Not just love, but space and time is measured by the heart?

Have you ever experienced time slowing down or speeding up? A new study suggests that our moment-to-moment perception of time is not continuous but may stretch or shrink with each heartbeat. Researchers from Cornell University found that the heart plays a fundamental role in our sense of time passing, proving that the heart is one of the brain’s essential timekeepers.

Typically, time perception has been tested over longer intervals, where it has been shown that thoughts and emotions may distort our sense of time, perhaps making it fly or crawl. However, the researchers wanted to investigate the more direct experience of our sense of time passing. They asked if our perception of time is related to physiological rhythms, focusing on natural variability in heart rates. Their study indicates it does.

Temporal wrinkles

The research involved monitoring heart electrical activity at millisecond resolution of 45 participants, ages 18 to 21, with no history of heart trouble. The participants listened to 80-180 millisecond tones triggered by heartbeats and reported whether the tones were longer or shorter relative to others. The results revealed what the researchers called “temporal wrinkles.” When the heartbeat preceding a tone was shorter, the tone was perceived as longer. When the preceding heartbeat was longer, the sound’s duration seemed shorter.

The researchers also found that after the participants heard the tones, they focused their attention on the sound. Thee “orienting response” changed their heart rate, affecting their experience of time passing.

Adam K. Anderson, professor of psychology at Cornell University, explains that “the heartbeat is a rhythm that our brain is using to give us our sense of time passing, and that is not linear – it is constantly contracting and expanding.” The connection between time perception and the heart suggests that our momentary perception of time is rooted in “bioenergetics”, helping the brain manage effort and resources based on changing body states, including heart rate.

Researchers say the findings of this study could have significant implications in fields such as neurology, psychology, and philosophy, where the nature of time perception has been debated for centuries.