Walking home last night, I walk past a large tower with flashing red lights. If I turned away, and then glanced back, the first ‘flash’ or ‘off’ bit of the light’s flashing cycle seemed to take longer than the rest.
It’s hard to explain, but the same can happen with your watch or a clock. The first time you glance at it, the second hand seems to stay still for much longer than a second. To me, anyway.
I’ve got an idea of why this happens, but if a doper could shed some more (non-flashing) light on this, that’d be great.
You’re focused on something for a split second, and your mind is very sharply aware of something for an instant. Then you lose your momentary focus and begin to spend more brain cells thinking more roundly about your environment. As your focus drifts, time seems to pass more quickly.
Is this a microscopic example of what happens to us as we get older and more aware of the rest of the world??? We lose focus on independent details and time flies by us:(
Yes, that’s most likely it. When we’re kids our focus is almost exclusively on our little world as we know it – friends, family, school, and the local neighbourhood. Anything happening outside of it might as well be on a different planet for all the difference in makes to you. 'Course, as you age you become more and moe aware of such things, your own little circle expands and your focus broadens to take in things that never even registered on your radar before.
But as to the OP, I don’t know that there is a name for it, but I think pikolo77 has the right idea in that the instant you shift your gaze to something you immediately focus pretty much exclusively on that which has your attention at that particular moment – the time on the clock, the flashing red light, etc. During that split second your brain is working out exactly what it’s seeing and putting it into context as it relates to the reason you were focusing on it in the first place. That momentarily intense period of mental scrutiny would then be followed by your brain, having dispensed with its immediate business, broadening its focus to take in everything else of lesser import to your intent. It’s only once that moment has passed that you perceive that brief but intense moment of concentration as seeming to be fractionally longer than subsequent moments.
It takes about 0.2 seconds from recieving light on the retina until your brain finishes decoding the scene. To synchronize your sight with what’s actually going on in your surroundings, your brain does a little time-travel slight-of-hand to make you think that your it decoded the scene instantly.
I’m guessing that part of the way that your brain does this is by some amount of prediction of future events. When you suddenly change what you’re looking out, some of this chicanery breaks down, leaving some actual delay that’s no greater than 0.2 seconds from when you first focus in on your new perspective.
I am pretty sure this exact phenomena was the subject of a PhD disertation a while back so I wouldn’t be suprised if there is now a name for it. The subject is a little hard to search but I will try.
From time to time I have “stretched a day” by focusing on it intently. I try to plan some special things ahead of time so that they day is filled with really pleasant associations. Of course there will be lapses when my mind wanders, but generally, the day does seem longer.
Yet I was unaware of the phenomena described in the OP.
I know this thread is old (and my own), but I was reading the latest issue of New Scientist, and it answered the question perfectly. The article is “mind tricks: six ways to explore your brain”. It’s #5, “Pay attention!”
You need to be a subscriber to read the whole article, but I’m sure enough people on here will be to make the link worthwhile…