Time in the brain doesn’t follow the steady ticking of the world’s most precise clocks. Instead it seems to fly by at one moment and practically stand still at others. This distorted sense of time may be caused, in part, by brain cells getting tired. When the brain has been exposed to the same exact time interval too many times, neurons or brain cells get overstimulated and fire less often. However, our perception of time is complicated, and many other factors may also explain why time moves slowly sometimes and quickly at others.
Sleep deprivation may affect time’s passing
We have only very recently begun to understand how our brains perceive time. It was only in 2015 that researchers found the first evidence of neurons whose activity fluctuates with our perception of time. But it wasn’t clear if these neurons, found in a small brain region called the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), were keeping accurate time for the brain or creating a subjective experience of time.