Does time seem to be going very fast and very slow, all at once? A friend of mine told me last week "I feel like I have nothing to do and no time do it." So what's going on? First, the brain loves to fill in missing gaps.

The brain's job is to present a complete picture of the world for you to act upon. With vision, your brain fills in an actual physical blind spot in your retina without you even noticing. The extreme version:

A person who is bumping into furniture and not realizing they've lost 50% of their peripheral vision, because the brain has been filling in the gaps. We did an experiment with this on Brain Games, it was shocking how quickly the brain compensates. We do the same with time.

Time is a euphemism for the magical property of the universe that keeps everything from happening all at once. When experiences are very new or challenging, like when you are young or in Calculus, time seems to go very slow, because the brain is processing a LOT.

When things are familiar, like when you get older, the brain processes less and time seems to go faster. Today we are all dealing with lots of new info (the world) while also experiencing great familiarity and routine (our daily lives at home). Only one time-scale is unchanged:

The internet, email, and media continues at literal "almost the speed of light". Einstein's theory says that time speeds up or slows down depending on how fast you move relative to something else. And through his theory of stimulated emission, we become ephemeral:

We have harnessed the speed of light to move information through fiberoptics faster than human consciousness. The relativity of time and our simultaneous experience of several distinct time-scales underlies the time dilation/contraction we are experiencing. Coincidentally...

Einstein's theory of relativity was proven during the great pandemic of 1919, which should give us hope about the creative light that can emerge from a time of darkness. There is an emerging field of Psychological Spacetime studying relativity and human perception.