In an announcement that may feel entirely too familiar to anyone who has ever feigned interest in a quarterly budget meeting or listened to a relative describe their cat’s dietary habits in painstaking detail, scientists have confirmed that when you feel bored, time truly does seem to warp within your brain. It is not just you. It is neuroscience now.
According to researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who apparently had the patience of saints and the imaginations of clockmakers, the brain processes time less accurately when one is not mentally stimulated. The less going on in the environment, the more your internal clock begins to slack off, like an employee who has decided nobody will notice if they relocate their afternoon nap to the minutes between each thought.
The study involved a group of volunteers watching a screen in a dimly lit room while patterns of lights appeared slowly. These volunteers were then asked to estimate how much time had passed. Unsurprisingly, their guesses were almost as poor as a weather forecast made with a dartboard, consistently underestimating how long they had been in the room. The more unchanging the environment, the more convinced the brain became that surely only a few seconds had passed when in fact it was closer to what felt like most of a Scandinavian winter.
On the flip side, when the environment was stimulating and ever-changing, test subjects were far more accurate in estimating time — their brains apparently snapping to attention like interns on their first day.
“When nothing around us is changing, our sense of time gets muddled, possibly because our brain isn’t receiving enough new information to properly record the passage of time,” lead researcher Hedda Mørch explained, bravely tackling the human condition with both academic rigor and the sort of calm found in people who enjoy the company of ticking clocks.
So the next time your afternoon meeting feels like it has lasted longer than the reign of Queen Victoria, know that your brain is quietly filing a formal complaint against your surroundings and has politely stopped keeping track of anything useful.
The bad news is time flies when you’re bored, but the worse news is it has no intention of circling back.