We all know the feeling: You're doing something fun and time simply whizzes by. Or you're just really bored (like the guys who didthis), and time...just...won't...pass.
Now, a group of researchers tells us that this relation is a two-way affair: Not only does the pleasure we're experiencing influence how we experience time passing by, but also our assessment of how quickly time has passed is frequently used to infer how much fun we had.
To test this claim, the researchers used a number of very straight-forward procedures. For one of these procedures, they invited people into their lab and let them work on a mundane task for a specified period of time; let's say 5 or 20 minutes. After completion of the task, participants were given the impression that 10 minutes had passed. Hence, for one group of participants it appeared that time had flown by, while for the other group it appeared as if time had progressed fairly slowly.
Once participants had received the feedback on how much time had supposedly passed, they were asked to rate the task in terms of a number of characteristics; including
"enjoyment, challenge, engagement, fun, skill required, and how excited he or she would be to participate in a similar task in the future".
These measures were then combined to a unified measure of "enjoyment".
As expected,
"participants in the time-flies conditions rated the task as more enjoyable than did participants in the time-drags conditions"
The study, which appeared online last November and is now in print in the journal Psychological Science proceeds to show that similar manipulations can be used to make people perceive
""noises as less irritable, and songs as more enjoyable".
Combining all of the experimental results, Aaron Sacket and his colleagues find that for feelings of time distortion to be used as inferences for enjoyment, it is necessary that subjective time progression is surprising, that people actually believe that time flies by when one is having fun, and that the actual experience be sufficiently ambiguous.
In other words, if you don't hold the believe that time flies by when you're having a good time in the first place, don't have the subjective experience that time moved particularly fast, or were simply having an undeniably terrible time, then this effect of time distortion won't work on you.
Besides being interesting in its own right, the study highlights an important mechanism that seems to permeate what we know about how the brain intuitively processes information; namely the mechanism of bidirectionality. In many ways, exploitation of this bidirectionality is how optical illusions work, and it also at the heart of a study I wrote about recently on how people evaluate tast experiences in regards to wine...
Whatever the case, I just want you to know that the time it took you to read this blog post was only an amazing 30 seconds! I'll leave it up to you to figure out how much of an enjoyable experience it has been...
Main Reference:
Danckert JA, & Allman AA. (2005) Time flies when you're having fun: temporal estimation and the experience of boredom. Brain and cognition, 59(3), 236-45. PMID: 16168546
