incredibly fast. You sit at a lecture and think that it is about to end, you look at your watch and do not believe your eyes - there is still half an hour left! Or vice versa - you are sitting with friends, and then someone says: it's already two in the morning. How?! You thought that, well, maximum, 11 pm!

The perception of time has many aspects: the feeling of the flow of time, the duration of what is happening in the present, past and future, and the speed of time. Scientists, looking at the results of research, talk about the biological clock in the human brain, but no one has yet found this clock in the brain, although several regions are known that establish the course of time processes. Maybe it has to do with electrical signals between neurons throughout the brain, and such clocks don't physically exist.

We know so little about the perception of time because it has never been the focus of science and business. Most of the research has been done on animals. This is strange, because, it would seem, to unravel the mystery of time means to control it. Nevertheless, we already know something, and science continues to hide the veils of the mystery of time.

The passage of time is an illusion

One paper (Gruber & Block, 2013) describes an experiment in which people were shown frames of two videos: one of a person walking and the other of toast being toasted. Each frame was shown for 100 milliseconds, and between frames there were intervals of various durations: half a second, three or seven seconds. The participants had to decide whether they see the passage of time or not. Perception of the passage of time was lost at 6.1 seconds of interval for motion changes (walking) and 4.7 seconds for color changes (toasting). Scientists conclude that the passage of time is just an illusion of our perception. If the flow of time were a physical characteristic of the world, it would not depend on what is happening, whether it be color or movement. If this is an exclusively subjective perception, then it will change from a qualitatively distinguishable stimulus, which happened.

Another experiment also shows that our perception of time is often illusory. So, for example, you are invited to press the spacebar on the keyboard and a glowing circle appears on the monitor screen. Between pressing a key and the appearance of light, an interval of 200 milliseconds is set, and you, within a minute, press a key, at any frequency, as you like. Then the experimenters reduce this interval to 50 milliseconds, you press a key, the light comes on, and you think you are ready to swear that it was lit even before you touched the key!

Relation to time

You can understand how you generally perceive time by answering the question:

You have an appointment for Wednesday, but it has been pushed back two days. Without thinking for a long time, on what day is it postponed?
The answer is at the end of the article.

Philip Zimbardo, author of one of the most famous studies, the Stanford Prison Experiment, has long been involved in the psychology of time. He found that time orientation influences our decisions and behaviors, shaping our lives even if we don't know it. As the classic experiment showed, when ten-year-olds were offered one sweet but were told that if they waited five minutes, they would get two. Two-thirds of the children succumbed to the temptation, while the rest began to expect greater rewards in the future. After 14 years, these children were found and their lives began to be analyzed: there was an incredibly large difference between the two groups of children. Those who waited had a giant lead in grades at school, were good students, succumbed to bad habits less, got better job and earn more.

Zimbardo described six types of relation to time, and found confirmation of the influence of this relationship on all aspects of life, even in politics. Why, for example, do northern Italians not understand southern ones? Because northerners are more future-oriented, while southerners want to enjoy the here and now, worrying less about what will happen tomorrow.

Zimbardo deduced an optimal relationship with time: be very positive about your past, be slightly more than average oriented towards the future, and be moderate about the pleasures of the present. At the same time, a negative attitude towards the past should be practically absent, as well as fatalism towards the present.

What do we know about the factors that affect the perception of time?

Age and fullness of life:

It is known that in childhood summer lasts indefinitely. Scientists explain this by the relative length of the interval in relation to age: for example, for a five-year-old child, one year is one fifth of life. The same year for a man of fifty is only 2%. Another explanation: in childhood and adolescence, every laziness is filled with new experiences, experiences and sensations, and the density of this creates a feeling of saturation and duration. We grow up, and there is less and less new for us, and a rare day is celebrated with something special. This phenomenon works even if we are not aware of it: in one experiment, l people were shown pictures of people different ages and found that older faces slow down time, while younger faces speed it up.

The impact of experience density on time is confirmed by a simple experiment where people are shown two videos of the same length. In one they see the calm flow of the river, and in the other - the scene of an armed robbery. And the heist seems to take longer because there are a lot of fast-paced and emotionally charged events going on. Psychologists believe that rich or new, never before experienced events are remembered by us more intensively. We not only remember more details of what is happening, but we make more copies in memory of these events.

One test, proposed as early as 1975, is for participants to look at geometric figures and remember them for the same period of time. Some look at a fairly simple figure, while others look at a complex one. Those who saw the simple figure rated the viewing time period shorter than those who looked at the complex figure. This is explained by the difference between the amount of information that needs to be stored in memory, which distorts the perception of duration.

This explanation is good in that it offers us an easy way to go back to childhood! It is necessary to find and try new things every day, and this is done simply: you can wear a watch on the other hand, answer the phone using the other ear, drive to work the other way, arrange furniture differently, and so on. The brain will perk up, just like in youth, and you will notice how time is stretching. That is why the vacation seems to be long, but only if you have tried a lot of new and unusual things. So if you want to make the weekend seem long and interesting, don't sit in front of the TV, but do something that you have never done before.

Emotions, danger, stress:

Strong emotions change the perception of time. In one study, it was found that the faces of people expressing some kind of emotion speed up time, compared with a neutral facial expression.

Many testify that during a car accident, time slows down for some people. This phenomenon has been well studied in combat conditions. So, studies have shown that during shootings, in 65% of cases, the police had a feeling of time slowing down. It has been found that earthquakes feel much longer in time than in reality.

Alan Johnson, a BBC journalist who was held hostage by a radical Islamist group for four months, says that one night he managed to hear the news on the radio that he was being executed! He thought that perhaps his captors had broken the news before they did and would soon come for him to carry out the sentence. Time slowed dramatically, and that night seemed like an eternity to him.

Psychologist David Eagleman decided to test whether it is true that sudden acute stress and fear cause time to slow down. He recruited volunteers who agreed to jump from a 30-meter tower onto a net fixed below: it was safe, but very scary. A watch was attached to their hand, on which numbers changed with great speed, which cannot be seen in a normal state. He figured that if time slowed down, the volunteers would be able to see those numbers. None of this happened, and, most likely, the slowdown of subjective time is also an illusion.

One famous experiment showed how social relationships change the perception of time. The participants of the experiment were gathered in a room where they met and talked on common topics. The scientists then asked everyone to choose two people with whom they would perform certain tasks. People were imperceptibly and randomly divided into two groups - one was told: “Sorry, this has never happened before, but no one has chosen you and you will have to work alone.” Others were told that they were so popular that everyone chose them, and it would only be fair if they worked alone. Then they were asked to estimate the length of one minute, and for those who were rejected by everyone, the minute lasted a very long time, but for the popular and beloved, it flew by quickly.

Pain, substances, diseases:

Time slows down when we feel pain, because time becomes an important factor and a person keeps track of it. Alcohol in large doses speeds up time, as do cocaine and methamphetamine. Marijuana most often slows down time.

The American psychologist Hudson Hoagland accidentally noticed that his sick wife complained that he went for a long time to get her medicines, while he was absent for only a minute. He became interested and asked her to mentally measure one minute. She signaled at 37 seconds. Hoagland did several dozen experiments, establishing that the higher the temperature, the longer the minute seemed to her.

Another psychologist, Buddley, investigated the opposite phenomenon by asking testers to swim in the cold sea. He found that the subjective length of a minute for swimmers was two minutes of real time.

Depression and suicidal thoughts lead to subjective time dilation. In schizophrenics, time changes in many different directions. People with Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary motor tics and compulsive yelling of rudeness, are incredibly accurate at timing time, and especially those who have learned to suppress their tics. For children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, time passes very slowly. When a teacher demands that such a child sit quietly for at least five minutes, it seems unbearably long for him.

For one patient with damage to the temporo-occipital region of the brain, the passage of time took on grotesque changes. When she, for example, poured tea into a cup, she could not see the movement of the jet, and did not know when to stop - everything seemed to be frozen like a sculpture.

Another patient had a brain tumor in the anterior frontal cortex of the left hemisphere. For him, the symptoms sometimes came unexpectedly - for example, he could drive a car, and suddenly time began to speed up several times five, as if the video was set to fast forward or as if the car had developed a speed of 300 km per hour. He was forced to stop. When asked to measure one minute, his 60 seconds turned out to be five minutes of real time! He couldn't even watch TV.

Habitual activity:

People very often misjudge the length of time it will take them to complete a task. Psychologists have found that, especially for those tasks that are very well known to a person - how long it will take him a familiar road from one place to another, or a familiar routine task at work - people often underestimate their duration.

The return home seems shorter in time. This is due to the fact that when we go somewhere, we tend to try not to be late. In addition, we see more new things, and the return, if it is not rigidly connected with time, is familiar and familiar to us, we do not follow the time, and our attention is diverted to other things.

In animals:

Different animals also have different perceptions of time. For a mouse that lives for 3 years, they probably seem as long as our 70 years for us. For a tortoise living 300 years, time must be incredibly slow compared to ours.

Two snails robbed a slug. The policeman asks him:
- Tell me how it happened.
“I can’t remember anything, officer, everything was so fast!”

Other facts:

The 19th century German scientist Carl von Verordt (Vierordt) made major contributions to the psychology of time perception with his 1868 book DerZeitsinnnachVersuchen, (Experimental studies of the sense of time). In it, he described many experiments, and one of the conclusions is known today as Verordt's law: when people evaluate duration short intervals time, they usually overestimate their duration, and when long intervals- are underestimated. Between these two values ​​there is a point of indifference, when the sensation of the duration of the elapsed time corresponds exactly to physical time.

Psychologists turned on a metronome at a speed of five beats per second, and then asked people to estimate the duration of some kind of stimulus - a sound or a light. People overestimated this duration by an average of 10%. The experimenters reasoned that if this really leads to time distortion, then it can be used - and under this quick click, people solved arithmetic problems and memorized words. And they turned out to be right - this clicking increased the subjective duration of time for people, and they solved problems 10-20% faster!

Answer to the question about the postponement of the meeting. If you answered that the meeting was rescheduled for Friday, You"moving" along the timeline. This is a kind of self-centered attitude to time. There is an abstract line of time and you are moving along it. "We're going away for the holidays" or "I missed a project deadline." You seem to be out of time.

If you answered "Monday", then you perceive time as moving towards you. As if you are standing still, and it goes to you and through you. “Vacations are coming!”, you say, or “summer has flown by.” You, unlike the "Friday" people, seem to be less in control of what is happening and more subject to the passage of time.

Well, of course, there is no right or wrong attitude to time in this, and, depending on the situation, you can behave differently. In one experiment (Margulies & Crawford, 2008), people were asked to imagine either something unpleasant (going to the doctor) or something pleasant (a party). If people expected a future event with pleasure, they were more likely to see themselves moving towards the event, but if the event was unpleasant, then it was seen as it's coming at them.

Gruber, R. P., & Block, R. A. (2013). The flow of time as a perceptual illusion. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 34, 91-100.

Hammond, C. (2012). Time warped: unlocking the mysteries of time perception. Canongate: Edinburgh.

Margulies, S.O. & Crawford, L.E. (2008). Event valence and spatial metaphors of time. Cognition & Emotion, 22(7), 1401–1414.

Space and time are connected in our heads in a bizarre way. We know, for example, that for a person who reads from left to right, the past is on the left, and the future is usually on the right and ahead, but we still do not imagine much.

So, for example, thinking about time and talking about it are two different things. The past, in our imagination, is on the left, but Monday is coming before Tuesday, and not on the left From him. For me, for example, Monday is “higher” than Tuesday on the left side of the field of view - this stupid (or beautiful) diagram was hammered into my head by a diary high school. In this scheme, by the way, there is no Sunday! But, yes, I confess, I never said: "let's meet at the top right," referring to Thursday, although I can imagine Thursday in that place. I can admit that a person who went through school in the same years will understand me.

In a classic experiment, Tversky and colleagues (Tversky, Kugelmass, & Winter, 1991) gave children and adults pictures of breakfast, lunch, and dinner and asked them to arrange them “in order.” You are reading this text in Russian, and I think you would arrange them in the same way as those English-speaking participants: breakfast on the left, dinner on the right, and lunch in the middle. The Arab participants did the opposite, with breakfast on the right. The direction of reading and writing really determines the perception of the passage of time.

A recent study by Dutch psychologists (Casasanto & Bottini, 2014) confirmed the passage of time from left to right in the perception of phrases such as "a week later", "a year earlier", "a century after". The experiment was carefully thought out and detailed: instructions and phrases were presented on the screen, and the participants responded to them with the appropriate keys located on the left or right side of the keyboard. Having thus created a result that eloquently testifies to the perception of the passage of time, they proceeded to the second experiment. It was exactly the same as the first one, only everything - and the instructions and phrases were written in a mirror image, inverted along the horizontal axis (as in the picture at the beginning of the article).

The graph on the left shows the results, with Block 2 being a rerun. The smaller the bar, the faster the reaction, the more natural the concept seems.

The duration of the entire experiment was about 15 minutes, and, as can be seen, repeated exposure led to a fundamental change in the perception of the passage of time. The researchers note that the reaction rates of the Dutch when reading mirror phrases are similar to those of people with their native Hebrew, which is written and read from right to left.

Thus, even a short time is enough for the perception of the passage of time to change. True, this effect will not be long-term, but if we suddenly find ourselves in the Looking Glass, we will be able to adapt there very quickly, but the inhabitants of Russia will not even have to get used to it.

You can mirror the text, print it or read it on the monitor, and see for yourself that you will get used to it pretty quickly, but now you will know that your idea of ​​\u200b\u200btime has changed. This should influence your understanding of your plans for the future, and, most likely, will give you a couple of interesting ideas. However, not only the perception of the passage of time changes, but also other curious things, but more on that tomorrow.

Casasanto, D., & Bottini, R. (2014). Mirror reading can reverse the flow of time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 473-479.

Tversky, B., Kugelmass, S., & Winter, A. (1991). Crosscultural and developmental trends in graphic productions. cognitive psychology, 23, 515-557.

Psychological theory of levels of interpretation ( construal level theory) speaks of the dependence of abstract or concrete thinking on the psychological distance to what is happening. The farther away in time, space or social event, the more abstractly we think about it. The battle of Thermopylae is more abstract than the recent battles on the Maidan. Vacation plans in a year are noticeably different from vacation plans in a week. We can think about the life of the peasants of an African village only in the abstract, and, on the contrary, the city in which we live more often causes us only concrete thoughts.

One study found (Kanten, 2011) that the farther into the future something is, the longer we think it will take. A hypothetical task also takes longer than a specific one. It has been suggested that we think of time as blocks, and when we begin to think abstractly, these blocks of time are perceived to be smaller and therefore more are required to complete a task.

In one of the experiments, a very ingenious move was used to demonstrate this. Participants were given a sheet with the following text:

The perception of time is a subjective thing and can vary from person to person. different people. One hour may seem long to one and short to another. Sometimes the duration of time is illustrated by an arrow pointing from left to right, the so-called time line. Below you see such a line and you can see that there are no divisions on it. How long does 1 hour seem to you? Please put a cross on the line so that the distance from the beginning to this cross corresponds to your idea of ​​one hour.

And below was this line:
People who, imperceptibly for themselves, were transferred to an abstract level of thinking, noted the duration of one hour is significantly shorter than people with imputed concrete thinking!

The ruler was 140 millimeters, and abstract thinkers noted one hour as an average of 30.2 mm, and concrete thinkers - 54.5 mm.

How did the researchers impute the way of thinking?
They asked to fill in the diagrams, answering the questions “why?” to establish an abstract, higher level of thinking, and to the questions "how?" - for concrete thinking. For example, the leaflet was titled "Health Improvement and Support", and four boxes with arrows, from one to the next. The arrows were labeled either "Why" or "How". It was enough to make a person think otherwise.

The next time you think about things that you have to do in the future, try to think about it both abstractly and concretely, and you will get a well-balanced result.

Kanten, A. B. (2011). The effect of construal level on predictions of task duration. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1037-1047.

In Russian, as in many others, people think of the past as something behind and the future ahead. Scientists put forward a number of models that would explain this phenomenon. One of the models claims that we link the abstract concept of time to a very specific concept of space. In one way or another, all models present this as a pattern that goes back to the universal experience of motor movements and perception: we move forward from one point to another, leaving the starting position behind both in space and in time.

But there are languages ​​with a different idea of ​​time, which may seem strange to us. For example, in the languages ​​of Toba, Aymara (the language of the American Indians in the Andes in Bolivia and Peru) and Malagasy (the language of the inhabitants of Madagascar), the past is in front, because it is visible, and the future is behind, because it is not visible what will happen (“Ni who does not have eyes in the back of his head, ”one aborigine explained to the scientist). Sounds logical, even better than our model, doesn't it? But there is probably something important in the fact that such a model of time perception in modern world practically unknown.

150 participants in an experiment (Mogilner, Chance, & Norton, 2012) were randomly assigned to four groups, depending on two conditions: spend time for yourself or for another, within 10 minutes or 30 minutes. On Saturday morning, all participants received instructions: Spend 10/30 minutes doing something for yourself/someone else that you didn't plan to do today.

At the end of the day, they were asked to rate their perception of time in the future, responding on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very true) to questions like: "My future seems endless to me", "Most of my life is still ahead."

The graph shows the results:
As you can see, when people devoted time to others, the feeling of more time in the future only grew, and it turned out to be no matter how much time was devoted to others.

Other experiments tested the sense of time in the present, with the same result. When we dedicate our time to others, we grow a sense of fullness and amount of time, in the present and future, at the expense of feeling and believing in the effectiveness of our own actions.

It is paradoxical, but true: when we do not have enough time for everything, we need to set aside and devote part of it to someone else, and the effectiveness of our actions will increase. This leads to a different perception of time for us, and we actually get more time.

Mogilner, C., Chance, Z., & Norton, M. I. (2012). Giving time gives you time. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1233-1238.

Recently, on a Saturday morning, my wife Susan and I made our way into town to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which we haven't been to since our sons were born. The crowd had not yet filled the galleries, and whole hour we walked through the halls, soaking up the deep silence of the art. We briefly separated: together, but separately. While Susan wandered among Manet and Van Gogh, I entered a small side gallery, not much larger than a subway car, where there were several glass cases with small bronze sculptures by Degas. There were several busts, horses walking, and a small bronze figure of a woman rising to her feet and stretching her left arm up as if awakening from a long sleep.

At the end of the gallery, in a long showcase, there are several dozen ballerinas in various states of movement or rest. One dancer examined the sole of her right foot, another put on a stocking, a third stood with her right foot forward, with her hands behind her head. I arabesque - lean forward on one leg, arms to the sides - a child depicting an airplane. II arabesque - standing straight on the left leg with the right leg extended forward, extend the left arm above the head. They were frozen in motion, but they were full of them. It seemed to me that I got to the rehearsal by mistake, and the dancers stopped long enough to give me time to appreciate the mechanics of their grace. At some point, a group of young people appeared, whom I also mistook for dancers. Their leader asked: “Quickly, which one of them are you now?”, And they chose each figurine to follow - the young man standing next to me put his right leg forward, put his hands on his belt, and pulled his elbows back. “I like that you chose her,” said the instructor.

Time flies when you're having fun. It can slow down in times of threat, during a car crash or fall off a roof, or be distorted by intoxicating substances, moving faster or slower depending on the substance. There are a myriad of lesser-known ways to distort time, and scientists are constantly discovering new ones. Consider, for example, the two sculptures by Degas shown above and below this paragraph.

They are from the same series that I considered - they reflect dance positions of varying complexity. The ballerina on the left is resting, while the ballerina on the right is performing the third arabesque. The sculptures (and their photographs) are static, but it seems that the depicted ballerinas are still full of movement - and this, it turns out, is enough to change our perception of time.

In a 2011 study, Silve Droit-Wole, a neuropsychologist at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, and her colleagues showed photographs of two ballerinas to a group of volunteers. The experiment was a so-called binary task. First, each subject was shown a neutral image on a computer screen for either 0.4 or 1.6 seconds. With the help of repetitions, they learned to distinguish between these two time intervals, to feel each of them. Then, for a given period of time, they were shown a photograph of a ballerina. After each viewing, the subjects pressed the button, answering how long they were shown the photo - either 0.4 or 1.6 seconds. The results were uniform: the subjects felt that the arabesque ballerina, the more dynamic of the two figures, was on the screen longer than it actually was.

There is some sense in this. Related studies show the connection between time perception and movement. A triangle or circle moving quickly across your computer screen will give the illusion of being in front of you longer than a stationary object. The faster the shape moves, the greater the distortion. But Degas' sculptures do not move - they only suggest movement. Usually, duration distortion is due to how you perceive certain physical-mechanical properties of the stimulus. If you see a light flashing ten times per second and simultaneously hear slower beeps—five flashes per second, for example—you will feel that the light is flashing more slowly than it actually is, in time with the sound. It has to do with the design of our neural connections. Many time illusions are actually audio-visual illusions. But in the case of Degas, there are no time-changing characteristics - no movement - to be felt. This property is completely fabricated by (and in) the beholder, reactivated in your memory, perhaps even replayed. That just looking at the works of Degas can distort time explains a lot about how our internal clocks work and why they function the way they do.

One of the most promising areas in the study of time perception is the study of the influence of emotions on cognitive abilities. Silve Droit-Wole, already mentioned by us, conducted a number of convincing experiments aimed at studying the connection between these processes. In recent experiments, she asked subjects to look at photographs of people with a neutral facial expression or showing simple emotions: happiness, anger, and so on. Each photo appeared for a period of 0.4 to 1.6 seconds. Then the subject was asked to say which image remained on the screen the longest - that is, to which of the two types of time intervals that they were taught to distinguish before the experiment, the duration of the appearance of the photograph could be attributed. Time after time, the subjects answered that the photographs happy people remained on the screens longer than photos of people with a neutral expression, but the longest, in their opinion, photos of angry or frightened people lingered on the projector. (As Droit-Volet found, three-year-olds seemed to take longer to show pictures of angry people than the rest of the subjects.)

Our ideas about time are fickle. They change depending on our life experience and environment.

Apparently, the key element here is a psychological reaction, scientifically called "arousal", but which has nothing to do with what you may now think. IN experimental psychology Excitation refers to the degree of readiness of the body to perform any action. It is measured using heart rate and electrical conductivity of the skin; sometimes subjects are asked to rate their degree of "excitation" depending on the displayed images of people or puppets. Excitation can be regarded as a psychological expression of a person's emotions or even a signal of impending physical activity; in practice, there may not be much difference between the two.

It is believed that anger is the emotion that causes the greatest excitement in both the person who observes it and the one who experiences it. Then fear, happiness and sadness follow. Arousal is supposed to speed up our internal metronome, increasing the number of clicks in a given interval, which in turn gives the impression that emotional images stay on screen longer than others. Participants in the Droit-Wole study found that sad faces were displayed longer than those without any signs of emotion, but still not as long as happy faces.

Physiologists and psychologists consider arousal to be transient. physical condition- the body is not moving, but is already ready for action. When we see movement - even if it is supposed movement captured in a still image - our thinking immediately imagines it. In a sense, arousal is an indicator of your ability to imagine yourself in the place of another person. Research has shown that if you observe some kind of action - for example, someone's hand picks up a ball - the muscles in your hand tense up and show a readiness for action. Muscles do not contract, but their electrical conductivity increases, as if they are preparing to contract. All this is also accompanied by a slight acceleration of the heart rate. Psychologically, you are aroused. The same thing happens when you simply observe the hand of a person who is close to some object - perhaps intending to take it - or even a photograph of a hand with an object clamped in it.

A significant amount of research suggests that we are constantly in this state. We mirror each other's facial expressions and gestures, often without even knowing it; in the course of a series of experiments, it turned out that the subjects imitate facial expressions even in those cases when, with the help of laboratory tricks, they are not aware that they see a face. Moreover, such mimicry causes a physiological arousal response and, apparently, allows us to feel the emotions of other people. Studies have shown that if you make a shocked expression, then when you experience a real shock, emotions will be much more painful.

Displaying exaggeratedly strong emotions while watching pleasant or repulsive videos accelerates your heart rate and skin conductance - typical indicators of physiological "arousal". MRI studies have shown that the same areas of the brain are activated when you experience a certain emotion - such as anger - as well as when you put on an angry expression on your face. Excitation is a bridge in inner world other people. If you see that your friend is angry, you judge her condition based not on logic: you literally feel the same as she does. Her internal state and external state at some point becomes yours.

The same applies to her perception of time. Behind last years Droit-Wole and her colleagues have proven that when we institutionalize another person's movements or emotions, we also accept their relationship over time. In one of her studies, Droit-Vole showed subjects on a projector a series of images of people, both elderly and young, that quickly replaced each other, the order of which did not follow any laws. She found that subjects consistently underestimated the length of time photos of older people appeared, but did not make the same mistake with photos of younger people. In other words, when the subjects saw the image of an older person, their internal clocks slowed down, as if “accommodating to the leisurely movements of the elderly,” writes Droit-Vole. Slower clocks have fewer "ticks" in a given amount of time, and so the interval appears to be shorter than it really is. Contact or memory of an elderly person prompts the observer to adopt or recreate his physical features, in particular, a slow gait.

“Through imitation,” writes Droit-Wole, “our internal clock adjusts to the pace of movement of the elderly and makes the duration of the stimulus appear to be shorter.”

Or consider an earlier experiment by Droit-Wole, in which subjects reported that angry and happy facial expressions were displayed longer on the screen than neutral ones. She attributed this effect to arousal, but later began to suspect that imitation might also have played a role. It is possible that the subjects copied facial expressions as they appeared on the screen, and the process of imitation caused discrepancies in the perception of time. So she decided to repeat the experiment, adding one detail: one of the groups of subjects was asked to look at the slides while holding a pen between her lips to refrain from any changes in their facial expressions. Penless subjects significantly underestimated the duration of exposure to images of angry people and somewhat overestimated the duration of exposure to images of happy faces—however, those subjects whose lips and faces were constantly tense did not notice any difference between the exposure time of emotional and expressionless faces. Who would have thought that an ordinary pen could equalize the perception of time.

This case also leads to a strange and provocative conclusion: time is contagious. By getting to know each other and communicating with each other, we penetrate into the personal space of another person, including his views (or what we think could be his views) for a while. And this applies not only to estimating the duration of this or that phenomenon - we constantly accept other people's discrepancies in time, as if it were a currency or an element that binds society.

"Efficiency social interaction is determined by our ability to synchronize our activities with identical indicators of the person with whom we are dealing, writes Droit-Wole. “In other words, people adjust to the rhythm and perception of the time of their interlocutors.”

Our general distortions in the perception of time can be perceived as manifestations of empathy; after all, imitating someone's perception of time is like trying to get into someone's head. We copy each other's gestures and emotions - however, we are more likely to do so when interacting with people with whom we associate ourselves or whose company we enjoy. Droit-Wole confirmed this in her study of faces: observers stated that the faces of older people were shown for less time than younger ones only if the observer and the person on the slide were of the same sex. If a man looked at a picture of an old woman, or a woman looked at a picture of an old man, they had no illusions about the elapsed length of time. The same trend was also confirmed with respect to ethnicity: the subjects stated that angry faces were shown longer than neutral faces, but the effect was more pronounced if the subject and the person on the slide were of the same nationality. Droit-Wole found that subjects who were more likely to overestimate the length of time they showed angry faces scored highest on a standardized test of empathy.

We constantly intrude into someone's personal space, but the same happens when we interact with inanimate objects - faces, hands, images of faces and hands, as well as other objects, for example, sculptures of Degas ballerinas. Droit-Volet and her co-authors on the Degas article argue that the reason the more dynamic sculpture appears to last longer on screen—the reason it appears more appealing—is because "it embodies the imitation of the more effortful and more inspiring movement." It is believed that this was Degas' intention: an invitation to take part in the dance, to make even the most clumsy observer want to join the movement. I see a sculpture depicting a leaning ballerina, frozen on one leg, and a tiny, inaccessible to the eye, but incredibly important part of me joins it, as if I myself are making an arabesque. I become the personification of grace, cast in bronze, over which time has no power.

Emotional facial expressions, movements, sculptures depicting athletes - all this can lead to distortions in the perception of time, the cause of which lies in the common psychological model of emotional-temporal connection. However, Droit-Wole still believes that this effect is fraught with mysteries. Of course, our life requires us to have some internal mechanisms for counting time and evaluating its short-term segments - however, they can be disabled by the slightest manifestation of emotions. And what then is the use of such a fragile internal clock?

Perhaps there is a better explanation, says Droit-Valo. It's not that our internal clocks are wrong; on the contrary, they adapt perfectly to any social and emotional environment in which we find ourselves throughout the day. The time I spend on social interaction is not only mine, it is multi-dimensional and partly affects our relationships with other people. “Thus, there is no unique homogeneous time - only numerous time intervals. Our divergence from the concept of time directly reflects how our brain and body adapt to these multiple time periods, ”writes Droit-Wole in one of his articles. She quotes the philosopher Henri Bergson: "We must discard the idea of ​​a unique time, only the multiple moments of experience matter."

The smallest forms of social interaction - looks, smiles and frowns - stem from our ability to synchronize them, notes Droit-Wole. We disrupt the flow of time when we try to carve out time to be together, and in this case, the divergence in its perception reflects empathy; the better I am able to put myself in your place, to understand your bodily and state of mind and you are mine, the better we can identify the other as a threat, ally, friend, or someone who needs us. However, empathy is a complex skill, an attribute of emotional maturity; he needs to study hard. As children grow and develop empathy, they begin to better understand how to behave in society. In other words, one might assume that the most important aspect of growing up is understanding how to manipulate time in order to synchronize it with someone else. We may be born alone, but childhood ends with a symphony - a harmonious chorus - of hours when we completely surrender to the mercy of an infection called time.

Posted by Alan Burdick is a staff journalist and former senior editor at The New Yorker. He has also contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, GQ, Discover, and Best American Science and Nature Writing, among others. His authoring debut, Escaped from Paradise: An Ecological Invasion Odyssey, was a National Book Award finalist and won Best environmental report» American Foreign Press Club Awards.
Original: Nautilus.

Dear colleagues! I want to introduce you to the hypothesis of psychological and psychophysiological phenomena associated with the peculiarities of the subjective perception of time. This hypothesis at first glance contradicts our experience and habitual sensations. The vast majority perceives time as a kind of acute shortage. Time seems to never be enough. Numerous trainings are aimed at teaching "prudent use of time".

However, the text argues that for many categories of people this is not at all the case. And this statement is based on experimental data. Although I completed this work over 20 years ago, it has never been published before. Despite the faulty presentation, I recommend reading to the end, as this is relevant to the professional activities of each of us.

The concept of "time" is still a mystery. Even its physical nature is not clear. Nevertheless, we all operate with this concept and consider it to be something in the highest degree real. Let's assume that this is the case. We will assume that real or objective time is what the most accurate clock shows for all residents of our time zone.

However, in addition to real or objective time, common to all (hereinafter referred to as OB), each of us has our own sense of the flow of time. Let's call it subjective (hereinafter - CB). It is like our own wrist watch, the readings of which are usually very close to RH, but can sometimes be a little late or run ahead.

SW begins to noticeably deviate from OB, mainly due to situational circumstances. So, we know that sometimes time "flies". What time are we talking about? Of course, about the OM, although we know very well that it flows evenly. When we feel good, when we are busy with something interesting, etc., our subjective time seems to slow down, or even stop. And suddenly, although according to our feelings “nothing at all” has passed, the clock testifies that it’s time for us to sleep for a long time. How to express this distortion? It should be said that our NE has lagged behind the OB, that it is "late". And, conversely, when we are bored, have nothing to do, or we are engaged in uninteresting activities, "time stretches endlessly." Again, we apply the metaphor to O-time, although our C-time is "to blame for everything", which in this case is much ahead of OB, i.e. "in a hurry".

What, in addition to our psychological states, determined situationally (interest, excitement, emotional uplift or, on the contrary, idleness, boredom, expectation), can affect the subjective perception of time, i.e. on SW? certain substances. They change our CB regardless of the situation. That is to say, forcibly. Some of these substances include medications, alcohol, different kinds drugs. We will not talk about medicines today, but will focus exclusively on alcohol and, in part, drugs. They just belong to the number of substances that "kill time". We see that in this case, too, we are using a metaphor in relation to OB. And we do it illegally, which confuses the situation. In fact, it is only about subjective feelings. And they are exactly the opposite of metaphor. CO slows down with the use of alcohol and drugs. Nothing happens to the OP.

I dwell in such detail on which of the times changes and how, because, unlike spatial characteristics, temporal characteristics are more difficult to represent. Here there is a danger of getting entangled in three pines. Therefore, one must be especially careful not to perceive some metaphors such as "in a hurry", "late" exactly the opposite. Only NE changes, and we must be careful to understand how it changes.

So, most people know from their own experience that after drinking alcohol, the CB changes its course dramatically - it slows down. Moreover, the stronger, the greater the dose of alcohol. We are in the grip of the illusion that this OB is starting to rush galloping. It would seem that it was just 7 o'clock. You look, and it's already 10. And in a minute it's already midnight. Is not it? Well, then it just fails. OV "killed". The same can be said about the effect of most drugs. In all cases, OS "passed faster" than without taking these substances. This appears to be the goal for groups of people who ALWAYS resort to alcohol or drugs. And not only for them. Here you can also include gamblers, casino regulars, lovers of various sports spectacles. It's just that they use other means to "speed up" the O-time (in fact, to slow down the SW).

But we value time so much, we value it so much, don't we? Yes, each of us sometimes toils from boredom and wishes that the hours of idleness or waiting would pass as soon as possible. But this is a situational desire. It, as a rule, is quickly replaced by "usual" states, when there is not enough time and we want to slow down its run. What motivates people to constantly "kill" time? What need underlies this behavior?
I had the following idea: in the "normal", i.e. for most people, the RH and SW readings are very close. For simplicity, let's assume that they just match in most cases (although this is not entirely true). Only sometimes they noticeably diverge under the influence of situational factors or when taking certain substances. But these discrepancies are easily and quickly corrected by objective factors - the rhythm of life, the mode of the working day, the need to carry out previously planned actions, etc., etc.

But if there is a temporary "norm", then perhaps there is also a temporary or "temporal" pathology? Or, to put it mildly, deviation. Do some categories of individuals, for reasons unknown to us, have a PERMANENT deviation of CB from OB? Moreover, such a deviation is possible in both directions. Either CB is constantly ahead of OB, i.e. "in a hurry". This includes the previously described groups of alcoholics, drug addicts, and gamblers. Or, on the contrary, constantly lags behind. It is clear that such a category should, for example, include people with hypomanic behavior. And probably not only them.

But now we will deal with only the first group. So, if there is a phenomenon that in people of certain groups there is a "rush" of CO, then this can be verified experimentally. Just then (80s) I worked as a psychologist in a drug treatment clinic and I had no problems with the subjects. The experiment was very simple: there were 2 groups of subjects - patients with alcoholism who were diagnosed with stage 2 of the disease and a control group consisting of healthy (in this sense) people - hospital employees, acquaintances, etc.

Each subject had to wait, on my signal, without doing anything (AND NOT CONSIDERING TO HIMSELF!), when, in his opinion, one minute would pass and say "Stop".

I specially stocked up with a timer that fixes the time with an accuracy of ten thousandths, since I was sure that the differences between the subjects of the two groups would be minimal. What a surprise it was when it turned out that alcoholics not only always make mistakes ONLY in one direction, but also that their “mistake” turns out to be unusually large. The most "accurate" of them were wrong by at least 15 seconds (i.e., in their opinion, the minute expired after 45 seconds).

There were also record holders who said "stop" before the end of 20 seconds. The average error in this group of 43 subjects was 24 seconds, i.e. on average, a minute of O-time lasted only 36 seconds according to their "subjective clock".

In the control group (37 people), errors were observed in both directions. Although, on average, there was also a tendency to "rush" C-time. But for these subjects, the average error was only 7 seconds (compare with 24 seconds for the other group). In the control group, there was also 1 record holder, "wrong" by 30 seconds. And what would you think? He turned out to be a regular racer who spent his whole life at the hippodrome!

The results were so impressive that I carried out the second phase of the experiment. Everything is the same, but I asked the subjects to determine the interval not at 1, but at 2 and 3 minutes.

And this is what turned out: in the group of patients, the proportion, i.e. the ratio of the error to the duration of the interval to be estimated remains virtually unchanged. Those. if their minute subjectively lasts only 36 seconds, then the 2-minute interval lasts only 1 minute 14 seconds, i.e. they "rush" by 46 seconds. In other words, the discrepancy between SW and OM almost doubled, and the ratio, i.e. the error value remains unchanged. With an interval of 3 minutes, it even increases slightly, but I considered this an artifact.

In the control group, the proportion is also preserved, which only confirms the assumption that subjective overestimation or underestimation of time is a fairly constant characteristic.

If we extrapolate the results in assessing short periods of time (from 1 to 3 minutes) to much longer time intervals, then we will come to the inevitable conclusion that in a day measured in real, i.e. in O-time, such a person has a fair amount of extra hours. Even if we assume that this excess is somehow corrected by the general rhythm of life, etc., it still turns out that 3-4 hours a day, at least, turn out to be "superfluous".

It is clear that such a feature of the subjective perception of time should lead to a whole bunch of special psychological and psychophysiological phenomena. Here we find ourselves in an absolutely unexplored from this point of view and excitingly interesting area. So, for example, if children have the same feature, i.e. mismatch of C- and O-time, it is easy to assume that the "rush" of C-time must inevitably give rise to a weakening of attention during school hours in general, and each lesson in particular. Especially in the last third of each lesson. In addition, he should have such symptoms as fatigue, passivity, apathy, drowsiness in the evening hours, when it was already late evening according to his "C-clock", sleep disorders, etc.

Deviation in CO can also explain the phenomenon of eating disorders. After all, if the feeling of hunger is associated with C-time, and many data allow us to think that way, then it becomes clear that in people with rushing C-hours, this feeling occurs earlier than normal. Hence - the constant "intercepts" and "snacks" either cookies or nuts. And if you remember how many "extra" hours appear in a real day, then he eats not 3, but at least 4 times a day. This one once again compensates for the feeling of hunger in the hours that turned out to be "extra".

One could talk for a long time about various violations that receive an unexpected explanation based on the hypothesis of time perception deviation, but we will postpone this conversation for the future. We will confine ourselves to the most general statement that a person whose subjective day ends regularly much earlier than the real ones must experience strong general discomfort. Naturally, in order to reduce this discomfort, he seeks and finds in an "experimental" way those "drugs" that allow him to draw out the extra time that is constantly formed, to "kill" it. And these means have already been mentioned above - alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc.

Thus, we must take a completely new look at the problem of these people, and, most importantly, at the methods of their treatment. It becomes clear why numerous ways to reduce drug addiction do not bring the desired results. Refusal of alcohol and drugs with the help of pills, persuasion, fear (all these torpedoes, coding, etc.), etc., turns out to be ineffective. And if it turns out, it often leads to even more serious negative consequences. And it is clear why - the reason that forces these categories of people to resort to such destructive "medicines" has not been eliminated.

It is quite possible that the categories of people suffering from the "rush" of ST are not limited to drug addiction, gambling, etc. It's just that other groups simply do not take these "medicines" (see about possible symptoms in children and overweight people)

Previously, in order to explain the totality of symptoms of certain psychological disorders or deviations, it was necessary to involve completely different explanatory models. Moreover, there was a mosaic of causes. One of them explained one or more symptoms well, but was obviously not associated with other symptoms and phenomena. They had to look for another reason. As a result, heterogeneous causes had to be combined to explain the overall picture of characteristic disorders. As a result, a complex multi-component explanatory "monster" arose, the individual elements of which did not fit together, or even simply contradicted one another. The proposed concept is preferable to them, at least in that almost all violations can be explained as the consequences of a single cause - a violation of the subjective perception of time.

I may be pointed out that the cause or causes of this distortion of time perception are unknown. Yes it is. But, firstly, the elucidation of the mechanisms of such a distortion has not previously been practically done (or, let's say, little has been done). In this case, at least it is clear what to look for and what needs to be paid attention to. Secondly, it is possible that the violation of these mechanisms will be easier to detect than to look for an answer, unwinding a tangled tangle of diverse and contradictory explanations. Finally, thirdly, it is also possible that, having revealed a defect, "watchmakers" will be able to fix it relatively easily.

But even if this is not the case, some ideas are emerging related to new, sometimes paradoxical ways to treat and prevent such disorders. But we'll talk about this next time.

The perception of time is a figurative reflection of such characteristics of the phenomena of the surrounding reality as cyclicity, duration, flow rate and sequence. Various analyzers take part in the construction of the temporal aspects of the picture of the world, of which the most important role kinesthetic and auditory sensations play in the exact differentiation of time intervals. The study of the mechanisms of time perception is one of the central problems of psychology and physiology. We cannot do without operating with the concept of time, as in Everyday life, and in the description of most scientific phenomena. Time is pervasive in relation to all mental processes, it permeates and binds them. Temporal features of the human psyche are found in the speed, duration of sensations, perception, memory, thinking, emotions characteristic of persons with a certain type of temperament, age, gender, groups of people.

It can be pointed out that the perception of time has various aspects and is carried out on different levels. The most elementary forms are the processes of perception of the duration of the sequence, which are based on elementary rhythmic phenomena, which are known as the biological clock. These include rhythmic processes occurring in the neurons of the cortex and subcortical formations. The change in the processes of excitation and inhibition, which occurs during prolonged nervous activity, is perceived as wave-like alternating amplification and weakening of sound during prolonged listening. This also includes such cyclical phenomena as the heartbeat, breathing rhythm, and for longer intervals - the rhythm of the change of sleep and wakefulness, the appearance of hunger, etc. .

All of the above conditions underlie the simplest, most direct estimates of time. They can manifest themselves in animals in the production of "timed reflexes" or "delayed reflexes", and they can be modified by pharmacological interventions affecting the autonomic nervous system. The latter effects can also be tested in humans. So, it was shown that some drugs (for example, amphetamine, nitrous oxide) significantly shorten the assessment of small periods of time, while other drugs (for example, LSD) lengthen the assessment of small intervals of time, when taking hashish, mescaline, the time lengthens.

Two types of perception can be distinguished: the direct perception of time as a simple temporal sensitivity and the complex perception of time, which is mediated by higher mental functions.

From the subjective assessment of the duration of the current intervals at the level of perception, one should distinguish orientation in time as the definition of a given phase of changes in the general cycle of changes. The two most important systems of time references in humans are: the change of day and night and the rhythms of the body itself: hunger is felt before the usual meal time, and fatigue is felt before bedtime. Orientation in time is formed in the process individual development. Only by the age of 5 does the child accurately name the morning and afternoon.

It is necessary to distinguish complex forms of time perception from elementary direct forms of time perception, which are based on “standards” of time estimation developed by a person. Such standards that mediate the assessment of time include such measures of time as seconds, minutes, as well as a number of standards that are formed in the practice of music perception. It is precisely because of this that the accuracy of such a mediated perception of time can noticeably increase, and, as observations of musicians, athletes, skydivers and pilots have shown, it can noticeably sharpen during the exercise, in which a person begins to compare barely noticeable periods of time. According to some reports, in this way it is possible to bring the accuracy of perception of short time intervals to amazing accuracy, for example, by developing in people the ability to distinguish intervals of 1/18 second from intervals of 1/20 second.

From the assessment of short intervals, one should distinguish the assessment of long intervals (time of day, season, etc.), in other words, orientation in long periods of time. When perceiving long intervals, some purposeful effort is always required to combine the beginning and end of the duration into a holistic image. This form of time estimation is particularly complex in its structure and approaches the phenomena of intelligent time coding.

With the help of memory you can establish past changes, with the help of imagination - future ones. Thus, a person acquires the past and the future, i.e. time horizon. Duration is revealed to consciousness through the sense of time. On highest level- at the level of intellectual operations, the concept of time is formed, there is an abstraction from specific changes in time, and then a person can adequately reconstruct the past, foresee the future, organize them to the extent that they depend on his activity. Thus, man becomes the master of dimensions and masters time.

A person is able to analyze processes over time, considering their diachronic structure (the change of each individual process over time) and synchronous structure (the course of events occurring simultaneously). Finally, a person makes attempts to analyze what time is and what properties it has.

Within the framework of foreign experimental psychology, a cognitive approach to the perception of time is widespread. Within its framework, time coding is considered as an exclusively cognitive process, not related to objective time. This process depends on the amount of processed information, on how much attention was paid to the current cognitive event. The task, the action in which a person is involved, also affects the perception of time. There are also more biologically oriented concepts, in which the issue of the perception of time is considered in close connection with studies of the body's biorhythms. The external environment can participate in this process only through the impact on these biorhythms, slowing down or increasing their frequency, synchronizing them with some external phenomena. By means of biorhythms, the perception of long time intervals of the order of days is usually described. IN domestic psychology the activity approach to the study of the subjective flow of time dominates. Within its framework, the process of perception and evaluation of duration is analyzed through correlation and analysis with human activity. So, for example, the duration of the moment of the subjective present is determined through the inclusion of this moment in human activity, the causal connections of events in the past, present and future. The psychophysiological approach involves using the data accumulated in psychology to correlate them with data on the mechanisms of work neural networks, brain formations accumulated in neuroscience.

Orientation in time in humans is carried out with the help of the cortical parts of the brain. Numerous data from clinical observations have convincingly shown that there are no grounds for assuming the existence of focal localization of time perception in the cortex; special timing center. A disorder of temporal perceptions is observed when various parts of the cortex are affected. From this we can conclude that the perception of time is carried out with the help of a number of analyzers that combine into a system and act as a single whole. The perception of time is based on the rhythmic change of excitation and inhibition, the attenuation of the excitatory and inhibitory processes in the central nervous system, V hemispheres brain. The most accurate differentiation of time intervals is provided by kinesthetic and auditory sensations. auditory sensations reflect the temporal features of the acting stimulus: its duration, rhythmic character, etc. Motor sensations provide a fairly accurate reflection of the duration, speed and sequence of phenomena. The kinesthetic analyzer plays a special role in the perception of rhythm. From a psychological point of view, rhythm is understood as the perception of a series of objects as a series of groups of stimuli. Sequential groups are usually built on the same pattern and are perceived as repetition. The nature of the perceived grouping is largely determined by the characteristics of the series of stimuli: the relative intensity of the stimuli, their absolute and relative duration, and location in time. If a series consists of physically identical and uniformly spaced stimuli, then the perception of the rhythm is determined by subjective factors. The subject usually perceives a series of groups, in each of which certain elements are emphasized. The rhythm perceived in this case is called the subjective rhythm, and the stress is called the subjective stress. Rhythm perception is usually accompanied by motor accompaniment. The experience of rhythm is by its very essence active.

But other analyzers can also participate in the perception and evaluation of time. The visual receptor, for example, is primarily an organ for perceiving space. Along with this, he also plays a certain role in the perception of time, since the work of the eye is not complete without movements (accommodation and convergence).

The perception of time, being associated with certain psychophysiological mechanisms and their systems, can be disturbed, in particular, in focal brain lesions. Let us give some characteristic examples. Patient S., 32 years old. A lesion of the optic tubercle, which is expressed in a number of thalamic symptoms, was stated. The patient has a time perception disorder: she incorrectly evaluates small time intervals, significantly lengthens them. The doctor asks S. to say when one second has passed, the beginning of which he notes. The patient after 5-7 seconds. says it's been a minute. The interval shown to her in 5 and 10 sec. it also takes 1 minute. In the first weeks, the patient was disoriented in the present, could not name the current year, month and day, determine the length of her stay in the hospital, mistook morning for evening.

In other cases, when the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex are affected, a person loses the ability to plan actions in time. So, patient V. complained of headaches and decreased vision. She was diagnosed with meningioma of the anterior cranial fossa with compression of the frontal lobes, striatum and diencephalon. During the operation, the pole of the frontal lobe was resected. Four days later, the patient showed disorientation in time: she said that it was now 1928 (it happened in 1938), incorrectly indicated the month, the season. Thus, the clinical material also testifies in favor of the proposition that the perception of time is based on the systemic activity of various parts of the brain, and not on the functioning of some special "center".

A complex set of disturbances in the perception of time is also possible, for example, the possibility of the coexistence of a feeling of being in the present and in the past, and even in all three times. There are also disturbances in the perception of time with prolonged (several days) sleep deprivation.

Human perception of time is not innate. With the formation of the child's personality, with the emergence and development of self-awareness, which are due to the inclusion of the child in educational and labor activities, the stage of awareness of the passage of time of his life begins. Temporary concepts are determined mainly by the culture (civilization) to which a person belongs.

Only internal changes, processes (heartbeat, hunger, fatigue, etc.), which also affect the formation of the perception of time, can be called innate. At the same time, in addition to such an innate sense of time, there is also the ability to consciously evaluate time.

Temporal perceptions in children take shape rather late, making a significant developmental path. WITH general course mental development, with the acquisition of knowledge in the learning process, an increase in the accuracy of differentiation of time intervals is also associated. Schoolchildren are best oriented in those periods of time that are associated with their daily activities.

The "measures of time" for delimiting one period of maturity from another turn out to be different throughout a person's life. Their relative nature is expressed in the fact that in the first years of a person's life, periods are measured in months and half a year, while in the future, a kind of “stretching” of time occurs. "Measures of time" are no longer measured in years, but in decades - depending on the current level of resilience and viability of a person. "One year for a five-year-old child (equal to him 1/5 of his life) seems to be 10 times longer than one year for a fifty-year-old man (equal to him 1/50 of his life)" .

The perception of time, of course, is influenced by a person's age, but this is not the only factor.

Many factors influence the subjective assessment of duration: environment(noise shortens subjective duration), the task facing the subject (than harder task, the shorter the duration seems), motivation (whenever we pay attention to the passage of time, it seems to us longer, the most accurate is a relaxed calm assessment of time), pharmacological agents. It has also been proven that time at the moment of movement seems shorter than at rest.

The perception of time also changes depending on the emotional state. Accurate experimental studies found that a person experiencing positive emotions, underestimates time intervals, i.e. the subjective passage of time accelerates in him; with negative emotional experiences, time intervals are overestimated, i.e. there is a subjective slowdown in the passage of time.

Immediately after the founding of psychology as a science, the problem of time perception began to be actively studied by psychologists. James in 1890 pointed out the relationship between the subjective length of a time interval and its occupancy by events. In particular, he pointed out that time passes quickly when filled with various and interesting events, although retrospectively this time interval is estimated to be long.

Perception of long periods of time is largely determined by the nature of experiences. Usually, time that has been filled with interesting, deeply motivated activity seems to be shorter than time spent inactive. Experiments on the limitation of sensory information have shown that in conditions of sensory isolation, an extremely slow subjective passage of time is observed. Thus, a subject placed in a tank-shaped respirator on a special mattress under conditions of constant monotonous sound, weakly artificial light, limited tactile and motor sensations, reported that minutes seemed like hours to him. However, in a subsequent report, the ratio may be reversed: time spent in idleness and boredom may seem shorter when remembered.

The time perspective - the attitude to the present and the future - depends to a large extent on the character of a person: some strive for changes, others, as it were, are prisoners of their past [ibid.]. The significance of the past, present and future is also due to some extent to the type of temperament: choleric people are more likely to look to the future (what was, was); sanguine people have a craving for novelty, the past cannot be returned, but they are equally turned to the present; melancholic people prefer to remember, the future does not bother them; phlegmatic people are guided by the past, the future does not excite them and does not attract them. IN AND. Tsukanov measured the thresholds of sensitivity to time in representatives of 4 main types of temperament: the shortest interval of felt time in choleric people. In terms of duration, sanguine, melancholic, the last are phlegmatic. To the question "Do you have enough time?" choleric people express an acute lack of time; sanguine people the same, answered that they did not have time, they were late all the time; melancholic people have enough time; for phlegmatic people, time passes slowly, enough in excess [according to A.A. Ershov].

Based on Jung's concept of a four-modal perception of the world (emotions, thinking, sensation, intuition), four types of personality are distinguished. A feature of each type is a specific relationship to time.

Time for representatives of the emotional type circulates: the past becomes the present, and then returns to the past, like a memory. Personal past determines behavioral reactions and acts. Times change, but people don't. To people of this type it seems that the world remains as it was in the years of their youth. They evaluate events not by results, since only those events are significant for them, which in the future can become vivid memories. People of the thinking type also perceive time as going from the past to the future, but their past is not personal, but an abstract, historical past. They place great value on continuity and consistency, so they strive to do everything deliberately. Time and plan for them is a serious factor. People of the situational-sensory type perceive the present in its entirety, while ignoring their past experience. Such people are not able to wait, they are not aware of the length of time, they do not perceive its movement. Only the perception of the present is rich, deep, full. They move from one moment of time to another, not by the passage of time, but through their actions. They are inattentive to their past and future. And the last in this classification is the intuitive type. Intuition, according to many authors, is a function of foresight. For a person of this type, the present is just a pale shadow, and the past is foggy. What will be is more real to him than what is or was. They are not aware of time.

The phenomenon of changing the time scale in stressful situations is widely known, when, on the one hand, people have time to incredibly short term make a decision and perform the necessary amount of actions (time for them seems to be “stretched”), and on the other hand, there is a reassessment of the flowing time, and people do not have time to do what is necessary - time in this case seems to “compress”.

Each person perceives time one way or another, not a single person (and any creature, phenomenon, any objects) can exist outside of time, therefore it concerns everyone and everyone. A study of attitudes to time was conducted in which 185 students participated. 46% relate to time situationally (positively - negatively), 38% are always positive and 16% - negatively. There were no indifferent to the time.

Thus, we studied and described in this paragraph the mechanisms of time perception, found out that a person does not have a specific “time analyzer”; identified factors that affect temporal perception: a person’s age, motivation, emotional state, the fullness of a period of time with events, a person’s character, temperament, etc. Also, a significant factor influencing the process of this perception is the culture, civilization to which a person belongs.