Vox A neuroscientist explains how history, mood, and surprise can make life feel like a slog — or go by in a blur.
It’s tempting to imagine memory as a videotape that stores and plays back the past just as it happened. But the workings of the mind are not so simple. Memory is more of a creative act, reconstructing the past under the often hasty and biased influences of the present.
The “creation” of memory doesn’t only influence what we remember, it influences our sense of time’s duration too. Having more memories available for recall can stretch our sense of how much time has passed, while our moods and emotions can tune the richness of what we remember up or down.
This all means news, current events, and the technologies that convey them (like the internet) can influence our perception of time passing slowly or quickly, by influencing how strongly we remember things.
But exactly how this interaction plays out, scientists still know very little about.
2020’s seemingly endless brigade of big stories might’ve stretched time to feel like a decade passed. But that stream of news was delivered to populations on lockdown, where every day looked the same and time became something of an undifferentiated blurry lump. How did this all influence our perception of how much time passed?
Enter a new paper by cognitive neuroscientist Nina Rouhani and colleagues, who analyzed Americans’ reported memories of 2020, leveraging the dual turbulences in news events and individual memories to learn more about how each shapes the other.
They found that the pandemic scrunched the distance between remembered events, like compressing a slinky. Everything seemed closer together. In our memories, if not in real life, time shrank. But as with most memories, there’s plenty more to unpack.
How the pandemic gave researchers a treasure trove of memory
Well before the pandemic, Rouhani was busy studying how we remember surprising events. But a lot of this work was in computer models, where modeling the depths and complexities of human memory isn’t a perfect science. Then, as her PhD dissertation defense began approaching, the pandemic hit, and she decided to study memory formation in near-real time.