Another factor may be the "proportional" aspect, which is that as we get older each period of time constitutes a smaller proportion of our life as a whole. It follows, then, that our experience of time should expand in unfamiliar surroundings, because this is where our minds process more information than normal.
When you go away to a foreign country you are much more sensitive to your surroundings. Everything is unfamiliar and new, so you pay much more attention and take in much more information. It's the same when you spend a day on a training course, learning new things with a group of unfamiliar people. It feels like more time has passed than would have done if you had stayed at home following your normal routine. Firstly, since we know that familiarity makes time pass faster, we can slow down time by exposing ourselves to as much new experience as possible.
By travelling to new places, giving ourselves new challenges, meeting new people, exposing our minds to new information, hobbies and skills, and so on. This will increase the amount of information our minds process and stretch out our experience of time passing. Secondly, and perhaps most effectively, we can slow down time by making a conscious effort to be more "mindful" of our experiences.
The opposite can happen in lockdown. Even if the days feels slow, when you get to the end of the week and look back, retrospectively estimating how much time has passed, you have made fewer new memories than usual and time seems to have disappeared.
Time passes painfully slowly and they long for it to be over, but when it is and they look back, time can feel as though it has contracted. Of course some people have found themselves busier than ever during lockdown, juggling the technological challenges of working from home with the new job of home-schooling their children.
Despite their busyness, their new life is spent almost entirely in one location, leading them to make far fewer new memories than usual and the sensation that time has whizzed by. Dozens of Zoom calls from the same surroundings can start to merge into one compared with memories of real life where we see people in different places.
I wonder whether our time perception in lockdown is also altered by the necessity to live more in the present. When the mind is left to wander, in normal times we often daydream about the future, but with less to anticipate or arrange, our time horizon has shortened. Now we might only look ahead by a few days or alternatively into the far distant future when we imagine this might all be over.
This perception may be due to a few factors, Kesari points out, firstly that when we're children, a year of life amounts to much more time of existence, percentage-wise. Additionally, when we are children, we are constantly being introduced to new things and ideas that leave lasting impressions on our memories.
But there is evidence that our perception of time as we are experiencing it is also slower when we are very young children. This in turn affects how they perceive the passage of time. By the time we are adults, our time circuits are done wiring and we have learned from experience how to correctly encode the passage of time. One method of testing that researchers have used to determine this discrepancy in time perception between children and adults is temporal bisection tasking.
In this method, researchers may have participants listen to a series of tones and compare them in terms of duration. Then you hear comparison tones. Most day-to-day activities during adulthood have become customary processes and life is generally familiar. This is why the passing of a year for a 50 year-old person can seem much shorter than twelve months during childhood or adolescence.
When an experience scares us, an area of the brain called the amygdala kicks into play. This part of the brain that is responsible for detecting fear and preparing for emergency events. It is understood that in situations that provoke the fear response, the brain accumulates lots of new information, which is all collected within a very short period of time. This means that frightening experiences generate richer and denser memories, which make us believe that the time elapsed was greater than the physical reality.
Whenever you get the chance to go to a different shop or pub, give it a go - instead of sticking to going to the same places.
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