how to slow down time (the neuroscience of time perception)

how the brain creates our perception of time, and how to expand it

Many of us sense that time is moving faster than it used to. Entire months disappear in the space of a week. June rolls around before we’ve finished processing March?! (and now that I’m editing this, it’s already July…)

It’s not just a feeling, and it’s not aging, exactly. It’s perception. And perception (like memory) is constructed.

Time doesn’t speed up. But the way the brain encodes experience changes over time. And that changes how long time feels.

(If you’re new to my writing - all links in this piece lead to peer-reviewed studies, academic papers, and other thoughtful pieces for deeper exploration. If you’re curious, you’ll find a full list of references at the end.)

---

the brain doesn’t “tell time”, it builds it

Unlike sight or hearing, there’s no sensory organ for time. No clock in the brain. Time perception is distributed, flexible, and deeply context-dependent. It’s built through a combination of neural systems tracking motion, attention, memory, and internal body rhythms.

Our brains track time on at least three different scales, each managed by different brain regions:

• Milliseconds to seconds. This is the brain’s short-range stopwatch. The cerebellum and sensory cortices manage fast, precise timing needed for things like speech, music, and quick movements (basically, anything that requires split-second coordination).

• Seconds to minutes. This is the middle range, where we hold onto time just long enough to plan and act. The prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia help us stay focused, estimate short durations, and make quick decisions.

• Longer durations. This is the brain’s personal timeline. The hippocampus and precuneus help you store and recall events that stretch across hours, days, or years. These regions shape your sense of continuity (your “life story”) and allow you to remember, reflect, and imagine the future.

Each time scale isn’t just measured, it’s experienced, and that experience is shaped by what the brain is doing while it ticks.

(This piece was informed by the 2024 Scientific Reports editorial on the malleability and fluidity of time perception by Kondo, Gheorghiu, and Pinheiro - an incredible overview of how our brains construct time across different scales and states.)

---

why time feels like it’s disappearing

1) the Novelty Effect

When something unexpected or unfamiliar happens, your brain perks up. It devotes more attention and forms richer memories. This makes those moments feel longer - both as you’re living them and later when you remember them.

This is termed the oddball effect. Children experience this constantly because almost everything is new - first time seeing snow, tasting mango, riding a bike. For adults, life becomes more predictable, and the brain stops recording in high resolution.

(i write about the oddball effect + childhood nostalgia in why time felt slower when we were kids (and how to get it back), check it out if you have big feelings)

2) the Contextual Change Hypothesis

Your brain keeps track of time partly by counting how many distinct things happen. More variety means more “mental timestamps”. A day filled with different sights, tasks, or emotions feels longer.

When every day looks the same - same room, same tasks, same routine - there are fewer context shifts. And fewer shifts mean less for the brain to mark. That’s how time blurs together.

3) internal clock & attention

Deep in the brain is a timing system that works like a pacemaker. It sends out regular pulses. Your perception of time depends on how many of those pulses get registered.

Attention is the gatekeeper. When you’re focused, more pulses make it through, and time feels slower and fuller. But when you’re distracted or disengaged, fewer pulses register, so the same span of time feels shorter.

4) predictability shrinks time

The brain is wired for efficiency. When it knows what to expect, it stops paying close attention. Familiar experiences get compressed and stored with less detail.

That’s why your first week at a new job feels long and vivid, but a year later, the same kind of week flies by. It’s not that time changed, it’s that your brain stopped noticing.

---

how do we expand time?

The answer isn’t to slow time. It’s to fill it. To create more neural “density”. More events, more attention, more memory. The brain registers time through what it notices. If you want more time, you need to make it notice:

• reclaim novelty. tiny changes wake up your brain. novelty doesn’t need to be dramatic, it just needs to be different enough to register.

sit somewhere new. take a different route. try a new spice. learn a term you didn’t know yesterday (polyrhythms). each of these creates a deviation in your brain’s model of the world. that deviation slows time down.

• use your senses, not just your mind. time perception is tied to sensory input. the insula, a region linked to bodily awareness, activates when you’re present in sensation.

feel textures. listen closely to ambient sounds. watch how light changes on a wall. these are the same things your child-self did automatically. You’re just doing it on purpose now.

• interrupt autopilot. notice when you’re zoning out in a routine. then, pause and disrupt it, even for a moment:

literally do nothing for two minutes. change your coffee order. take five conscious breaths before opening your email. walk without your phone. this doesn’t just create presence - it creates mental markers. your brain encodes the difference.

• create oddball moments. unique, salient stimuli are perceived as longer. give yourself micro-oddballs:

a playlist you’ve never heard. a spontaneous conversation. a curious Substack read lol. even a change in lighting (or smell - think incense) can alter your perception of duration.

• track attention, not time. presence changes neural activity, especially in the default mode network (which governs mind-wandering). when you’re engaged (aka in flow), you don’t notice time. but afterward, it feels full. your brain encoded a rich memory.

this is different from boredom or scrolling. scrolling erases time while it’s happening and afterward. flow compresses the experience but expands the memory. so if you want days to feel long again, seek deep engagement.

---

time feels long when you’re alive for it

Time is not just what the clock displays, it’s what your brain encodes. And your brain encodes change, salience, and novelty.

Many people look back at their childhoods with an aching nostalgia, and it makes sense. Childhood was immersive. Time was thick, vivid, and unfiltered. Of course it feels different now. Adulthood comes with repetition, responsibility, and noise.

While we can’t recreate childhood, we can reclaim the way we once experienced time.

That feeling you miss - that sense of aliveness, slowness, wonder - it wasn’t just the world. It was you. Your attention, your openness. Your ability to be fully there for the smallest details. That part of you didn’t vanish, it just went quiet, unused for a long while. Notice what brings that feeling back. Stay close to it. Keep returning to the places, the actions, the moments that slow time down. Let it become second nature again.

i hope this post gave you something to sit with. if it resonated, your thoughts, feelings, and experiences are fully welcome here (in the comments, community chat, or message me!) <3

---

References

1. Eagleman, D. M. (2008). Human time perception and its illusions. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 18(2), 131–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2008.06.002

attention, novelty, and emotional salience warp our perception of time.

2. Grondin, S. (2010). Timing and time perception: A review of recent behavioral and neuroscience findings and theoretical directions. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72(3), 561–582. https://doi.org/10.3758/app.72.3.561

reviews distributed neural mechanisms of time perception.

3. Koch, G., Oliveri, M., & Caltagirone, C. (2009). Neural networks engaged in milliseconds and seconds time processing: Evidence from transcranial magnetic stimulation and patients with cortical or subcortical dysfunction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1525), 1907–1918. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0018

identifies distinct neural networks involved in processing different timescales.

4. Ivry, R. B., & Keele, S. W. (1989). Timing functions of the cerebellum. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1(2), 136–152. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.1989.1.2.136

cerebellum supports precise subsecond timing for motor control, speech, and perceptual tasks.

5. Buonomano, D. V. (2000). Decoding temporal information: A model based on short-term synaptic plasticity. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(3), 1129–1141. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.20-03-01129.2000

sensory cortices (especially auditory and visual) contribute to subsecond timing via local circuit dynamics.

6. Lewis, P. A., & Miall, R. C. (2003). Brain activation patterns during measurement of sub- and supra-second intervals. Neuropsychologia, 41(12), 1583–1592. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0028-3932(03)00118-0

the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia are active during tasks requiring estimation of durations in the seconds range.

7. Eichenbaum, H. (2013). Memory on time. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(2), 81–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.12.007

the hippocampus encodes temporal context in episodic memory.

8. Tang, L., et al. (2021). Neural correlates of temporal presentness in the precuneus: A cross-linguistic fMRI study based on speech stimuli. Cerebral Cortex, 31(3), 1538–1552. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaa307

the precuneus helps generate the sense of “now”.

9. Kondo, H. M., Gheorghiu, E., & Pinheiro, A. P. (2024). Malleability and fluidity of time perception. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 12244. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-62189-7

overview of current research on how attention, emotion, sensory input, and neural mechanisms shape our subjective experience of time.

10. Eagleman, D. M., & Pariyadath, V. (2009). Is subjective duration a signature of coding efficiency? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1525), 1841–1851. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0026

novel and complex stimuli stretch subjective time due to increased processing and memory encoding.

11. Rose, D., & Summers, J. (1995). Duration illusions in a train of visual stimuli. Perception, 24(10), 1177–1187. https://doi.org/10.1068/p241177

empirical evidence for the “oddball effect”.

12. Block, R. A., & Reed, M. A. (1978). Remembered duration: Evidence for a contextual-change hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 656–665. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.6.656

the contextual-change hypothesis - more perceptual and emotional changes lead to a longer subjective duration in memory.

13. Gibbon, J., Church, R. M., & Meck, W. H. (1984). Scalar timing in memory. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 423(1), 52–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1984.tb23417.x

the scalar expectancy theory.

14. Zakay, D., & Block, R. A. (1997). Temporal cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 6(1), 12–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.ep11512604

the attentional-gate model.

15. Wittmann, M., & Lehnhoff, S. (2005). Age effects in perception of time. Psychological Reports, 97(3), 921–935. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.97.3.921-935

aging leads to perceived time acceleration due to routine, repetition, and reduced encoding of new experiences.

16. Craig, A. D. (2009). How do you feel — now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(1), 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2555

the anterior insula integrates interoceptive and emotional signals to generate subjective awareness.

17. Esterman, M., Noonan, S. K., Rosenberg, M., & Degutis, J. (2013). In the zone or zoning out? Tracking behavioral and neural fluctuations during sustained attention. Cerebral Cortex, 23(11), 2712–2723. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhs261

how fluctuations in attention relate to engagement and time distortion.