Our brain's perception of time is somewhat different from how clocks keep time. When we're having fun as the saying goes, time flies and it surely does. You don't notice the minutes and hours passing when you're having a good time. In contrast, when we don't have much to do, time seems to be at a standstill, crawling at a snail's pace. So why does that happen?
How the brain percieves time depends on its expectations. The brain can represent the probability that something is going to occur, given that it hasn't happened yet, said Dr. Michael Shadlen, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.
Every thought has various "horizons," Shadlen told Live Science. In a book, for example, horizons lie at the end of every syllable, the end of every word, the end of the next sentence and so on. Time moves according to how we anticipate these horizons, he said.
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Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
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When you are a kid, summer vacation seems like an eternity. At say age 65, not so much.
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