How much is too much?
Time is an illusion. Time is relative. But is time fooling us as well?
Have you ever felt time just flying by when you are doing something exciting and comparatively, time drags when you are stuck in boredom? Well, that has happened to all of us. Even Einstein, in his own words, beautifully explained the famous concept of time relativity as ‘‘When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than an hour. That’s relativity.’’ So, in a nutshell, we tend to underestimate the duration of time spent when we are enjoying the moment. But the main question is WHY is this so?
Recently, I came across the video of Tom Lum where he explained visual temporal resolution. He mentions that time “slows down for us” when we are facing a life-threatening situation. It made me wonder, if this is the case in a life-threatening situation which is generally unpleasant, then the converse should happen with time when we are facing a pleasant moment. For example, while surfing through social media(a pleasant activity), we generally underestimate the time we have spent on it. It seems that we have spent 15 minutes but in reality, we have been scrolling for an hour! To make it more clear and relatable, let me demonstrate one more example. Imagine you have been waiting for a boring class to get over, but often it feels like it is lasting throughout eternity. Time doesn’t pass that easily when we are trapped in boredom. To find out the reason, I explored some articles on the internet and this is what I found.
We are greedy!
Yes, you read it right. Our brain is greedy for rewards and positive results. All thanks to our favorite neurotransmitter, Dopamine.
Dopamine(DA short for 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine) is responsible for the motivation in reward-motivated behavior. It gets released when we do pleasurable activities, then it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat those rewarding activities. Isn’t it amazing? Now studies have shown that there is a surge of DA when we scroll through our social media, the positive news, jokes, memes, etc activates the DA pathways in our brain that results in the influx of DA which in turn motivates us to keep scrolling again. This is known as The Dopamine Seeking-Reward Loop. And trust me this is the fundamental of all social media, to keep their users hooked to their platforms. This is the reason why we are addicted to social media but the larger question remains unanswered which is what makes us underestimate the time we spend on these platforms?
Now, a set of experiments conducted by Sofia Soares, Bassam V. Atallah, and Joseph J. Paton found that the activation of DA neurons slowed down the time estimation. Gotcha! But hold on! If this is the mechanism, there should be some reason behind it. After all, evolution has made sure that we have reasons for every action of our body.
Now, it seems that the reason behind the underestimation of time is that our brain wants us to spend a little more time in such pleasurable situations. The way this works is that, while enjoying our happy moments or browsing through social media, our brain releases DA which makes all the arrangements to make us feel that time is passing slower than it is passing in reality. Again, since we are believing that less amount of time has passed it leads us to longer engagement in those situations, which in turn increases the amount of scrolling, and that leads to the amplification of the probability of releasing more DA. Ahaaa now that’s what I call a perfect loop!
Again, these are my amateur thoughts that came across my mind by linking the facts which I came across while reading these papers. A lot of work is still going on to determine the effect of DA on time perception. In some cases, DA seems to slow down the timekeeping but there have been some reports where DA has shown to speed up or not affect the timekeeping.
But the question remains how much dopamine is too much dopamine for the brain?