Michelle: I'm going to start with a number: three seconds. That’s it. According to neuroscientists, that’s the average length of the 'present moment.' Mark, try to count out three seconds in your head right now. Feel that? That little slice of reality is all we ever truly experience. Mark: One… two… three. Wow. That’s… surprisingly short. It feels like everything I'm aware of, right now, fits into that tiny window. But at the same time, it feels like the last year just evaporated. How can both be true? Michelle: That is the exact question that sits at the heart of today’s book. We're diving into Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time by Marc Wittmann. And it’s a book that has fascinated readers because it tackles that very paradox. Mark: I can see why. It’s a topic that gets under your skin. Michelle: It really does. And what's fascinating about Wittmann is his background. He's not just a neuroscientist; he studied philosophy too. So he's uniquely positioned to bridge that gap between the hard science of brain rhythms and the deep, personal, almost spiritual feeling of time slipping through our fingers. Mark: Okay, I’m in. Because honestly, that feeling of 'where did the year go?' is getting more intense every single year. So let’s start there. Why does it feel like those three-second moments are flying by faster and faster?

Michelle: Wittmann argues it comes down to a simple but profound idea: our judgment of time past depends entirely on memory. Specifically, the density of new memories we form. Mark: Density of new memories. What does that actually mean? Michelle: Think of your memory as a hard drive. When you’re young, or on vacation, or starting a new job, everything is novel. You’re constantly saving new files: new faces, new sounds, new skills, new emotions. The drive fills up fast. So when you look back at that period, your brain sees this huge, dense collection of files and concludes, "Wow, a lot must have happened. That must have been a long time." Mark: That’s a great analogy. It’s exactly like the first week of a new job versus the fiftieth week. The first week feels like a month because you’re learning everything from where the coffee machine is to your boss’s weird sense of humor. The fiftieth week is just… Tuesday. Michelle: Precisely. That’s the power of routine. As we get older, life becomes more predictable. The commute is the same, the work is similar, the evenings follow a pattern. Your brain, being efficient, stops saving new files. It just says, "Yep, another one of those. No need to record." So when you look back at a month or a year of routine, the hard drive is sparse. There are very few distinct memories. And your brain’s conclusion is, "Not much happened. That must have been a short time." Mark: So it’s not that time is actually moving faster, it’s that our retrospective record of it is emptier. Michelle: Exactly. Wittmann brings this to life with a brilliant literary example from Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic Mountain. The protagonist, Hans Castorp, goes to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps for what he thinks will be a three-week visit. Mark: Oh, I can see where this is going. Michelle: The first few days are described in excruciating detail over dozens of pages. Every meal, every new patient he meets, the strange daily rituals of the sanatorium—it’s all a flood of new information. The time feels vast and stretched out. But he ends up staying for seven years. And those later years? They fly by in the book, sometimes a whole year is covered in a single paragraph. Mark: Because it’s all become routine. The novelty is gone. Michelle: The novelty is completely gone. He’s habituated. And this isn't just fiction. Wittmann cites a real-world study done with Israeli vacationers. Researchers interviewed them at the end of their holiday and asked about their perception of time. Mark: Let me guess. The first few days felt way longer than the last few. Michelle: You nailed it. The first days, filled with new sights and experiences, felt subjectively long. The last few days, when a routine had set in, felt like they just zipped by. The study also found something else fascinating: people whose jobs involved more routine reported that time in their daily lives passed more quickly than people with more varied professions. Mark: That makes so much sense. But is it just about new memories? Or is emotion a factor? I feel like a really happy or a really scary moment can stretch time too. Michelle: That’s a crucial point. Emotion is the ink that makes memories stick. A highly emotional event, whether positive or negative, gets encoded with much more detail and vividness. It creates a much bigger "file" on your mental hard drive. So a week with a major life event—a wedding, a graduation, even a crisis—will feel longer in retrospect than a boring, uneventful week, because the memories are so much richer. Mark: So the recipe for a subjectively longer life is to constantly seek out new, emotionally resonant experiences. Michelle: That's the big takeaway. Break the routine. Challenge yourself. Create memories worth saving. But that brings us to an even deeper question. We've talked about how we remember time, but how do we experience it in the moment? In those three-second windows?

Michelle: And that link between emotion and memory brings us to an even deeper level. It's not just about what we remember; it's about the very machine doing the experiencing—our body. This leads to the search for an 'internal clock.' For centuries, philosophers and scientists wondered if we had a 'time organ,' a specific part of the body that measures the passing moments. Mark: Like a little grandfather clock in our heads? That sounds a bit like science fiction. Michelle: It does, but the research gets surprisingly close. Wittmann explores the idea that we each have a personal 'brain rhythm' or 'processing speed.' He tells this incredible historical story about a 19th-century English explorer named John Franklin. As a boy, Franklin was perceived by everyone as incredibly slow. He couldn't catch a ball, he was slow to answer questions in class. His own father thought he was a dunce. Mark: Oh, that’s rough. Poor kid. Michelle: But he was persistent, and he eventually became a sailor. On one expedition, he noticed something strange. When looking at a lighthouse at night, his fellow sailors saw the beam as a quick flash of light. But Franklin, because of his 'slowness,' perceived it differently. He saw it as an extended curve of light moving through space. Mark: Whoa. So his brain was processing the visual information at a different frame rate, essentially. Michelle: Exactly! His teacher, a Dr. Orme, even invented a device to test this. It was a disk with a man painted on one side and a woman on the other. When spun slowly, you'd see man, then woman. When spun fast, they'd appear to be together. For most people, they blurred together at a high speed. For Franklin, they blurred together at a much, much slower speed. It was objective proof that his temporal resolution was different. Mark: That is wild. So this idea of a personal speed isn't just a metaphor. But what's the modern science on this? Have we found the part of the brain responsible? Michelle: We're getting very close. The search has led neuroscientists to a specific region called the insular cortex. Mark: Hold on, 'insular cortex' – can you break that down for us? Where is it, what does it do? Michelle: It's a region deep in the brain, tucked away between the temporal and frontal lobes. For a long time, its function was a bit of a mystery, but we now know it's a crucial hub. It's where your brain integrates all the signals from your body—your heartbeat, your breathing, your gut feelings, your temperature. It’s the seat of your physical self-awareness. Mark: So it’s the brain's dashboard for the body. Michelle: Perfect analogy. And fMRI studies have shown something remarkable. When subjects are asked to estimate the duration of a sound, the activity in their insular cortex climbs steadily for the entire duration of that sound. The longer the sound, the higher the activity climbs. It acts like an accumulator, gathering up the moment-to-moment signals from the body. Mark: Wait, so you're telling me my heartbeat is literally a clock? That the feeling of a minute passing is my brain counting my heartbeats? Michelle: In a way, yes. It's not as simple as one beat equals one second, but the theory is that the brain uses the steady, rhythmic input from the body—especially the heart—as a pacemaker. It's the constant, reliable drumbeat against which it measures everything else. A study found that people who are better at accurately counting their own heartbeats without checking their pulse are also significantly better at estimating time intervals. Mark: That’s incredible. So our sense of time is literally embodied. It’s not an abstract thought; it's a feeling rooted in our physiology. Michelle: That’s the core of Wittmann’s argument. Subjective time is body time. And this explains so much, like why time seems to drag when you're sick with a fever—your internal pacemaker is running faster. Or why time seems to slow down in a moment of crisis. It’s not that your brain speeds up, as some people think. An experiment by David Eagleman had people in freefall look at a special watch, and they couldn't perceive time any faster. What happens is that the emotional intensity, processed by the insular cortex, makes the memory of the event feel much longer in hindsight. Mark: Okay, so our perception of the past is about memory density, and our perception of the present moment is tied to our body's rhythm, processed by the insular cortex. This is a complete picture. But what does this mean for how we live? How do we use this to 'win back time'?

Michelle: This is where all the threads come together. If our sense of time is built from our memories and our bodily awareness, then our relationship with time is fundamentally our relationship with our self. And Wittmann argues we experience this most intensely in two opposite states: boredom and busyness. Mark: The two great enemies of modern life. Michelle: Exactly. Let's start with boredom. Wittmann tells this poignant story of visiting a park and seeing a lone chimpanzee in a small, barren cage. The chimp was just lying there, listlessly poking at the rubber floor. It looked utterly, profoundly bored. Mark: That's actually heartbreaking. To think an animal can feel that existential dread of boredom. Michelle: And that's the key. Self-aware animals, like chimps and humans, can experience boredom. And what is boredom? It's a state of heightened awareness of yourself and of time passing, with nothing to distract you from it. You are trapped in the present moment with your own consciousness. It’s deeply unpleasant. Mark: I totally know that feeling. It's when time feels thick and slow and you're just… stuck in it. Michelle: Now contrast that with the modern state of being constantly busy, constantly stimulated, constantly future-focused. We're rushing from task to task, checking our phones, planning the next thing. In that state, we lose our connection to the present moment. We lose our connection to our bodily signals. We essentially lose our sense of self. We're not in time anymore; we're just being rushed along by it. Mark: Honestly, that feeling of being 'too busy' is my default state. I feel like I'm losing time, not just wasting it. The days blur, and I don't feel present for any of it. Michelle: And this is where the famous "Marshmallow Test" comes in. It’s a classic study you’ve probably heard of. A child is left in a room with a marshmallow and told they can eat it now, or if they wait 15 minutes, they can have two. Mark: Right, and the kids who could wait ended up being more successful later in life. It’s always presented as a test of willpower. Michelle: But Wittmann reframes it. He sees it as a test of one's relationship with the present. The impulsive children, the ones who can't wait, are trapped in a state of 'temporal myopia' or shortsightedness. They are so focused on immediate gratification that they can't handle the discomfort of waiting in the present moment. They are, in a way, more prone to that agonizing feeling of boredom. They need constant stimulation. Mark: So impulsivity and boredom are two sides of the same coin. A difficulty with just being in the present. Michelle: Exactly. And the solution, he suggests, is mindfulness. Not in a vague, spiritual sense, but in a very practical, neurological sense. Mindfulness is the practice of intentionally bringing your attention back to the present moment, and specifically to your bodily sensations—your breath, the feeling of your feet on the floor. Mark: You’re bringing your attention back to the insular cortex, to the body's clock. Michelle: You are literally training your brain to pay attention to the very signals that construct your sense of time. It doesn't give you more hours in the day. It makes the hours you have feel more real, more inhabited. It's about slowing down your subjective experience of life, not the clock on the wall. It's about winning back the feeling of time.

Mark: That's a powerful shift in perspective. It’s not about time management or productivity hacks. It’s about self-awareness. Michelle: It is. Ultimately, Wittmann's message is that 'we are time.' That’s a direct quote from the book, and it’s profound. Our experience of time isn't something that happens to us; it's the very process of our consciousness unfolding. It's the sum of our memories, the rhythm of our bodies, and the focus of our attention. Mark: So when we feel like we're losing time, we're actually losing a connection to ourselves. Michelle: That's the deep insight. The frantic pace of modern life encourages us to live outside of ourselves, constantly chasing the next thing. But the richness of life, the feeling of a life well-lived and subjectively long, comes from inhabiting the present. Mark: Okay, this has been fascinating, but I need something I can do tomorrow. What’s one practical takeaway for someone who feels like their life is on fast-forward? Michelle: It’s beautifully simple. Challenge your routine in one small way this week. Take a different route to work, try a new food, listen to a different genre of music, have a conversation with a stranger. Do something that forces your brain to save a new file. Create one new, distinct memory that won't blur into the background. Mark: I can do that. It’s about intentionally creating those little memory anchors so the whole week doesn't just wash away. Michelle: Exactly. And as you do it, ask yourself a question that Wittmann’s work leaves us with: are you living a life that will feel long in retrospect? Mark: Wow. That’s a question to sit with. A life that feels long when you look back on it. That’s a new goal. Michelle: It’s a powerful one. It’s not about a longer life, but a fuller one. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.