Multiple studies have demonstrated the brain can significantly slow or speed subjective time flow.

Evolutionary, environmental, physiological, and psychological factors dictate our subjective pace of time.

The experience of death creates multiple conditions conducive to the subjective slowing of time.

Have you ever had a dream that seemed to last for hours, only to wake up and realize that mere seconds have passed? This is just one example demonstrating the widely accepted neurological understanding that our experience of time is simply a construct of the brain (e.g., Macar et al., 2002; Teghil et al., 2024).

Similarly, many people who have had a near-death experience (NDE) report that it seemed to last far longer than the duration of time their body was recorded as being non-responsive (e.g., Cramer, 2021). Some have claimed a subjective experience lasting years, or even decades (e.g., International Association for Near-Death Studies, 2016). And although we might be tempted to chalk up such claims to modern factors such as chasing social media clout, similar claims have been documented going back centuries (e.g., Springer, 1898).

Such an abundance of NDE reports exists from people of diverse backgrounds and cultures that it’s widely accepted they are not all just blatant fabrications. Regardless of what is “really” happening, the people reporting these experiences often believe what they are saying. The goal of psychology, then, is not to prove these claims objectively wrong, but to explore the subjective experience. And much of that experience comes down to how the brain constructs our perception of time.

How Evolution and Lifespan Influence Time Perception

Under different evolutionary conditions, intelligent beings could easily evolve to experience time much slower or much faster than we do. So why do we experience time at its apparent pace? Maybe it’s related to our lifespan. An organism that lives only 24 hours might experience each second as if it were a day. Conversely, for a being that lives for millennia, a year for us........

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