The feeling that a minute on the treadmill lasts forever is not just a subjective impression. In new research, scientists show that running actually changes our perception of time and leads us to systematically overestimate the length of the exercise.
Scientists asked twenty-two participants in the experiment to look at an image on the display for two seconds and then judge whether the next image was displayed for the same amount of time. They performed this task under different conditions – standing still, walking backwards and running on a treadmill.
The analysis of the results shows that when running, participants overestimated the passage of time by approximately nine percent. In other words, a run that the runners said took sixty seconds actually lasted about 54.6 seconds.
Previous research has suggested that this phenomenon is mainly related to increased heart rate during physical exertion. However, in a new study, they showed a different mechanism. According to the authors, the main factor is the amount of brain resources needed to maintain balance and coordinate movements while running.
“An accurate perception of the passage of time is necessary for many everyday activities, but the subjective sense of the length of events often does not correspond to their actual physical length.” say the authors of the study, published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.
The research also shows that Distortion of time perception does not only occur when running. Walking backwards leads to a similar effect, with participants overestimating the passage of time by about seven percent. Although running increases the heart rate more significantly than walking backwards, the amount of time distortion was very similar for both activities.
According to the authors, this strongly suggests that the cause is not physiological effort, such as increased heart rate, but rather the cognitive effort required to control the movement. “The results of this study suggest that we should be very careful in interpreting the distortion of time perception during physical activities as a reflection of physiological changes. The results also challenge the time perception scientific community to consider the potentially confounding role of cognitive factors involved in the performance of complex motor actions,” they explained.
Distorted perception of time does not only apply to sports. A similar effect appears, for example, when waiting for a bus or for heating food in a microwave oven, when the waiting time often seems longer than it actually is. On the contrary, time tends to “fly” during enjoyable activities such as vacations or entertainment.
