Time Perception, Skating, and Regular Perception

Raise your hand if you love TED-Ed as much as I do! Now, please watch this video.

In the past few weeks, we have covered the basic structure and function of the parts of the brain. Most recently, we have been covering sensation and perception. As the video explained and had you try out, time seems to pass slower as the brain senses and perceives new information from a new situation. The question now is: why is the brain's perception of time so off?

People throughout time (no pun intended) have tried to find out how to make special moments linger. Sometimes, when something new and amazing or catastrophic happens, your brain takes in much more information, making it seem like time is passing more slowly. For example, the first time I ever landed an axel jump in skating (1.5 revolutions in the air; take off forwards, land backwards), it felt like I was in the air for a good 10 seconds. In reality, My air time was less than 1/4 of a second. Because the experience was new, my brain took in more information than it normally would and processed that information a lot quicker using both top-down and bottom-up processing. By using bottom-up processing, I was sensing that I was gliding forward of one foot, heard the ripping noise of the blade on the ice, smelled and felt the cold and slightly stinky rink, and saw that I was rounding the corner of the rink. However, I was perceiving that I was properly preparing to do the jump at the end of the ice, just as my coach had told me to do. Furthermore, I perceived that I was in the proper position to do the jump and land it. If you're still confused, here's a video. (Watch the first few seconds. You don't have to watch the jump slowed down.)

Actually, come to think of it, skating is related to sensation and perception a lot more than I originally thought. In the skating world, we have movies that we idolize. One such movie is "Ice Castles" from 1978. To completely spoil the movie for you guys, a skater with a lot of potential suffers an injury to the occipital lobe after falling over some tables and chairs. For the rest of the movie, she has to learn how to skate blind (nearly blind because her brain cannot perceive images anymore) and eventually winds up at the championships again. At the end of the movie, she trips over the flowers that people have thrown onto the ice because she can't see them. Actually, she can see them, but her occipital lobe couldn't process the images. Anyway, this movie is so inspirational because she was able to skate and win, even with her perceptual challenges.

To tie this back in with time perception, it is important to note that, in her mind, the last performance, which took less than 3 minutes in the movie, probably felt like 10 solid minutes of skating.

Questions (for Rachel):

How has knowing more about sensation and perception changed the way you look at your daily life and activities? Do you think the amount of effort you put into any activity affects the amount of time you perceive that it takes?