How The Brain Shapes our Perception of Time: The Psychology of Temporal Windows
This is the second installment in a series examining the psychology of time. If you haven’t read it already, you can go back and read the first piece here.
Time perception is a funny thing. We feel that “now” is perpetually here, and yet, it’s very rare that we’re actually focused on the current moment. “Being in the moment” isn’t an experience we can easily relate to.
It seems to be so rare, in fact, that only the most extreme experiences invoke this kind of focus. As psychologist Paul Bloom writes in The New Yorker, “Being in the moment is said to be a perk of sadomasochism; as a devotee of B.D.S.M. once explained, ‘A whip is a great way to get someone to be here now. They can’t look away from it, and they can’t think about anything else!’”
One’s encounters with BDSM notwithstanding, our minds constantly wander—replaying the past, projecting into the future, and inhabiting worlds far from the here and now. This drifting, though, is also necessary to fully understand and appreciate the present experience.
As each moment passes, our brains—naturally drawing on existing knowledge and past experiences—make sense of what we’re encountering. At the same time, we’re forward-oriented creatures; our experience of the present is largely shaped by our anticipation of what might happen next. In other words, what we experience as “now” is a synthesis of past, present, and future.
How does the brain stitch this together, in real-time, to give us a sense of coherence? Let’s dive into the psychology of time perception.
Working Memory and The Psychology of Time Perception
As we’ve seen, our working memory system enables us to hold, retrieve, and manipulate information over time. But how does this relationship between time and working memory play out? And how does the brain organize information along different timescales, from fleeting moments to long, engrossing intervals?
While the brain doesn’t have an internal clock, it tracks the flow of experience over time through a set of neural circuits called Temporal Response Windows (TRWs). These circuits map the flow of experience along different timescales—from just a few seconds to several minutes or hours.
Understanding TRWs provides a window into the psychology of time perception. Ultimately, these circuits suggest that time doesn’t merely march along linearly, moment by moment. In fact, the brain doesn’t seem to track absolute time at all but is attuned to something else entirely.
From Working Memory to The Brain’s Temporal Response Windows
Working memory isn’t an isolated process. Instead, research reveals that it is distributed across the brain. In one telling experiment, participants listened to a seven-minute story in an fMRI machine. To explore how the brain processes information along different timescales—integrating past, present, and future—they listened to the story in various forms: a full version and scrambled versions at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels.
The full version strained working memory most, requiring participants to integrate information across the entire story, while the scrambled versions required integration across shorter timescales. Each shorter version retained the original content but disrupted temporal order at specific linguistic boundaries. This design helped researchers identify the neural processing across the brain that responds to different “temporal receptive windows” (TRWs). They found that different regions rely on progressively longer timescales for coherent processing—a kind of hierarchical temporal structure in the brain.
While instantaneous features were processed in early sensory areas (such as in the word and sentence levels), content requiring longer timescales—holding information across the entire story—engaged “higher order” regions such as the temporal-parietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex. The specific brain regions aren’t the main story. Rather, it’s what this general pattern reveals about working memory: our ability to track and hold information over time—synthesizing past, present, and future—is not isolated to a specialized brain area, but is a property of the brain itself.
Temporal Response Windows and The Psychology Of Time Perception
The names of specific neural regions aren’t crucial. What matters is the bigger picture: distinct mental processes engage only when we sustain attention on a stimulus. These higher-order processes need time to unfold, and the experience itself needs time to develop within us.
One key feature of TRWs is their sensitivity not to absolute time, but to the volume of information within a given window. It’s not about time per se, but about the relevant information. As the researchers note, “The size of the TRWs should therefore vary more in accordance with the amount of information conveyed via different semantic units such as words, sentences, and paragraphs than in accordance with any absolute temporal period.”
What happens in these longer TRWs? Ultimately, these regions are tracking, synthesizing, and retrieving information from the past to maintain a rich, coherent narrative.
Final Thoughts on The Psychology of Time Perception
There are many ways to think about the psychology of time. What neuroscience suggests is that the brain isn’t particularly sensitive to absolute time. An hour in objective time doesn’t translate precisely, or even approximately, to an hour of psychological time. An hour doesn’t always feel like an hour.
The feeling of time changes dramatically, depending on the experience. Waiting in a dentist's office with nothing to do inches time along, while a mid-game athlete in flow experiences it flying by. As we’ve seen, novelty also plays a major role in our perception of time, especially in our memory of how long a given experience was. Research shows that time “stretches out” during novel encounters—such as when we’re traveling in a new place—and contracts for routine events like a morning commute.
In the end, our experience of time is as flexible and subjective as the attention we bring to it. Whether through the jarring immediacy of a whip that snaps us to the present or the slow drift of a routine day, the brain’s temporal landscape adapts to the richness of information we encounter, rather than the ticking of the clock. Our perception of time, then, isn’t bound by seconds or minutes but by the nature of our experiences.
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About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for TTWs and The Psychology of Time Perception
Bloom, P. (2021) Being in Time, The New Yorker
Hasson, U., Yang, E., Vallines, I., Heeger, D. J., & Rubin, N. (2008). A hierarchy of temporal receptive windows in human cortex. Journal of neuroscience, 28(10), 2539-2550.
Honey, C. J., Thesen, T., Donner, T. H., Silbert, L. J., Carlson, C. E., Devinsky, O., ... & Hasson, U. (2012). Slow cortical dynamics and the accumulation of information over long timescales. Neuron, 76(2), 423-434.
Lerner, Y., Honey, C. J., Silbert, L. J., & Hasson, U. (2011). Topographic mapping of a hierarchy of temporal receptive windows using a narrated story. Journal of neuroscience, 31(8), 2906-2915.
