How is it December already? What happened to 2025? And how did we suddenly jump from eating Easter eggs to putting up Christmas trees?

To understand why our perception of time seems to bend and warp, we need to dig into how our brains tell time in the first place.

The term “time perception” is actually a bit of a misnomer, because time itself isn’t “out there” to be perceived.

When we perceive a colour, a sound, a flavour or a touch, specialised sensory organs detect something in the environment: the wavelength of a light particle that enters the eye, the frequency of a sound wave that enters the ear, the presence of different chemicals in the mouth and nose, or the pressure of an object against our skin.

But there is no parallel for time – no “time particle” for the brain to detect.

Our brains don’t perceive time – they infer it. Like the ticking of a clock, the brain estimates the passage of time by keeping track of change.

But unlike a clock, the brain does not have regular ticks to count. To infer how much time has passed, the brain simply adds up how much happened. If you fill a time interval with exciting stuff, it seems to last longer. In the lab, a briefly presented flickering image seems to last longer than a static image of the same duration.

This is also why witnesses........

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