Where does time go?

220px-The_Persistence_of_MemoryOnce a week, I guide a mindfulness meditation group in a corporate office. Near the end of yesterday’s session, a participant wondered aloud, “Where did the time go? It seems we sat for just a few minutes, yet you’re telling us that it’s been 25.” Others shared her puzzlement and I, too, wondered what happens to time during meditation.

Such an elastic and slippery commodity. Sometimes, during an extended retreat for instance, half an hour goes by in a flash — while during the next period the clock seems to have stopped. Time, so experience and literature suggests, is the most fundamental component of the world we live in, yet its perception is barely understood.

A brief search of the literature shows that the Perception of Time is an illusive topic that’s occupied philosophers and psychologists for a long time. A recent study* suggests that mindfulness meditation has the ability to temporarily alter our perceptions. The researchers hypothesised that, given the emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, meditation would slow down time and produce the feeling that short periods of time lasted longer.

To test this hypothesis, they used a “temporal bisection” task, which allows researchers to measure where each individual subjectively splits a period of time in half. They found that meditation led to a relative overestimation of durations. Within an internal clock framework, a change in attentional resources can produce longer perceived durations.

According to the lead researcher**, these findings “represent some of the first to demonstrate how mindfulness meditation can alter the perception of time. Given the increasing popularity of mindfulness in everyday practice, its relationship with time perception may provide an important step in our understanding of this pervasive, ancient practice in our modern world.”

Can you relate?

I’m curious to learn about your experience of time during meditation. Does it seem to “fly” slower or faster on certain days? How do setting (at home vs. on retreat), circumstances (alone, in a group) and physical-emotional conditions (exhausted, relaxed, happy, neutral, depressed) shape your experience of time? Please comment — if only with further questions and/or personal impressions.

* Kramer, R. S., Weger, U. W., & Sharma, D. (2013). The effect of mindfulness meditation on time perception. Consciousness and cognition, 22(3), 846-852. Abstract. If you’d like to read the Full Text, please contact me and I’ll send a link (thanks to Arlene).
** quoted in http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-06-perception-mindfulness-meditation.html
image: “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dalí (1931).

2018-09-17T18:06:16-07:00April 8th, 2014|4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Tess 9 April 2014 at 11:13 - Reply

    Peter, I found the study you cited to be fascinating evidence of what I so often experience. There are the spaces at the beginning of many of my meditations that generally seem to fly by and then there are the endings that at times seem to go on into perpetuity. My grasping at the future, at the sound of the bell to end to session, often stunts my mindful concentration, slowing time in the process and accentuating my bouts of frustration.

    On retreats I find there is more of a fervent intention to be with what is and time melds into a spacious void where I often wonder where the time went. And then my stomach growls and time pulls me yet again in the future and lunch. 😉

    Fascinating stuff.

  2. Elanna 9 April 2014 at 14:58 - Reply

    Thank you for citing this studiy Peter. It is very interesting.
    I am fairly new to the practice of meditation and so find that sense of time often depends on the day.
    It also can depend on the level of chronic pain I am experiencing. (More pain; generally feels like time is moving more slowly; and its more challenging to stay focused on the breath). However, having said that, the benefits of staying focused for a significant amount of time does lead eventually to reduction in pain level..so its all good.
    Namasté.

  3. Fran 9 April 2014 at 17:16 - Reply

    Such an interesting topic. Atomic time must tick along at its own pace but our perception of its passing is certainly flexible. Why does it run faster and faster as I age? Usually time passes more quickly when I meditate. That long long wait in the doctor’s office or before a CT scan passes quickly when I let go of annoyance and focus on breathing or even open awareness. Time seems to pass faster with home and solitude or familiar people and surroundings, but it does vary day to day. Pain and physical tiredness can stretch the meditation period endlessly. And sometimes the first part seems slower than the second part, having stilled and settled at last. Thank you for prompting this discussion. 😉

  4. Peter 11 April 2014 at 22:29 - Reply

    Into the mix … Wittman (2009) reviewed the most prominent models of time perception and concluded:

    1. Although the perception of time is an essential and inextricable component of everyday experience, no conclusive answers to the questions of which neural substrates and what kind of neurophysiological processes could account for the experience of duration have been established. That is, several areas of the brain have been identified as potential contributors to timekeeping (e.g. cerebellum, frontal cortices and basal ganglia), but none have been specifically implicated for this process and there is no consensus as to the precise neural mechanisms accounting for our sense of time.

    2. Philosophical wisdom beginning in antiquity has related the experience of time to the feeling of a self. The body self and emotional self in modern biological terms is based on insular cortex activity. The signalling of body states, which define the material me and contribute to the ‘feeling me’, is a permanent and ongoing process over time and, thus, could function as an inner measure of duration by matching external temporal intervals with the duration of physiological changes.

    Wittmann, M. (2009). The inner experience of time. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1525), 1955-1967. Full text at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2685813/

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