So What, Who Cares (vol 2, issue 81) Why time slows to a crawl or goes by in a flash

Hello! Welcome to a new week. Let's make it a good one -- how do you plan on doing that? Tell me your (grand, modest, tiny) plans for the week via Twitter or email, ja?

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Your brain and your temperament are why your perceptions of time are so wildly inconsistent. San Diego State University researcher Jeff Conte asked people when they thought a minute had passed, and he found a wide gap between Type A folks and Type Bs: the former thought that a minute had elapsed at 58 seconds, while the latter thought a minute had elapsed after 77 seconds.

Seeing as how a minute's 60 seconds long, a 19-second gap means that these (vast) groups' collective senses of type are out of whack by nearly a third. In other words, when a Type A waits ten minutes, they're tapping a foot impatiently around 9 minutes and 30 second; when a Type B waits ten minutes, they're not antsy until about 12 minutes and 50 seconds into it.

This isn't the only area where how we experience time is out of whack with its objective measurement. Five years ago, Robert Krulwich reported on why time seems to speed up as we get older. The prevailing theory is that when we experience something the first time, our brain's working overtime to record everything associated with the experience; it's a cognitively dense episode and so we're using more of our attention to absorb and process the new event.

Because later events are less cognitively demanding, our attention drifts and time seems to pass faster. Neuroscientist David Eagleman points out that the brain's ability to keep time is "metasensory," as in it's distributed and entangled through many different parts of the brain and therefore influenced by all our senses and the attendant stimuli they process. What's more, we're living in the past: all of our senses are slightly time-delayed from when they register the stimuli to when our conscious mind processes it. Eagleman says the brain needs time to get its story straight -- yes, even Type As.

Last week, scientists from Kyoto University published research on the "return trip effect," which found if people watched someone else walk an unfamiliar route from Point A to Point B, then return to Point A by reversing their route, the return trip felt faster to the viewer even when it took the exact same amount of time.

Although the flip explanation is "Well, the return trip is familiar, ergo it takes less time," other researchers hypothesize that return trips feel swifter because we overestimate the amount of time and effort it will require to get home, or because we are often more concerned about arriving to a new destination on time than we are about returning home on time. (Editorial aside: that research was clearly not conducted by someone racing home to relieve the babysitter on date night.)

The Kyoto researchers have a different explanation: The brain has multiple ways to measure time -- some very precise and based on neuronal firing, others more narratively based (like Eagleman talks about above). And because the study participants were very clearly told they were taking a round trip, their narrative time sense may have incorporated that information and altered its perception of how time was passing. In other words: Our expectations are influencing our perceptions of time.

So what? Knowing how you perceive time -- and how your expectations could be influencing your perceptions of time -- could be useful both in smoothing over social situations and in helping you feel more in control of that finite and non-renewable resource.

Who cares? Steve Miller, who may want to assess whether time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, because sometimes it moves at a crawl. Or Alan Parsons, who may want to revisit the theory that time is flowing like a river to the sea. Or ... you get the point. Fill in your favorite time-related yacht rock ballad here or send me a musical suggestion via email or Twitter.

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Your pop culture moment of the day: I spent the weekend inhaling Robin Givhan's The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History, and now I think everyone else should too. The book is about a one-night fundraiser in 1973, held in Versailles, five French couture giants against five American designers, and how the Americans' unexpectedly fresh and modern showing basically turned the high-fashion world on its ear.

But the book's not just about the lunacy of that one night -- I feel very strongly that any event involving the 1970s version of Liza Minelli has to, by law, include the word lunacy -- it's a meticulously researched and wittily constructed origin story of the relationship between fashion and a rapidly-changing society. It has tons of dishy details to die for. And it points out exactly how far today's fashion has fallen back in terms of diverse beauty ideals.

My friend Martina once said to me, "It's funny how you're interested in fashion, because you are untouched by style," but I firmly believe even the Agnes Gooches of the world can enjoy reading about fashion about because it offers such a perfect opportunity to observe and interpret the shifts in society, from the economic to the cultural to the moral, all based in how people choose to present themselves to the world. This book is a wonderful example of fashion history for non-fashion people. At the very least, anyone who's keen on 1970s history should read it.

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Are there typos? I apologize in advance. The only editing class I did not get an A in was copyediting.

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