In this study we wounded study participants following a standardized procedure and manipulated perceived time to test whether perceived time affected the rate of healing. We measured the amount of healing that occurred across three conditions using a within-subjects design: Slow Time (half as fast as clock time), Normal Time (clock time), and Fast Time (twice as fast as clock time). Based on the theory of mind–body unity—which posits simultaneous and bidirectional influences of mind on body and body on mind—we hypothesized that wounds would heal faster or slower when perceived time was manipulated to be experienced as longer or shorter respectively. Although the actual elapsed time was 28 min in all three conditions, significantly more healing was observed in the Normal Time condition compared to the Slow Time condition, in the Fast Time condition compared to the Normal Time condition, and in the Fast Time condition compared to the Slow Time condition. These results support the hypothesis that the effect of time on physical healing is directly affected by one’s psychological experience of time, independent of the actual elapsed time.
Does Your Brain Think Accurately About Time?
Chicago Booth’s Kristin Donnelly talks about her research on time-duration asymmetry.
When Bad Things Happen in Slow Motion - Nautilus
Is there more to our experience of time than the foibles of memory?
How to be more creative in seconds!
Effects of Extreme Ritual Practices on Psychophysiological Well-Being
Extreme ritual practices involving pain and suffering pose significant risks such as injury, trauma, or infection. Nonetheless, they are performed by millions of people around the world and are often culturally prescribed remedies for a variety of maladies, and especially those related to mental health. What is the actual impact of these practices on health? Combining ethnographic observations and psychophysiological monitoring, we investigated outcomes of participation in one of the world’s most extreme rituals, involving bodily mutilation and prolonged suffering. Performance of this physically demanding ordeal had no detrimental effects on physiological health and was associated with subjective health improvements, and these improvements were greater for those who engaged in more intense forms of participation. Moreover, individuals who experienced health problems and/or were of low socioeconomic status sought more painful levels of engagement. We suggest two potential mechanisms for these effects: a bottom-up process triggered by neurological responses to pain and a top-down process related to increased social support and self-enhancement. These mechanisms may buffer stress-induced pressures and positively affect quality of life. Our results stress the importance of traditional cultural practices for coping with adversity, especially in contexts where psychiatric or other medical interventions are not widely available.
Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain
Rating, ranking, and comparing peak experiences suggest the existence of long tails for bliss and suffering.
Time-Duration Asymmetries in Consumer Decision-Making
Abstract Consumers routinely make decisions about short time periods, such as waiting for a table or deciding whether to pay for faster delivery. Such periods are often expressed by either a duration or a clock time (e.g., if it is 6:00 PM now, “Your table will be ready in 30 minutes” vs. “Your table will be ready at 6:30 PM”). Eight experiments (N = 16,604) show that these logically equivalent frames change how long a period feels, with downstream consequences for consumer decisions. Relatively short time periods feel longer when framed by duration rather than by start and end time (i.e., clock times or calendar dates), but this pattern reverses as periods get longer. We refer to this phenomenon as time-duration asymmetry: framing an interval by its start and end time versus its duration changes how long it feels, with the direction of the effect depending on the interval’s length. We propose that this occurs because duration frames evoke compressive scalar representations shaped by diminishing sensitivity, whereas start-end frames situate time within structured categorical systems that attenuate compression. This research offers a unified framework for understanding how subtle differences in temporal framing shape perceptions of time and subsequent decisions.
Effects of Stroop task duration on subsequent cognitive and physical performance
The strength model of self-control purports to explain why brief cognitive response inhibition tasks impair subsequent isometric handgrip endurance. A…
To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future | Quanta Magazine
A controversial theory suggests that perception, motor control, memory and other brain functions all depend on comparisons between ongoing actual experiences and the brain’s modeled expectations.
Mindful Judgment and Decision Making
A full range of psychological processes has been put into play to explain judgment and choice phenomena. Complementing work on attention, information integration, and learning, decision research over the past 10 years has also examined the effects of goals, mental representation, and memory processes. In addition to deliberative processes, automatic processes have gotten closer attention, and the emotions revolution has put affective processes on a footing equal to cognitive ones. Psychological process models provide natural predictions about individual differences and lifespan changes and integrate across judgment and decision making (JDM) phenomena. “Mindful” JDM research leverages our knowledge about psychological processes into causal explanations for important judgment and choice regularities, emphasizing the adaptive use of an abundance of processing alternatives. Such explanations supplement and support existing mathematical descriptions of phenomena such as loss aversion or hyperbolic discounting. Unlike such descriptions, they also provide entry points for interventions designed to help people overcome judgments or choices considered undesirable.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a 2011 popular science book by the Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Its main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
Six Ways to Think Long-term: A Cognitive Toolkit for Good Ancestors
None of these six ways is enough alone to create a long-term revolution of the human mind — a fundamental shift in our perception of time. But together — and when practised by a critical mass of people and organisations — a new age of long-term thinking could emerge out of their synergy.
The New Wounded
This book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the “new wounded” (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.
Brett Scott (@brettscott)
Despite all the rhetoric about automation supposedly making our lives easier, the true story being told by Big Tech is that our lives are better when speeded up You are supposed to be in an ever-accelerating race, packing more units of experience into the same unit of time, a phenomenon that requires a contraction of patience and a blurring of experience as everything quickens In the end, this is what ‘convenience’ actually is. It’s a state of being in which you become disassociated and disengaged from the texture of the world around you. You pass through it dreamlike, and suddenly wake up decades years later as an elderly person on your deathbed, thinking “WTF happened”, as then the memory slips away
Self-Distancing: What It Is and How You Can Use It to Make Better Decisions – Effectiviology
It’s hard to set your emotions aside when you’re faced with a difficult decision. This is problematic, since our emotions often cause us to make the wrong decision in important areas of life, including in our relationships, our finances, and our health.
Opinion | To Make the World Better, Think Small (Published 2016)
It is easy to become numb to suffering. Feeling empathy for individual victims can overcome the numbness.
How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes or Less | The Art of Manliness
With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Friday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in March 2018. Have you ever unexpectedly found yourself with a snatch of time in which to steal a […]
