Every year, it feels like time speeds up a little more. It was Easter not too long ago and then before you know it, now it’s Christmas season again.
But it turns out it’s not just another downside of getting older – a psychologist has found evidence that our constant use of technology is making our brains more efficient at processing information, and as a result, tricking us into thinking time is passing faster than it really is.
Scientists have discovered that interacting with technology and technocentric societies have increased some type of pacemaker within us and that while it might help us to work faster, it also makes us feel more pressured by time.
Even though our near-constant use of technology is a relatively new phenomenon, the speed at which time passes is something that people have been concerned about for centuries. As far back as the French Revolution, there are reports of individuals complaining about the pace of modern life.
However, Dr. Aoife McLoughlin of James Cook University has found evidence that our perception of time is now speeding up even faster thanks to smartphones. Her research looked at two categories of people: those who are always connected to technology and those who rarely use it, and compared how each category perceived the passage of time.
She found that those who were always online or on their computers or smartphones overestimated the amount of time that had passed compared to those who rarely used technology. So while sitting in a room, they’d think that an hour had passed when it had only been 50 minutes. That perception difference could make them feel stressed because they were more likely to feel like time was running out than their unconnected peers.
And it wasn’t just those who used technology often – McLoughlin found that even people who read an advertisement for the latest iPad perceived time as passing more quickly than those who had read an excerpt from a non-technological novel.
The findings back up the frequently issued advice that we should all take the time to detach from social media and the Internet each week in order to slow down that pacemaker.
Another research has shown that technology use can help us process information more efficiently, and actually become faster at performing tasks, which could help us save time in the long run.
So the good news is that time isn’t actually speeding up, only our brains are. The bad news is that we’re all too busy using technology to appreciate the extra time that buys us. Ironic.
Technology Speeds up Our Brains’ Perception of Time
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