It seems that time is always against people. Happy time passes very quickly. In all the long time, the hardest thing is to wait. Mother said she would pick you up after school. Seeing other students go one by one, you have been waiting for a long time, but mother said she was only 20 minutes late. Why does it feel so different?
Memory determines time feeling
Physically speaking, time passes as fast as any time. It's like your height is the same at home or at school, but you're shorter with your parents and taller with your friends. Because your sense of height is influenced by the people around you. Time is the same. Although it is objectively the same as long, because your psychological feelings have changed, you feel that the passage of time is different.
When waiting for someone, I feel that time passes very slowly, but do you remember how many times such things have happened? What are you doing during that long time? You must remember what you did when the spring outing passed quickly? When you think about it carefully, you will find that sometimes we feel time is hard, but later when we think back, we can't remember anything; Some time passes quickly, but memories are very rich. These are two ways for us to feel time. One is the feeling of time in the process of things happening, and the other is the feeling of time when we recall after things happen.
When do you think time passes slowly? When you look forward to the future, you will become sad now. For example, when you are in the exam, time is very tense. Every time you look at your watch, you feel that time passes very fast. But if you're not allowed to do anything else, just look at the watch and count, the second hand seems to go slower and slower. There is a saying called "staring at the water does not boil", which is also the truth. The more you look forward to class, the less the bell rings. The same is true when waiting for someone. Your focus is on the future, not the present.
Panic "lengthens" time
When Professor David eagman, an American psychologist, was 8 years old, he and his brother went to a construction site not far from home to "turn over the wall" and accidentally fell off the ladder. He tried to catch the protrusion on the wall, but he couldn't reach it. Then he saw that the bricks on the ground were rushing towards him, and the bricks were dotted with some shiny small nails. The fall resulted in a fracture of eagman's nasal bone. The whole process was just a few seconds, but it was more than that for eagman. Even when he recalled it more than 30 years later, he still remembered the thrilling moment.
Can we really lengthen the subjective time in critical moments? Eagman's childhood doubts led him to engage in the study of time perception when he grew up. He plans to recreate the scene of that year to see if the frightened experimental participants will also feel the extension of time.
Eagman thought of "zero gravity bungee jumping", which is to throw people from a height of tens of meters onto the net bag below, back down, raise their hands and do free fall. Unlike the usual visitors, participants also wore an electronic screen on their wrists to report the numbers they saw.
As soon as these brave participants came down, eagman asked them to hold a stopwatch to recall the process of falling down and count the time. He found that after excluding interference errors, these people recalled falling for an average of one-third longer than the actual time. But no one can see the numbers on the electronic screen. This shows that people's subjective time does not slow down when in crisis, but lengthens the time when recalling afterwards.
When we are in an event, we usually have a "anticipatory" judgment on the speed of time passing, and most of the time we have a "retrospective time perception" by virtue of memory, so the length of time is often just the density of memory.