Time is contagious: how to control the subjective perception of time

One of the recent Saturdays, my wife Susan and I went to the city to visit the Metropolitan Museum , where we had not been since our sons were born. There was a crowd of visitors, and for about an hour we walked around, absorbing the depth of art. We are briefly divided; Susan examined the works of Monet and Van Gogh, and I slipped into a side gallery, no larger than a trailer, in which small Degas sculptures were kept in glass boxes. There were busts, horses, a figure of a swift woman who stood up and pulled out her hand as if she had woken up after a long sleep.

And at the end of the gallery in one long box there were two dozen ballerinas in different poses. One dancer studied her foot, the other put on her stockings, the third stood, stretching her right leg forward, and her hands behind her head. Pose arabesque devant - standing on one leg, leaning forward, arms extended - like a child, imitating a plane. Their movements were stiff but alive; It seemed to me that I suddenly went to a rehearsal and the dancers froze for a while so that I could enjoy their grace. At some point, a group of young people who also seemed to be dancers came into the gallery. Their instructor said: “Well, quickly, choose which one of them you are?”, And each of them chose one of the poses to follow - one of the men closest to me stretched out one leg, put his hands on his hips, pushing his elbows back. “I like that you chose this position, John,” said the instructor.


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Time flies when you have fun. When you find yourself in a difficult situation, it can slow down - in a traffic accident or when falling from the roof, and also be distorted under the influence of intoxicating substances, and depending on the substance move faster or slower. There are many less well-known ways to control the passage of time, and scientists are constantly finding new ones. For example, take two Degas sculptures: one above, the second below.



These are sculptures from the series that I considered, demonstrating dance poses of varying degrees of tension. One ballerina rests, the other performs the third position arabesque. Sculptures and their images do not move, but it seems that the depicted ballerinas are moving - and this, as it turns out, is enough to distort your perception of time.

In a study from 2011, Sylvie Droit-Volet, a neuropsychologist at the University. Blaise Pascal, along with three co-authors, showed a group of volunteers images of two ballerinas. The experiment was carried out according to the scheme of dividing in half. First, on the screen, each of the subjects saw a neutral picture, which was there for either 0.4 seconds or 1.6 seconds. After several repetitions, the subject trained to distinguish between these two time intervals. Then a figure of a ballerina appeared on the screen for a while. After each viewing, the subject pressed a button, indicating whether he considered this time interval long or short. The results were unambiguous: it seemed to them that the dancer in arabesque pose, a more dynamic pose, was on the screen longer than it actually was.

It makes sense. Similar studies have found a link between the perception of time and movement. It seems that the moving figure on the computer screen remains on the screen longer than the stationary one. The faster the figures move, the greater the distortion. But Degas sculptures do not move - they only imply movement. Typically, duration distortions arise from the way you perceive certain physical properties of stimuli. If you watch the light flashing every tenth of a second, and at the same time you hear beeps that repeat a little slower - every fifth of a second, for example - then it will seem to you that the light flashes more slowly, along with the sound. This is due to the way our neurons work; many illusions about time are in the audiovisual domain. But Degas has no time distorting properties, no movement. This property is fully created and occurs inside the observer - it is reactivated by memory, perhaps even reproduced. The fact that just watching the sculptures, you can distort time, says a lot about how our internal clocks work.

One of the richest areas in the study of the perception of time - the effect on the perception of emotions. Drua-Vole conducted several intriguing works studying this relationship. In a recent series of experiments, subjects observed several images of people neutral or expressing simple emotions, such as happiness or irritation. Each image remained on the screen for either 0.4 s or 1.6 s, and the subject had to choose one of these gaps. And all the time it seemed to the subjects that happy faces stay on the screen longer than neutral ones, and those reflecting anger or fear seemed to linger even longer.



The key point is the physiological reaction of "excitement", but not the one you thought about. In experimental psychology, arousal is the degree of readiness of the body to react in some way. It is measured through the pulse and conductance of the skin. Sometimes subjects are asked to rate their own arousal when they look at faces or dolls. Excitement is something like a physiological expression of a person’s emotions, or a precursor of physical action; in practice there may be differences. According to standard measurements, anger is the most exciting emotion, both for the person looking at the photo and for the person who is experiencing it; fear comes after him, then happiness, then sadness. It is believed that the excitation speeds up our internal metronome, which causes more beats to accumulate over a certain period of time, which means that it seems to a person that emotionally colored images remain on the screen longer than other images displayed for the same period of time. In the Drua Volie study, the perceived duration of the demonstration of sad faces was longer than that of neutral ones, but not so much longer than that of happy faces.

Physiologists and psychologists consider arousal to be a preliminary physical state - not moving, but ready to move. When we observe a movement, even an implied movement on a still picture, it is considered that we play it in our head. In a sense, excitement shows your ability to put yourself in the place of another person. Studies show that when you watch an action - someone picks up the ball, for example - the muscles of your arm are preparing for it. Muscles do not move, but their electrical conductivity rises, as if they are ready for movement, and their pulse increases. Physiologically you are excited. The same happens if you just see the hand next to the object - as if it is going to raise it - or just see the hand holding the object.

Many studies suggest that this happens to people all the time. We depict the faces and gestures of others, often unconsciously; several studies have found that subjects repeat facial expressions, even when they are not aware of seeing the face. Moreover, such imitation triggers physiological arousal and opens the way for us to feel the emotions of others. It has been found that if you make such a face as if you are expecting an electric shock, the electric shock itself will seem less painful to you. Exaggerated facial expressions while watching pleasant or unpleasant videos accelerates the pulse and conductivity of the skin, typical measures of physiological arousal. With the help of fMRI, it was found that the same areas of the brain that are activated when experiencing emotions, such as anger, or simply by observing this emotion. Excitement is a bridge into the inner state of another person. If you see your friend angry, you do not just make a conclusion about his emotions - you literally feel the same as he does. His mood becomes yours.

The same happens with his sense of time. Over the past few years, scientists have demonstrated that by adopting the emotions or actions of another person, we are also adopting his time distortion. In one experiment, Droa-Vole showed the subjects a set of faces - old and young - without any particular sequence. She found that observers constantly underestimate the duration of finding old faces on the screen. That is, when an observer sees an old face, his internal clock slows down, as if he "adopts the slow movements of old people," writes Droia-Vole. A slower clock is ticking less often, a rare tick accumulates, and the interval seems to be smaller than it actually is. Observing or remembering an old person causes a person to pretend to his condition, slow down movement. “Through this adoption,” writes Drua Volya, “our internal clocks adapt to the speed of movement of old people and the duration of the stimulus seems less.”

Or recall the previous experiment, in which participants reported that the time to demonstrate evil or happy faces seemed longer than the time neutral. She attributes this effect to arousal, but suspects that it does not do here and without adopting someone else's state. The subject may have depicted the faces viewed, and the imitation led to a slower perception of time. She again conducted the experiment, with a serious difference: one group of participants had to look at faces, holding a pen with their lips, to suppress a change in facial expression. Observers without pens strongly overestimated the duration of the display of evil faces and slightly overestimated the duration of the happy ones - but those whose lips and faces were restricted in their movements did not find a time delay. So the pen has fixed the time.

All this leads to a strange conclusion: time is contagious. Communicating with others, we adopt their feelings, including the sense of time (or, what we consider as the perception of another person, based on our experience). The duration of the intervals is not only distorted, we share these distortions with each other as if with money. “The effectiveness of social intercourse is determined by the ability to synchronize our actions with the actions of the individual with whom we are dealing,” writes Droua-Vole. “In other words, individuals adopt the rhythms of other people and their time.”



Perceived time distortion can be considered a manifestation of empathy; because for this we need to stand in the place of another person. We repeat the gestures and emotions of each other - but more likely this happens with the people with whom we identify ourselves, or with the people with whom we want to be. Drua-Vole discovered this in a study of individuals: observers rated the duration of the display of old faces as less than the duration of the display of young people, but only when the observer and the observed person were of the same sex. If a man watched the face of an old woman, or a woman - the face of an old man, no temporary illusions arose. Ethnic studies confirm this: the subjects overestimate the duration of evil faces compared to neutral ones, but the effect is more pronounced if the subject and the one whose photo he sees belong to the same ethnic group. Droa-Vole found that observers with the highest rate in the empathy test are more likely to overestimate the duration of an angry person’s show.

All the time we stand in place of not only other people, but also the place of inanimate objects - faces, hands, images of faces and hands, other objects, such as sculptures of ballet dancers Degas. Droa-Vole and co-authors on work related to Degas believe that the duration of the display of a more dynamic sculpture seems longer, because "it involves a simulation of a more complex and exciting movement." Perhaps Degas was trying to achieve just that - an invitation to participate, the stimulation of even the most clumsy observer to empathy. I see a sculpture of a ballerina standing on one leg and bending forward, and in a sense I am with her, doing my inner arabesque. I feel grace, and at the time of observation, time is distorted.

Emotional faces, moving bodies, athletic sculptures — everything can cause time distortions, and this can be explained by the usual physiological model of how the mind works with time. But for Drua Volia, this effect is still mysterious. Obviously, we have a certain internal mechanism for counting time and measuring short intervals - but it can be spoiled by the weakest emotion. Why then do we need such an unreliable clock?

Droa-Vole believes that this can be interpreted as follows. Not that our watches work badly; on the contrary, they adapt perfectly to the constantly changing social and emotional environment in which we find ourselves daily. The time I experience in social intercourse, belongs not only to me, and is not measured in one way only, which is one of the nuances of social intercourse. “There is no unique homogeneous time, but a multitude of perceptions of time,” writes Droia-Vole in one of the works. “Our temporal distortions reflect how our brains and bodies adapt to these multiple times.” She quotes the philosopher Henri Bergson: “On the doe mettre de côté le temps unique, seuls comptent les temps multiples, ceux de l'expérience”. It is necessary to reject the idea of ​​a single time, a lot of times have a value, from which sensations are composed.

Our smallest social interactions - looks, smiles, frowning eyebrows - are gaining strength from our ability to synchronize them with each other, as noted by Droia Vole. We distort time to spend time with others, and the many temporal distortions that we feel speak of empathy; the better I can put myself in the place of your body and the state of your mind, and you of mine, the better we will recognize a threat, an ally, a friend, or someone in need. But empathy is a very complex property, a sign of emotional maturity; she needs to be trained and it takes time. Children, when they grow up and develop empathy, begin to better understand how to navigate the social world. In other words, it is possible that the critical aspect of growing up is learning how to distort our time, adapting to others. We may be born alone, but childhood ends with a symphony - or synchronization - of hours when we completely devote ourselves to temporary infection.