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See the original image at discovermagazine.com —

How Your Brain Can Control Time

discovermagazine.com — The three methods your mind uses to reverse, speed, and even slow the minutes.

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  • richmomz, on 07/13/2008, -1/+2Dupe -buried.
  • inquilinekea, on 07/18/2008, -0/+0"in 2007, scientists rang a bell after 53 seconds of silence. Healthy people estimated on average that 67 seconds had passed. Stimulant addicts guessed 91 seconds. Other drugs have the opposite effect on dopamine and compress the subjective experience of time."

    ==

    Yeah, so then the question is, does time pass faster or slower for the stimulant addicts? I mean, if you're USED to time passing so fast, then you'd alter your subjective estimates of time in such a way that the equal number of seconds "feels" shorter in your frame of reference.

    Also in general children generally estimate that more seconds pass than adults. (because children are impatient and tend to overestimate wait times). this is cognitive, not physiological.

    So what does it mean if you think more seconds have passed than is the case? If you're totally rational and learn well from your experiences, then your "perceptive wait time" is well-calibrated to what it actually is. So then differences between perceived seconds and actual seconds are usually the result of time passing slower/faster in the experiment (rather than in general). i.e. time seems to pass slowwwwwwly (for you, relative to controls) if your guess of seconds passed is higher than that of the controls. But only in the particular experiment. It would have meaning, however, if it could be shown that the "perceptive wait time" of drug addicts are not well-calibrated to actual number of seconds.

    Also stimulant addicts are not a representative subset of the population and they probably would count differently than the controls even w/o drugs
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