Time seems to be determined by people's mood. It is said that time is the most fair to everyone, but we can't grasp the time when we are happy, and feel that time can't go away when we are sad. Is this our psychological problem?
Memories determine the feeling of time
Physically speaking, time passes as fast at any time. It's like your height, at home or at school, but you're shorter when you're with your parents, and you're taller when you're with your friends. Because your sense of height is influenced by the people around you. Time is the same, although objectively the time is the same, but because your psychological feelings have changed, so the time you feel is different.
When waiting for someone else, time passes slowly, but you still remember how many times such things happened. What were you doing during that long time? Although time passed quickly during spring outing, you must remember what you did? Think carefully, you will find that sometimes we feel time is hard, but later, when we look back, we can not remember anything; Some of the time goes by quickly, but it is rich in memories. These are two ways that we feel time. One is the feeling of time in the process of things happening, and the other is the feeling of time when recalling after things happen.
When do you think time goes by slowly? When you look forward to the future, you will feel sad now. For example, when you are in the exam, time is very tight, and every time you look at your watch, you feel that the time passes quickly. But if you don't want you to do anything else, just look at the watch and the second hand seems to go slower and slower. There is a saying that "the water you stare at will not boil", which is also the same truth. The more you look forward to class, the more silent the bell will be. It's the same when waiting for someone else. Your focus is on the future, not the present.
Panic 'prolongs' time
At the age of 8, Professor David Eggman, an American psychologist, went to a construction site not far from home with his brother. He accidentally fell down from the ladder. He tried to grasp the protuberance of the wall, but could not reach it. Then he saw that the bricks on the ground were coming towards him, with some shining nails on them. The fall resulted in a broken nose. The whole process lasted only a few seconds, but it was more than that for Igman. Even more than 30 years later, he recalled the thrilling moment.
Can the subjective time of critical moments really be prolonged? Eagman's childhood questions lead him to study time perception when he grows up. He plans to recreate the scene to see if the frightened participants feel the same stretch of time.
Eagman thought of 'zero gravity bungee jumping', which is throwing people from a height of tens of meters onto the net bag below, with their back down, holding up their hands and doing free fall movement. Unlike regular visitors, participants wear an electronic screen around their wrists to report the numbers they see.
As soon as the brave participants came down, eagman told them to hold a stopwatch and remember the fall and time. He found that, after eliminating the interference error, these people recalled falling time by an average of one-third longer than the actual time. But no one saw the numbers on the screen. This shows that people's subjective time does not slow down in times of crisis, but only lengthens the time when they recall afterwards.
When we are in the middle of an event, we usually have a 'anticipatory' judgment on the speed of time passing, and most of the time we produce 'retrospective time perception' by virtue of recall, so the length of time is often just the density of memory.