Recently, my attention was grabbed by conversations about an issue that seems to concern many people around me: How we define time according to lockdown period. Many people comment that they’ve forgotten how it was during the pandemic. They also express feelings of nostalgia and sadness about the past. Many statements are often related to the loss of time perception. When did all the events during and after lockdown restrictions take place exactly? Many also say that it is even impossible to remember the sequence of events or worst, they cannot define who they were before the pandemic starts.
This article relates to everyone but is more focused on people who were juveniles or had just graduated when the quarantine started. There are some research examples that pinpoint the importance of time perception of youngsters that were affected by the quarantine years, such as duration of events, memories of events, for how long these events lasted etc.
Many people often talk about how differently time passes after the outburst of Covid-19. A recent research (May 2022), refers to the ability of placing the events in the right timeline. Based on 2016-2022 events, participants had to answer questionnaires aimed at quantifying their state boredom, depression, anxiety, stress, resilience and level of activity during the lockdown periods of the COVID pandemic. As expected, the findings showed more errors for distant events than those in 2020. However this is normal if we consider how brain functions right?
Unexpectedly, the findings indicate that participants were less able to recall the timeline of very recent events coinciding with COVID lockdowns. The false perception has a strong correlation with levels of depression and anxiety. Although measurements of boredom showed significantly related to depression and anxiety. The findings are consistent with poor perception of event timeline reported in prison inmates. According to Sarason and Stroops, who tested anxiety in relation to how participants view time, findings confirm the theory above, showing that higher anxiety, is related to poorer time estimation. More specifically, they support that time feels to pass slowly under periods of stress.
To understand better this phenomenon, we’ll discuss some of the findings, related to how we perceive time, also which mechanisms play a role in this. Why can someone feel like time passes quickly or slowly?
To begin with, David M. Eagleman examined the illusion of time perception from our brain and neural system. Based on his evidence (using EEG, MEG, PET, fMRI), scientists found that time duration patterns are related to repetition. Thus, our nervous system, in order to have lower metabolic costs, after the exposition to a repeated object, suppresses neural response. This incident corresponds with shorter time perception. Maybe this explains somehow why, in periods of isolation, when boredom is intense, and we live in an repetitive routine, people tend to remember this as a brief time. On the other hand, when an oddball incident happens, a dense memory is being created. Dense memories are associated with longer perception, due to the fact that amygdala, which is responsible for intense feelings, is neurologically linked with time perception mechanisms.
Time estimation is a significant factor that has been questioned after lockdown years. Considering brain activity that takes part in it, evidence pinpoint also the role of working memory and attention to it. There are facts which prove that working memory (ex. remembering briefly a phone number, calculating something, driving etc.), plays part in perceiving time as shorten than it is, while we can feel time longer when we pay attention to duration (Bayesian model).
If we stick to the idea that time is a subjective and fluid illusion, we should pay attention to expanded factors. It can be determined by subjective factors such as our emotional state, attention, routine. Most reports related to time perception, have focused on stimulus property and physiological state, supporting that brain has high adaptability also vulnerability. Deriving from this statement, two theories explain how and why estimating time can be diverse:
Contextual- Change hypothesis = The perceived duration of an event , is affected by the number of contextual changes . This hypothesis explain why grown ups experience vacations or events as shorter unlikely to kids.
Event-Density hypothesis =The number of events occurring a certain period influent time estimation. The difference in time feeling is based on our internal clock that counts at a constant rhythm. A new event increases heart rate, internal pulses are increased so time feels like flowing faster. When body temperature increases internal clock works faster and time feels shorter.
GABAergic system also plays a significant role in individual differences of time perception and memory loss. It is basically responsible for perceiving the duration of visual intervals. Per-frontal cortex, striatum and precuneous are related to the sense of the present moment, the “now”. Studies also support that during lockdown, people have difficulty in remembering, estimating time also due to the increase use of social media platforms. Brain is not designed to synchronise instant information with communication, which can explain why time duing lockdown feels ambiguous and we can experience distortions of events related to it.
It is likely that an accurate perception of an event timeline relies on a collection of life events, which was absent that time. Our generation was forced to live in silence and grief in a time that many personality changes were taking place. Hence many mental and cognitive malfunctions came to surface, having an impact in the way we all perceive our selves, others, the world. Recreating our normality is something that requires time and gradual adjustment.
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Sarason, I. G., & Stoops, R. (1978). Test anxiety and the passage of time. Journal of
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