Leaving aside the fun and fascinating question about whether time exists — even if we assume that time is a real entity — our own personal perceptions of the flow of time can slow, stretch, speed up, and everything in between.
Our brains constantly monitor a complex influx of signals arriving with different timings, and the balancing act from all those signals, combined with many internal operations, combine to give us our sense of time’s passage. These systems work…well, most of the time.
How Our Brains Sense Time
To get a taste of just how much work our brains do to give us a steady experience of time, consider watching a movie. Neither the video nor the sound from the movie arrive at our eyes and ears in a continuous steam. Instead, the video is composed of a series of still images, usually 24 every second. Our brains seamlessly blend these images together to give us the perception of continuous motion.
