As anyone that’s ever experienced even a fleeting existential moment knows well enough that time is relative. Or, rather, the perception of time is relative. My minute is not your minute, probably, though we’re still quantitatively traveling according to the same basic clock. Time drags and time flies, yet it always arrives on schedule. Weird, eh.
Perception of time isn’t some philosophical triviality. As we could probably anticipate, it’s implicated in mental health. And so a new meta-study finding that depression influences time perception—slows it dramatically, on average—is maybe not all that surprising. It’s a cruel fact (on average) that the more the world sucks, the slower it goes.
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The new study comes courtesy of psychologists Sven Thönes and Daniel Oberfeld-Twistel, of Johannes Gutenberg University, who’ve published their findings in the Journal of Affective Disorders. Taking 16 individual studies, examining in total 433 depressed subjects and 485 non-depressed control subjects, they found that while depressive individuals overwhelmingly report the perception of time moving slowly (or not at all!), they were usually just as adept as non-depressive individuals at “judgments of time intervals.” So, the distinction is qualitative vs. quantitative, as we might expect.
The quantitative aspect of time-telling is, over the course of the 16 analyzed studies, examined in four primary ways.
First, there is verbal time estimation, which is where subjects are basically just given a start and a stop signal and asked to say how long the interval was. Secondly and thirdly, subjects are asked to reproduce/produce given time intervals, e.g. take a given 10 seconds (either as “10 seconds”, or as in the first test, where an actual interval is demonstrated) and try to say where such a span might stop and start (usually by pressing buttons). Finally, there is “duration discrimination,” which is mostly what it sounds: a subject is given two time intervals and asked to differentiate between the two.
For the most part, depressed subjects could handle these tasks just as well as non-depressed subjects. Qualitative time experience, however, was different.
“On visual analogue scales, the subjects are asked to mark a point on a line where the endpoints represent a very slow and very fast subjective flow of time,” Oberfeld-Twistel and Thones explain in their report. “Notably, these ratings differ from [time estimation] tasks because the subjective flow of time is assessed rather than the perception or production of defined time intervals.” What they found were, across the 16 studies, “medium effects” of depression on time perception. So: different clocks, in a sense.
“In terms of this model, the observation that depressive patients frequently report to perceive time as going by less quickly can be explained by a faster running clock in depressive patients than in non-depressive controls,” the current report notes.
So, just imagine being in one room with a clock moving a bit fast where, after an hour has passed according to that clock, you go into another room with a normal clock. That normal clock will have shown less time having elapsed then the first clock. A relativity, of sorts.
More than anything, Oberfeld-Twistel and Thones’ analysis shows huge gaps in our current knowledge of mental illness and time. For example, how do antidepressants effect this perception? How is time perceived in bipolar patients? Does it speed up during manic episodes? What about schizophrenia? These remain very open questions.
“Our review also shows that several aspects have not yet been investigated in sufficient detail in the context of time perception in depression and might be addressed by future research,” the psychologists add. “These aspects include the role of the dopaminergic neurotransmitter system, influences of different subtypes of depression, potential influences of stimulus modality, and specific task-related characteristics like prospective versus retrospective time estimation.” Time will tell.
