In complementary to the physical and objective perspective of time, psychological time, a more discrete perspective of time, is the one we feels that shapes our behaviours. Since human has no direct time perception mechanism, there are 2 mirroring ways of timing: retrospective timing and prospective timing. When people are doing retrospective timing, which is recalling the duration, the more memory data there is, the longer time duration is perceived, but it’s also affected by many other factors in reality; for instance, the level of segmentation into sub-intervals. When doing prospective timing, the “attention gate”, which is the contextual changes, affects the experience of the interval. In our daily lives, knowing these categories of perceiving time seems useless, but it helps us understanding why sometimes time feels so fast, like when experiencing joy and happiness, and why sometimes time feels so slow, like waiting, and experiencing pain. Understanding these may make people feel less anxious and more confident.
