The Power of Time Perception

by Jean Paul Zogby

  Slowing Down Time With Stimulants

  As we saw earlier, neuroscientists use Flicker Fusion Frequency (FFF) tests to measure the brain’s information processing speed and its state of alertness. When people consume stimulants, like nicotine and amphetamine, their FFF increases. 107 Amphetamines were originally developed as anti-depressants but are now being used as “mental enhancers” that go by the street names “speed,” “ice,” “whizz,” “uppers,” or “ecstasy,” depending on their composition. Amphetamines raise the level of brain neurotransmitters and enhance alertness by exciting the firing rate of brain neurons, allowing the brain to register more events in a shorter period of time, hence the street name “speed.” This boost to the brain’s processing speed increases energy levels, concentration, motivation, and slows down time. During World War II, U.S soldiers were given amphetamine drugs to increase their alertness on the front lines. American bomber pilots used amphetamine pills to stay awake during long missions. It is also thought that British troops consumed around 72 million amphetamine tablets during those times, so much so that this drug was said to have won the Battle of Britain!

  As you would expect, the alertness-boosting effect of such smart drugs is why people often report a slowing down of time. 52 This is mainly due to the heightened sense of awareness and focused attention, and this is quite evident in people on drugs. People who are high on marijuana, amphetamines, or other stimulants seem to be fixated on the internal—sensations, thoughts, or imaginings—and are often unaware of what is going on around them. They seem to be super-focused on the present, as if seeing things for the first time. Colors seem brighter and food tastes better. The drugs seem to hijack the brain and focus attentional resources on one particular thing, filtering out the surroundings. As a result, whatever comes into focus becomes more intense and that includes the present moment that expands in their mind, thus creating the feeling that time had slowed.

  However, the extended usage of “speed” or steroids can also result in hallucinations, paranoia, and a loss of contact with reality. This is because it boosts the amount of dopamine to levels that are close to those seen in Schizophrenics. It can also lead to a lack of judgment and a willingness to take risks. This explains why people on these drugs have higher tendencies for compulsive gambling. This is similar to the characteristic gambling and risk-taking tendency now being observed in Parkinson’s disease patients who take dopamine-enhancing drugs, like L-Dopa, Neupro, or Requip. It is important here to note that all amphetamines are prescription-only drugs and consuming them without a prescription is considered an illegal offense.

  Similarly, people who take Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) report a profound increase in brain processing speed and sensory intake, and experience time as slowing down. Gamers who take LSD during online games report how these drugs increase their speed of thought, allowing them to analyze various distinct options simultaneously—they’re able to annihilate their opponents, watch the clock tick in slow motion, and chat with onlookers!

  Aldous Huxley, author of the book The Doors of Perception, believed that LSD was a kind of “mind-expander” that enhances one’s senses to the extent that seeing, hearing, and tasting create a much deeper perception of reality. He believed that the brain acted as a “reducing valve” that constrained conscious awareness, while psychedelic drugs inhibited this filtering mechanism and opened the mind’s doors of perception. Imagine a sensory knob that defines the rate at which our brains process information from the world around us. Imagine it has a dial similar to an amplifier that goes from one to 10. When we are awake, the dial would be at about four. However, on LSD, the rate of information flow would go as high as eight. Due to the increased sensitivity, more of reality flows to the brain via the senses, and the world would appear to run in slow motion as more mental snapshots are processed per second.

  LSD has a structure that is very similar to the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is another key chemical messenger heavily involved in visual and emotional processing. LSD actually activates serotonin receptors better than serotonin itself! This turns off brain areas responsible for constraining consciousness, and allows thoughts to flow freely and imagination to go into overdrive. That is why people on LSD experience hallucinations. 108 It is like turning up the volume on a piece of quiet music. The audible parts become more audible and things you could not hear previously become clearer. People on LSD start seeing things as if for the first time. When listening to their favorite song, they hear sounds they never knew were there and often report that time has prospectively slowed down to the extent that it froze.

  Time-stretching effects are also experienced with anti-depressant medications, such as Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro, and Paxil, but to a lesser effect. The use of these prescription antidepressants has gone up an alarming 400 percent in the past few decades. Currently, one in 10 Americans are taking one of these medications to treat depression. If you are taking any of these medications, you now know that your internal clock will be ticking faster than usual, so that prospective future intervals of time will stretch in your mind and retrospective past durations will shrink.

  In contrast to stimulants, depressants such as alcohol, heroin, Xanax, and Valium, decrease alertness and slow down the brain’s processing speed, causing time to speed up. 109, 110 A few glasses of wine over dinner will shrink time intervals and make time pass fairly quickly. Alcohol slows down speech, thoughts, and movement, which is why drunken people stumble, fall over chairs, and do other clumsy things. Consuming alcohol also causes a decline in FFF values in the long run. However, the impact is not so great for someone who does not consume alcohol frequently. 111 Likewise, people taking sleeping agents, beta-blockers, or antihistamines feel drowsy, sleepy, and have a lower flickering fusion limit. 112 In fact, pharmaceutical companies use FFF measurements to assess the impact of new drugs like analgesics, sleeping agents, and psychoactive drugs on the brain and nervous system. If you regularly take any of these medications, you might feel that time is speeding up. These drugs block neurotransmitters and reduce the neurons’ firing speed, causing a slower recording of reality and, therefore, the experience that time is running faster.

  “Drugs that stimulate dopamine receptors slow down time, while depressants that inhibit those receptors, speed it up”

  Smart Drugs and Mind Expanders

  Attempts to enhance the human brain through “magic potions” dates back to the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman times. Olympic athletes in ancient Greece were known to turn to herbal medications, hallucinogens, and wine potions to enhance their performance. In Egypt, archeologists have found hashish and opium in ancient tombs. A series of studies have found traces of cocaine and tobacco in hair samples from Egyptian mummies. Roman gladiators also ingested hallucinogens to deal with the traumas of the arena.

  Until the 1980s, the most popular chemicals that were used to enhance mental function were caffeine and nicotine. Caffeine is a stimulant that indirectly increases dopamine neurotransmitters, which speed up the firing rate of brain neurons, and produce the popular “boosting’ effect.” 113, 114 The effect of one cup of coffee takes about 25 minutes to kick in and lasts around 30 minutes. Green tea also contains high levels of caffeine, with similar effects, but its effects can last up to four hours. High doses of caffeine consumption increase the brain’s FFF and processing speed, which accelerates the brain’s internal clock, causing time intervals to expand and time to slow down. 115 This probably explains why music sounds better when you are caffeinated than when you are tired.

  Smoking a cigarette has a similar effect on time perception. That is because nicotine is essentially a dopamine stimulant that increases the brain’s alertness levels, speeding up the brain’s internal clock causing and duration to stretch retrospectively, as if time had slowed down. A study on French women who smoked an average of eight cigarettes each day confirmed that nicotine improves alertness, which implies a faster internal clock that stretches time d
urations. 116 Clement Freud jokes about this when he says, “If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer!”

  However, a brand new class of drugs has started to take over nicotine and caffeine’s dominance as the stimulants of choice. Nowadays, “magic potions” go by modern names such as “smart drugs,” “cognitive enhancers.” or “nootropic drugs.” Public demand for mind enhancers is running at an all-time high. According to the Nutrition Business Journal, the U.S. annual sales of nutritional supplements that promise to improve memory is now at around 37 billion dollars. Increasingly, people have realized that our mental faculties are the result of biochemical reactions that can be manipulated with pharmaceutical drugs. The growing interest in “smart drugs” is also fueled by the notion that some medications that were originally developed for patients with mental illnesses may have a positive effect in healthy people as well.

  One popular “cognitive enhancer” is Modafinil, also known as Provigil. It was originally developed in France to treat narcolepsy, but was later discovered to be very effective in enhancing alertness in healthy people, too. Research has shown that Modafinil can keep you awake and alert for 90 hours non-stop; without any of the side effects produced by caffeine, such as jitters, nervousness, or agitation. That is almost four days of no sleep. It is also non-addictive and does not raise the blood pressure or heart rate. Consuming 200 mg of Modafinil can make you feel alert, attentive, and highly energetic, as though your brain is firing on all cylinders. 117 It enhances sensory perception, improves mood, and makes ordinary tasks more enjoyable. 118. It is also known to boost short-term memory, which is the basis of our attentive abilities and our experience of time. 119 However, the use of Modafinil is illegal without a doctor’s prescription, and I do not endorse it’s use in any way that is contrary to that.

  Other “smart drugs” that were originally developed to treat Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), like Ritalin (also known as Concerta) and Adderall, are now also being used illegally by healthy people to enhance concentration. Ritalin is a stimulant drug and seems to work best in young people, especially students who need to sustain attention and enhance their intellectual capacity. It increases levels of brain dopamine, which acts to enhance short-term memory, and boosts attention span, alertness, and reaction time. Studies have shown that Ritalin improves time estimation precision in ADHD children, which makes it a candidate for controlling time in healthy individuals. 120 People taking Ritalin also report feelings of euphoria and a sense of well-being. This brain effect can, however, potentially make Ritalin an addictive drug, which is why it is also illegal without a doctor’s prescription.

  Is there a future in smart drugs and cognitive enhancers for controlling the speed of time? Many scientists are optimistic that one day, smart drugs will become something people take daily. The unrelenting advances in neuroscience are opening the doors for developing smart drugs that target specific brain functions such as memory, attention, alertness, and processing speed, all of which are crucial to our experience of time. It is inevitable that the ability to control the experienced speed of time will happen sometime in the near future but, until then, the best advice for a drug-free approach is to rely on a good brain diet, as briefly discussed in Chapter 6. I would just add here that there are several tested and tried natural alternatives to anti-depressant medications, such as garlic, ginger, saffron, turmeric, and curcumin, all of which have similar stimulant properties and can be as effective. A diet that is rich with these spices has been shown to stimulate the brain and boost its information processing speed, hence slowing down the perceived speed of time. Of course, it is highly advisable to consult your doctor before taking any dietary supplements.

  Time and Mental Disorders

  Additional evidence for how brain chemicals affect time perception comes from patients with mental disorders. Patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) all have abnormal levels of neurotransmitters and therefore experience problems with time perception. 121 These symptoms generally improve when patients receive medications, which restore their optimal levels. 122

  As we saw already, the neurotransmitter dopamine is critical to the brain’s information processing speed. The more dopamine in your brain, the sharper your attention and alertness are, and the faster you can capture and process information through your senses. This implies a quicker internal clock and the perception that time is passing slowly. A low level of dopamine effects concentration and focus and this is the culprit of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Children with ADHD have difficulty estimating time intervals due to their limited attention span and poor concentration. Their brains’ pattern of electrical activity shows a reduction in beta brainwaves, which are associated with focused attention. The lower dopamine levels, along with a decline in brain electrical activity, reduces alertness and causes brain processing speed to slow down, so less information is recorded. Consequently, time appears to speed up in their mind, making them less tolerant to delays, and leading to their characteristic impulsive and impatient behavior. 123

  Moreover, when alertness levels are low, ADHD children search for external stimulation to keep themselves alert. To understand this, imagine that you are feeling very sleepy in the middle of an important but dull meeting. To keep yourself awake, you might feel the need to talk to the person next to you, maybe stand up and walk around, or have a drink of water. ADHD children feel the same way when they are compelled to sit still and focus on something that is of no interest to them. They start to generate high intensity movements, such as doodling or fidgeting. They use these body movements to self-regulate alertness and maintain an optimal level of interest. Their impulsive hyperactive behavior and inattentiveness is simply a reaction to the lack of stimulation. This is why doctors prescribe stimulant drugs, like Ritalin and Adderall, which raise dopamine levels and increase brain electrical activity, alertness, and concentration power. The stimulants fill the gap in the stimulation they are lacking and seeking.

  The same goes for Parkinson’s disease, which occurs when the nerve cells that produce dopamine die off. As a result, the brains of Parkinson’s disease patients contain almost no dopamine and their alertness and brain processing speed is very low, causing their internal clocks to tick very slowly, making durations shrink retrospectively, resulting in the experience that time ran fast.121 Since dopamine also plays an important role in controlling body motion, a lack of it leads to the characteristic jerky movement and the tendency to "freeze." Moreover, patients with ADHD and Parkinson’s disorders cannot detect fast flickering lights and have lower average values of FFF than healthy individuals, which implies a slower “recording” speed and, hence, a faster flow of subjective time. 124

  To remedy this condition, neuroscientists came up with a medication (L-Dopa) which chemically mimics dopamine and restores it to its normal level. This was described by neurologist Oliver Sacks in his 1973 cult book Awakenings, which was later made into a film by the same name, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. The book tells the story of a group of patients who suffer from a sleeping sickness (similar to Parkinson’s) that causes their internal clocks to tick so slowly, they seem to have stopped. These patients are frozen—as if statues—speechless and motionless in their wheelchairs for many decades, until Sacks begins treating them with L-Dopa. This restores their dopamine levels, which greases their brain’s rusty engine and starts their internal clock ticking again. They start moving again, demonstrating that they had been conscious all along but “frozen” in their consciousness.

  On the other hand, when dopamine levels are higher than normal, people become over-stimulated, paranoid, and suspicious. It increases their brain processing speed and heightens the sensitivity, turning up the volume on hearing, vision, smell, touch, and taste. With extremely high dopamine levels, people can start hearing voices, see hallucinations, experience del
usions, and eventually lose contact with reality, leading to schizophrenia. In contrast to ADHD and Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenic patients perceive time as flowing slowly. Schizophrenia is the result of an overactive dopamine system that is characterized by increased gamma brainwave activity. That is why medication that blocks dopamine receptors, such as Clozaril and Seroquel, tends to suppress the symptoms of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia causes people to stop perceiving time as a continuous flow, an instead as something that stops and starts again, as if there is a delay in time perception. Schizophrenics act similarly to people under the influence of LSD. Both have abnormally high levels of dopamine, which speeds up their brain processing speed and causes time to slow down to the extent that it feels as if the flow of time has ground to a halt.

  It’s All in Your Eyes

  Knowing how much dopamine your brain is running on will give a fair indication of how fast time runs inside your mind. Your levels of dopamine also affect your level of mental arousal which, as we saw in the previous chapter, define personality traits, such as extroversion and impulsiveness, and affect the perceived speed of time. But to measure your level of brain dopamine accurately, you will have to undergo a Positron Emission Tomography (PET), which is a rather expensive and invasive medical procedure that involves injecting radioactive elements into your blood stream. If you are not too excited about doing that, there is an alternative—and it’s all in your eyes. Scientists have discovered that the faster you blink, the higher the level of dopamine is in your brain. The average eye blink rate for a healthy brain is between 13 and 17 blinks per minute, and this is independent of age, eye color, or whether one is wearing eyeglasses. 125 The eye blink rate (EBR) is an easy way to assess mental disorders resulting from abnormal levels of dopamine. Parkinson’s disease patients with low dopamine levels blink their eyes less than normal—an average of 11 blinks per minute—whereas schizophrenics blink around 31 times per minute. 126 The eye blink rate of long-term chronic marijuana users is lower than average, indicating lower dopamine levels and slower brainwaves (but it is higher for infrequent users). 127 By counting how many times someone blinks per minute, you can tell a lot about what is going inside their brain, determine some innate personality traits, mental arousal levels, and how fast time is running in their mind. All other things being equal, people who blink less than average have a slower internal clock. They exhibit the personality traits we saw in the previous chapter, i.e. they are inclined to be extroverts, impulsive, and are easily bored. Whereas those who blink more than average have a faster internal clock and tend to have the opposite characteristics.