Earlier this year, my husband and I decided to try at least one new thing—a recipe, a game, a trip to a neighborhood we had never visited—every single week. Firmly in our mid-40s, we were inspired by an article in Time magazine that suggests you can “think yourself young” again. The general hypothesis is that if time starts to feel like it’s advancing too fast, a common feeling as we age, novel experiences can help stretch out our perception of how we’re moving through the weeks, months, and even years. Now, researchers have uncovered clues about what might be happening in our brains as we make fresh memories. And you might be able to use this new information to warp your perception of time—and make your life feel longer.
“Time may feel like something we simply move through, but our brains are constantly shaping how it is experienced and remembered,” says cognitive neuroscientist David Clewett, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA. “When time seems to stretch or contract in retrospect, that may be more than a feeling. It may be the way the brain organizes a meaningful record of the past, separating important moments from a stream of experience so they can become distinct memories.”
Clewett, who leads the Adaptive Cognition, Memory, and Emotion Lab focused on understanding how the brain transforms continuous experience into memorable episodes, recently published a paper in Nature Communications that outlines an investigation of the role of dopamine in distorting and expanding time between distinct events.
The organic chemical dopamine is both a neurotransmitter—or a chemical that allows the neurons to communicate—and a hormone released by the brain. It has many roles in the body; dopamine is often involved in motivating certain behavior and signaling in the brain when something is important, novel, or worthy of attention, Clewett says. And that includes things like taking up a creative hobby, visiting a new town, or enjoying a concert by a band you’ve never seen before.
In their recent study, Clewett and two of his graduate students used MRI scans to monitor the brains of 32 participants while they played different auditory tones, which signaled the start of a “new event.” The team found that a key dopamine-producing area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) lit up when participants detected the beginning of a new event. When volunteers' VTAs were highly activated, they also reported that greater time had passed. Furthermore, when participants blinked more—a behavior recently linked with increased activation in dopaminergic regions including the VTA—during a new event, their memory of how long a fixed interval lasted stretched even further.
“This shows that dopaminergic processing also has consequences for later remembering, warping representations of time to form the building blocks of memory,” notes Clewett. “Additionally, our findings suggest that something as simple as blinking may give a glimpse into dopamine function and its effects on the structuring of new memories.”
Martin Wiener, PhD, an associate professor in the department of psychology at George Mason University, says Clewett’s findings are very interesting. He wasn’t involved with the work but notes that previous research has separately shown spontaneous blinking to be associated with a dilation of time and with spikes in dopamine, but this paper provides a nice linkage between the two.
“A lot of people have asked me why summers when they were young seemed to last forever and as they get older, they seem to shorten,” says Wiener, whose Spatial, Temporal, Action, Representation Lab explores how people perceive time and space. “David’s study gives me something I can point to, that if there’s more dopamine at a particular change of episode—or start of a new event—that makes it feel like it was a further distance in time.”
Still, Wiener cautions that Clewett’s study evaluates an indirect marker of dopamine through activation—or blood flow—in the VTA, which is one of the primary brain areas for production of the chemical.
“It’s certainly possible that there’s some other neurotransmitter or much more complicated thing happening here, but without having direct neural recordings, we don't actually know for sure,” he says.
For his part, Clewett admits that we still know surprisingly little about how the brain marks the time boundaries that are used to adaptively organize memory. He says we often think of memory as a recording device, but it is really more like a film editor.
“Segmenting experiences into distinct memories is essential for making the past more accessible and for piecing events together to make sense of our lives,” Clewett says.
“We show that dopamine may play an important role in carving up experiences based on these meaningful turning points.”
These findings have real-world importance, particularly for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Parkinson’s disease, or aging issues in which memory problems partly reflect disruptions in how experiences are segmented into events, and not just whether information is stored. Clewett says studies of autobiographical memory suggest that people with conditions such as PTSD or depression often retrieve fewer specific events and their memories can be more overgeneralized or less detailed. In theory, these difficulties could reflect differences in whether and how individuals remember the timing and structure of distinct life events.
“If we can better understand how dopamine shapes different features of memory, we may eventually be able to improve memory and cognitive function,” Clewett says. “One exciting possibility is that something as simple as blinking could provide a window into this process. These measurements could offer a low-cost, noninvasive way to study how dopamine shapes memory in everyday life and in clinical populations.”
So, what about healthy individuals who, like me, are seeking to experience a slower pace of life? The dopamine system can be engaged by a wide range of factors, many of which are within our control, says Clewett. “Our results suggest that you can make life feel longer in retrospect by embracing novel, stimulating, and rewarding experiences in the moment,” he explains. “Creating a more ‘eventful’ life may lead to a fuller life.”
As research increasingly shows that our sense of time and what we remember are linked in a very strong way, Wiener says our time perception may be a marker of how well we can lay down a memory.
“We can choose when we’re going to remember something, and the intensity with which we encode a memory likely will reflect the length of that memory when we look back on it,” he explains. “Your sense of time is also controllable as well, and I have found that it seems that if you just think about wanting a moment to last longer, you can actually expand it in the period that you’re experiencing it.”
As for our little experiment, my husband and I both believe that creating novel memories has helped slow our perception of time. The weekends last longer, and it seems like we’re getting more done by being more intentional with our free time. Who knows if the effects will last, but it can’t hurt to stay curious and activate more of those “feel-good” hormones to help stretch out your life. “Carpe diem!” as the saying goes. Or perhaps it should be “carpe dopamine.”
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Katie Neith is a science writer based in Los Angeles. Her favorite celebrity sightings are the great horned owls that live in her hillside neighborhood. A recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins MA in Science Writing program, her work has appeared in Nautilus and Live Science, among other publications. Connect: www.katieneith.com
