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spikedragonborn t1_jbw5d4e wrote

Reply to comment by old_guitarist in Perceived time expands and contracts within each heartbeat by old_guitarist

can you explain it in dumb dumb words plz? i maybe smart but this is way out of my league.

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LiteralSymbolism t1_jbxn67m wrote

You know how sometimes a few minutes or seconds feel really slow, or they go by super fast? This paper focused on the small side, on those few seconds that sometimes feel slow or fast, and they thought “hey maybe it’s related to the heart beating.”

So they went a proved a relationship between when your heart beats and the perceived passage of time, specifically during the 200-400 millisecond windows of “your heart is pumping blood” and “your heart is chilling, waiting to pump blood”. In the first state, time seemed to expand (ie felt longer), in the second state, time seemed to contract (or felt faster) according to study participants.

They also found that this effect nearly completely went away as one becomes more aroused, likely due to other more important factors like your brain interpreting something more interesting, which could easily muddy the results.

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