Time Warped by Claudia Hammond, book cover

Time Warped; a Book Report

This is a book about the human perception of time. It was a little too pop sci for me, but it has some cool notes.

  • People with a fever or otherwise high temperatures appear to perceive time as being dilated; they estimate a minute has elapsed when it has in fact been 35 seconds.

  • That cool “bullet time” effect that people anecdotally get when experiencing terror? It doesn’t seem to actually speed up human perception.

    The experiment (by my neuroscience-crush David Eagleman) is thus:

    1. Attach many digital clocks to the side of a building. They are displaying numbers, but the numbers are changing faster than humans can read.
    2. Sparta-kick your volunteer backwards off the roof of the building. Ask them, afterwards, whether they could read the clocks.
    3. They couldn’t.

    (They tried this experiment on a rollercoaster too, but the participants weren’t scared enough. And, obviously, David Eagleman did this himself.)

  • An experiment where you have someone listen to very rapid tones, and people tell you whether it was two or one tone that you heard; people are better at differentiating sounds than they are lights. The human ear-precision threshold is something outrageous like 1/500ths of a second, but the visual differentiation is more than an order of magnitude worse. (I assume that experimenters controlled for potential cofounders like echoes and reflections, but I haven’t read the study.)

  • Hummingbirds have a weirdly precise internal clock that is, by default, tuned to tracking 20 minutes. (This is the nectar-reload time on many flowers). It’s not hard-coded, though; if you put hummingbirds in a garden of 10-minute-flowers, they learn to track that very accurately as well.

  • A person in a vegetative state can still learn classical conditioning so long as they have an intact cerebellum.

    You have a machine which puffs a little puff of air into a person’s eye. This causes people to blink. You play a tone 600ms before puffing the air into their eye.

    The person learns to blink at precisely the correct time to avoid this—even if they aren’t, like, otherwise conscious.

    A person with cerebellar damage does not learn this.

    The discoverer of this finding wants to use it for diagnosing which persistent vegetative states are recoverable.

  • Ten percent of people can just feel their heartbeat all the time (including myself)

  • Dopamine seems to be involved in time perception; people on anti-dopa drugs underestimate how much time has passed, while people on dopamine agonists (e.g. meth) overestimate it.

    I have some concerns about research methodology, given that haloperidol probably just makes you have low-brain-activity in general, and cocaine makes you feel great.

  • “A moment” is pretty universally considered to be 2-3 seconds. Handshakes need to last almost precisely 3 seconds or people feel weird.