That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Time

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss how your brain processes the passage of time. 

Hi, my name is Olive Krig Olson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria, and in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Have you ever been standing in line, checking your watch every few seconds, convinced the time is somehow slod down for you? Maybe you pull out your phone, scroll, look up again, and somehow only 30 seconds have passed. And even after you decide to wait it out, you're still not sure it was the right call? So what would you do? On today's podcast, the neuroscience of time. Time feels like one of the most stable things in our lives. Seconds tick by, clocks move forward, and days pass whether we like it or not.

But your experience of time, how fast or slow it feels, is not fixed at all. It's something your brain actively constructs. You probably noticed this in two very different situations. In the moment, waiting can feel almost unbearable. A delayed flight, a loading screen, a red light that seems to last forever. Time stretches. But then you look back on the last 10 years of your life and you think, where did it go? It feels compressed, almost like it passed in the blare. You know, that's one that I can really relate to. I was talking to my son just the other day and he's 18 years old and he's in university and I can still remember the day he was born. And you probably

know the phrase, it feels like yesterday. So we have this strange paradox. In the present, time can feel slow and heavy. In memory, it often feels fast and fleeting. What's going on in there that your brain doesn't have a single clock. So what's going on in there is that your brain doesn't have a single clock. Instead, it builds your sense of time from two main ingredients, attention and memory. Let's start with attention, what you're focusing on right now. When you're waiting in line and you're aware of every passing second, your attention is locked onto time itself. You're monitoring it. You're checking in. And when attention is directed at

time, your brain essentially samples more moments. It takes more mental snapshots. The result is that time feels expanded. It feels longer because more information is being processed per unit of actual time. But when you're deeply engaged, say you're in a conversation, working on something interesting or completely absorbed in a task, your attention is not directed on time, it's directed on the activity. You're not sampling time directly, so fewer time markers are created, and the experience ends up feeling faster. Now, let's shift from attention to memory. When you look back on a period of your life, your brain reconstructs time based on how much information was stored. Now, not how long it actually lasted, but how many distinct memories you formed. If a period is

rich with new experiences, traveling, learning, something new, meeting new people, it creates a dense set of memories. When you look back, it feels longer because there's more there. But if your days are highly repetitive, same routine, same environment, same patterns, your brain compresses that information. There are fewer distinct memory markers. And when you look back, it feels like time disappeared. That happened to me today, and you might have experienced this. You know, with the COVID pandemic, we got Zoom. And all of a sudden, Zoom meetings and Zoom calls were a thing. I had four straight hours of Zoom meetings today, eight 30-minute meetings. Back-to-back, no breaks. Click out of one. into the other. Now, when I was approaching that, I was dreading it. I was like, I don't want to do

this. This is horrible. But, you know, when it was over, because I was interested in every single conversation, I was talking with my graduate students, you know, time just flew by. I had no clue. It was like, oh, that meeting's over? All right. And then at the end, you know, I felt tired, but I wasn't processing time. My attention was on the meetings. So here's the key idea. In the moment, time is shaped by attention. In hindsight, time is shaped by memory. So right now, if you're paying attention to time,

it's going to feel like it drags on forever. But if you're not paying attention to it, you look back at it, and that's the hindsight part. Time is shaped by memory. That's why waiting feels slow, but years can feel fast. And this system leads to a very clear pattern in everyday life. The more predictable and routine your life becomes,

the faster it seems to pass in retrospect. And the more you fix it on time in the moment, the slower it feels. I'll give you another example. My drive to work these days, I'm away on sabbatical, takes about 20 minutes. and I can't separate them. You know, if I look back on the last 10 times I drove to work where there was no incidents,

it just went by. It was over. Like it started and then it was over. I got home and went, oh, wow, that was quick. However, just the other day I got stuck in traffic. And man, every second tick by. Because in the moment, it was attention, just like I've said. But in retrospect, when you get home,

guess what? It's hindsight and you weren't paying attention to time. Now let's dive in a little bit deeper. This system works well most of the time. It allows your brain to allocate resources efficiently. When something is important or uncertain, like waiting for a decision or outcome, your attention increases. Time slows down, giving you more resolution to process what's happening. But in situations like modern life where we have constant low-level monitoring, checking notifications, watching clocks, waiting for responses, it leads to an unexpected outcome. Time starts to feel both fragmented and slow in the moment, and yet empty and fast in memory.

You feel like you're constantly waiting, constantly checking, constantly aware of time passing, but when you look back, there's not much there to anchor those experiences, so it collapses. This is one reason why people often feel like time accelerates as they get older. It's not just aging. There's no neuroscience behind that. Time passes, well, unless we get into special relativity, but let's not go there. It's a neuroscience podcast, not a physics podcast. But anyway, it's not just aging.

It's increasing routine, combined with reduced novelty in constant partial attention. So what can you do about this? First, recognize the cue. If time feels like it's dragging on, ask yourself, am I paying attention to time itself? And if the answer is yes, that's your signal. The adjustment is simple. Shift your attention away from time and towards something engaging. Even a small change, starting a conversation, focusing on a task, introducing novelty,

can compress your experience of time in a moment. I'll give you an example of this, which I've experienced many times. Your flight's delayed two hours. You're dreading it. Absolutely dreading it. Phone a friend, that's what I do. I get out the iPhone and I start calling people until someone is free to chat. And next thing, you know, 45 minutes out of that two-hour delay are gone.

Now, second, think about memory. If you want your life to feel fuller and longer in retrospect, you need more distinct experiences. That doesn't mean dramatic changes. So just don't go out and start doing random things. It can just be small variations. New places, new activities, new conversations. What matters is breaking the pattern enough for your brain to create new memory markers.

This is a challenge I have for a friend of mine because when we go out for dinner, he always wants to go to the same restaurant every time. And we always order the same thing. But you know what? The downside of that is that all of those times we've gone to that restaurant, they blend together. And you know what stands out for me? The times where we go to a different restaurant. Because it's new, so it's a marker. So try some small variations. Try something you've never done before. Go somewhere you've never been. Talk to someone randomly that you've never met before. What matters is breaking the pattern enough for your brain to create new memory markers.

So the next time you're in that situation, standing in line, watching the seconds crawl by, remember, time isn't just passing, your brain is building it. All right, I hope you like the neuroscience of time. Something that's fascinated me for years. In fact, one of my first graduate projects at a summer school was trying to figure out how the brain encodes time. time. And there's this high-level stuff, but there's actually a really cool way it works at the neuronal level. But I'll come back to that another time. Now, don't forget the website, that neuroscience guy.com. We've got the Etsy store for merch. We've added more. We're slowly trying to add more beyond that. Patreon, if you don't know what Patreon is, it's just a website. You go in,

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And before I forget, do not forget to check out my new podcast series, 60 seconds of neuroscience. One idea, one minute, neuroscience you can use. And don't worry, this podcast is staying. Thank you so much for listening. And if you haven't already, please subscribe. My name is Olaf Krig Olson, and I am that neuroscience guy. See you soon for another full episode of the podcast.