Why Does Time Fly When You're Having Fun? 2

Hi everyone! Today I will be talking about time distortion in the internal sense of time in our body again, but from different perspectives.

First of all, our brain is made by nature to assume that things are all causal relationships(relations between cause and effect ), even when it's not such as gambling. There are two types of conditioning, respondent conditioning and operant conditioning. The primary difference between the two is predicated on learned behavior being voluntary or not. Also, the longer time lag there is between two events, the harder it will be for humans to recognize the relationship between the two events. So the longer there is a delay in the outcome/reward shows up after you have done something, That's why when you have a quarrel, you should not bring up a topic of past conflicts because it is not effective and even makes you less persuasive lol. Let's not cling to the past and be graceful! lol

Then why can we not recognize the long time lag? The answer is that our brain/nerve system is not designed to recognize it. That's the reason "aging" is a difficult research scope, in which you cannot clearly define the causal relationship.

For example, if you could get $100 immediately or you would have to wait a month but could get $120, which would you choose? According to surveys, most people chose the former. However, when they were told to be given $100 a year later or $120 a year and a month later, they all chose the latter. As another example, some of you might know a famous social experiment "marshmallow experiment". We tend to pursue short term things and be blind about long term or big things. For instance, the difference between 1 and 2 dollars feels larger than the difference between 101 and 102 dollars, and we are inclined to overestimate long term goals even though we estimate short term goals precisely. So our sense of time is not straight bur distorted. And the reason why we tend to choose quick outcomes/rewards is not because we hate to wait, but because by nature, we want something exciting, which is in this case, getting money immediately, and that's how humans have survived in the process of evolution. That's why we like new things and tend to buy a new product unnecessarily.

Our sense of time is intricately linked to memory because it requires a reference point, and without the ability to recall the location of the reference point in the timeline, our sense of time is impaired. Have you heard of "anterograde amnesia", a type of memory loss that occurs when you can't form new memories. I used to read book series "The Memorandum of Kyoko Okitegami", Japanese fiction novels, when I was in elementary and middle school. I thought that was a fantasy and didn't know that exists in the real world until I see a documentary video about it.

Perception, that generates the sense of time, is cautiously edited (like cut, copy, and paste). For instance, light and sound are processed to come into our body as information simultaneously, by making either of them slower or conversely, faster. Another example is that when reading a text, the meaning of a single word may change depending on the whole context. How we comprehend the whole context is that we recall the single word and update the meaning of the word after reading the whole sentence.

I ended up talking about time distortion in our internal sense of time mainly, and didn't really dive into the topic "Why does time fly fast when you're having fun but pass slowly when you're bored or undergoing hardship?" (I'm just talking about whatever I'm curious about, so sometimes it's off topic/target sorry lol.)

But I hope you enjoyed this story! In the near future, I would like to talk about time distortion in general (external), particularly, about relative theory. I hope to see you soon!

Reference: Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives by Dean Buo

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