CLOCK WISE

After three years of pandemic, our relationship with time has changed- maybe for the better

- Lily Rothman

IT WASN'T LONG AFTER THE PANDEMIC BEGAN that people around the world started to notice something weird was going on. As the rhythms of daily life changed, some people's days seemed to run together; others felt theirs stretched on indefinitely. The sense of what an hour felt like was corroding. News outlets filled with attempts to explain what was happening.

Ruth Ogden, an experimental psychologist who studies time perception at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., says she had only ever gotten maybe one interview request before the pandemic, and has since received at least a hundred. And while the study of time is certainly not new, she says the volume and pace of academic publication on the topic seem to have increased too. Studies published since early 2020 have suggested, in no particular order, that dragonflies process the movement of time very quickly while starfish do so slowly; that virtual reality and ADHD are both linked to difficulty judging how much time has passed; that time flies when you're making eye contact and seems to drag when you're guilty of hiding something. (And the International Bureau of Weights and Measures is even in the course of redefining the second, though that one's a coincidence.)