We’ve all been there: waiting for a boring meeting to finish or for a bus to arrive and time just seems to drag on far more slowly than usual. Yet our most enjoyable moments seem to whizz by at lightning speed. It seems obvious that more boring events appear to take longer than the ones that stimulate us. But there’s another reason we sometimes experience time differently.
If we understand what causes an event or we cause it ourselves, the time between the cause and its effects seems to be shorter than an event we have no control over. This phenomenon, known as temporal binding, can help us uncover some important truths about the relationship between cause and effect and whether or not we are really responsible for different actions.
