We have talked about optical illusions and temporal perception, now we’ll learn about temporal illusions too, such as “chronostasis”. Many are familiar with phrases like “time stands still” or “frozen in time.” But how real is this distorted perception of time stopping, and what can trigger it?
Our sense is time is just as measurably prone to distortions as our visual system is. In both cases, we remain mostly blind to these effects in every day life.
What is Chronostasis?
Chronostasis is the perception of time (chrono) standing still (stasis). While we hear sentiments of time freezing in colloquialisms, there are several measured instances and explanations of us perceiving time in this way.
The stopped clock illusion is when one sees the second hand of an analog clock to be holding still for longer the first moment after looking at the clock compared to later on. The first impression of a new event or idea has a bit of staying power.
Your brain pauses its internal clock and waits for the next image. The trick to see the stopped clock illusion is to look away at something else, then shift your glance to the watch or clock. Your time perception changes to wait for the next image. Chronostasis is one of many temporal illusions that is deeply connected to our visual processing.
Temporal Illusions – Deceptions in Context
Your brain has no problems lying to you in order to make more “sense”. In a 1980’s study, people wearing inverted image goggles ended up magically seeing right-side up again after a few days. Instances of the mind adapting situations to expectations and learning from experience happen on all time scales.
There is a difference in how we perceive time on the order of seconds and milliseconds, considered to be more neurobiological, and how we perceive days and months, considered to be more cognitive.
Optical illusion analogues as Temporal illusions
One study (Taussen) took common visuospatial illusions and applied them to temporal circumstances on the order of days and months.
“Time is undeniably abstract, making it difficult to conceptualize, communicate, and measure. In everyday life, people circumvent this difficulty by associating time with the more concrete medium of space. We speak of pasts that lay behind us, vacations that feel miles away, and unpleasant encounters that lurk around the corner. Such metaphors ground the concept in easily understood terms, and their use reveals how space is exploited to help people communicate to one another about time.”
Taussen, see sources
Like the vanishing point illusion, a month in the future seems shorter than a month that starts now. This also relates to the tendency to overestimate what can be done in one day and underestimate what can be done in one month. The more immediate situation is more granular, also called Vierordt’s law.
Other visual illusions carried over into temporal realms.
Delboeuf Illusion, where the size of a circle depends on the circle encircling it, 12 hours out of 3 days is longer than 12 hours out of 9 days. The time length of an event seems shorter embedded in a longer duration. The study also accounted for the percentage of duration and still found that the embedded event was over and underestimated by 47-72%. The illusion from context was also stronger when the embedded event was negative, like a sickness, compared with positive, like a day with a friend.
People interpret a 9+1 day vacation to be longer than an 11-1 day vacation, for example.
The Ebbinghaus Illusion, where the circle changes size based on the circles around it. If it’s surrounded by smaller circles it appears bigger and vice versa. This carries over to durations of events. An event sandwiched by shorter events feels longer and vice versa. For example, a 60 minute appointment sandwiched between 90 minute appointments feels shorter than when sandwiched between 30 minute appointments.
Next they studied the visual representational momentum in a temporal context. Visually, this is when your brain finishes the motion of some process. For example, lines that are shrinking appear shorter than lines that are growing even when they’re the same size. And thus a 9+1 day vacation is longer than an 11-1 day vacation. Losses again had a stronger effect than gains in the difference in perception, so the 11-1 day vacation felt even shorter than 9+1 did long.
Psychologically these time distortions impact emotional forecasting and willingness with regard to future events as we perceive them.
Short intervals, Chronostasis and Compressed duration
At short intervals, we can underestimate or miss out on time during eye movements. You can see this in a mirror when you look to your left and right eye alternately. You never actually see your eyes move, you just see one to the other. The stopped-clock illusion is just like this too, the first image you see freezes during the saccade (a fast eye movement). It’s very clear in data that this “compressed duration” happens, but the mechanisms continue to be studied. Similarly, we don’t notice any discontinuity of input during blinking. This is reviewed in Eagleman’s paper in the sources.
The Connection to Eye Movements
When eyes make a saccade, time perception reaches backwards.Because it’s processing the prior inputs. The brain creates a continuous story even though the eye movements are constantly starting and stopping. The effect persists with auditory stimuli as well.
You can see the saccades when viewing someone else’s eyes, but not your own. Your mind does fill it in as your eyes follow your own eyes, so you generally can’t see these involuntary movements in a mirror. These are all called saccadic masking. Saccades are going on 10% of the time and can mask time up to half a second.
Other Temporal Illusions
| Oddball Effect | The initial and final events in a sequence feel longer. |
| Telescoping | Recent events in the past seem farther than they are relative to longer-ago events which seem closer |
| Kappa Effect | Two events closer in space also seem closer in time, those farther in space also seem farther in time. For example, consecutive flashes of light in different places. |
| Vierordt’s law | Shorter and closer time frames are more granular to us, therefore we estimate that it feels longer. Farther and longer time frames we disproportionately estimate as feeling shorter. (Tomorrow versus a random day 6 months from now.) |
| Changes | Events with changes and discontinuities seem longer than without |
| Flash-lag | A flash occurring in a moving ring seems to lag behind it due to our motion extrapolation |
| Reversal | When one adapts to a lag or delay, and then the lag is removed, the stimuli and effect seem to happen in reverse order |
| Emotional States | “Time flies when you’re having fun”, or doing something with high motivation. When bad news is delivered or you’re being tortured, time feels slower, as with during moments of awe |
| Age | There are conflicting studies, as some report people in their 60-80s estimated 3 minutes as 3 minutes 40 seconds (slower) on average, compared with those in their 20s who were closer to accurate. Others claim that with age, one estimates time as going by faster. |
The oddball effect could be related to neuronal firing rates. When we see a repeated image and expectation, we have a better representation of it, so the neuronal firing upon viewing it decreases. For new stimuli there’s more neuronal activity. Perhaps the amount of power used to process something makes it seem longer in duration. Expectation can play a big role as our brain sorts out the timing on short scales. For example, those who press a button and repeatedly cause a flash 100 ms later, over repetition think it’s happening sooner, immediately after pushing. When the light then actually flashes immediately after pushing, they can perceive the flash the really be happening before they press the button. Motor-sensory expectations, where we react to the world around us, create stronger effects than sensory alone. During a frightening event, the amygdala contributes denser memory formation, like a higher frames-per-second recording.
Chronostasis, sounds fun?
The connection with short term saccades and chronostasis has led some researchers to postulate that a form of this happens during REM sleep, the deep sleep and dreaming phase, as well. To understand that would go more into the possible evolutionary benefits behind why we dream anyway.
My mind starts thinking of these flaws in our perception as potential superpowers rather than being restrictive. Perhaps we can remember to take more joy in good moments by.. moving our eyes more? And less during unsavory ones? I’ll let you know when I think of something better.
Sources
Eagleman, David M. “Human time perception and its illusions.” Current opinion in neurobiology 18.2 (2008): 131-136
Tausen, Brittany M. “Thinking about time: identifying prospective temporal illusions and their consequences.” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 7.1 (2022): 1-18.
Cao, Rui, et al. “Internally generated time in the rodent hippocampus is logarithmically compressed.” Elife 11 (2022): e75353.
Yarrow, Kielan; Whiteley, Louise; Rothwell, John C.; Haggard, Patrick (February 2006). “Spatial consequences of bridging the saccadic gap“. Vision Research. 46 (4): 545–555
