"The Psychology of Time" with Prof. Joel Pearson on The Buzz

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Education, Society & Culture, Comedy, Self-improvement

4.5 • 905 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's always a treat when Professor Joel Pearson stops by for The Buzz, to blow our minds about our minds.

On this visit, Joel and Josh wrestle with how you experience time. Why does time sometimes seem to move fast, and slow? Are some people naturally better at different times of day? How fooled can you be by tricks of time? Is there a biological timer in your brain? And why does time speed up as you age?

Joel is a professor of cognitive neuroscience who runs the Future Minds Lab at one of Australia's big ivy leagues, UNSW. His latest book is "Intuition: Unlock Your Brain's Potential to Build Real Intuition and Make Better Decisions".

This is a taste of a longer episode for premium subscribers. It includes a couple of visual brain games to test your time perception. They need to be seen to be experienced. If you'd like to hear the whole thing and to see the experiments, pop over to the Substack page at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe to access to videos of this and all our other premium shows.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the buzz where we dissect some big scientific issue, especially if it relates to your brain.
0:09.2	We try to blow our minds about the nature of our minds with the one and only professor, Joel Pearson, neuroscientist extraordinaire, who runs the Future Minds Lab at the University of New South Wales.
0:19.4	Joel, welcome back to the show.
0:37.5	Thank you, Josh. Good to see you again. Time we're talking about today. Not the actual ticking of the clock, but the way that it... We might touch on the clock. Yeah, we'll get the clock. Yeah, all right. Let's start with the big stuff then. What is time? So that's about time perception. So chronos, chronopersception.
0:39.7	Right.
0:40.7	And so where to start with this?
0:43.7	So when we think about the senses, the five senses, we have ears and eyes and things, and we perceive time, but we don't have sense organs for time.
0:52.1	So it seems to be something that the whole brain does. There's no
0:55.5	dedicated sense organ, no dedicated brain area. There's not a tiny bit of my brain that's sort of
1:01.7	ticking away in the background. Yeah, there's no, there's no like these neurons do time perception.
1:06.0	It seems to be in nature of the whole brain and it's also as we'll get to affected by what your
1:11.9	brain what else your brain is processing so if you're highly stimulated if you're highly
1:16.6	emotionally aroused or scared all these things will affect time perception so it seems to be sort of
1:21.4	intimately interwoven into what else the brain is doing right so it's it's like double-tasking, if you like.
1:28.5	Meaning that my, and so presumably when I'm highly aroused or when my brain is doing a lot of
1:33.4	work and I'm thinking very quickly, time seems to take longer?
1:38.7	Normally people report the opposite, that time goes by very quickly.
1:42.9	But what about the effect of I'm in a car accident and everything slows down?
1:47.4	Yeah.
1:47.6	Playing a game of tennis and the ball is coming at me slowly.
1:50.3	There's controversy around this.
1:52.1	So, because there was some research and people have suggested that it was that time perception as you perceive it is changing in these things.
	...

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