The Perception of Time

Time. It’s a really ambiguous subject. But the part of time that I’m really interested in is how we as humans perceive it. For all of us, 5 minutes can appear to be both long and short. An example of each would be:

How 5 Minutes Appears to Last an Age – in first year for Reading Performance we all had to do a 5 minute presentation and for myself, this seemed like a long time to be able to talk about something on my own for.

How 5 Minutes Appears to Last a Second – when we’re having fun, enjoying ourselves, time flies by. I remember having a kickabout with my mates when I was in school, it was the summer holidays and we met about 5 o’clock. The dark of the night seemed to come about quickly and it was 10 o’clock.

An interesting, but rather odd, thing I have thought about is those charity adverts that have been on that say every 30 seconds in Africa a child will die. Now the first thing that comes to me for this is that in 5 minutes that’s 10 children, so surely in a week, too many would have died and nobody would be left alive in Africa.

But, pretty quickly, my mind sped off from that and thought about the period of time of 30 seconds. This is both a long time and a short time as well. In Formula 1, if one racer were to finish 30 seconds behind the leader, they could be down in 7th, 8th, 9th or even 10th place. Same with athletics, to finish 30 seconds behind the leader, you could be halfway around the track still.

I even narrowed down the time period when I thought of time. 1 second. 1 second can be the difference between life and death. Crossing the road. Being stood on the edge of cliff.

But to round things off on time, there’s so much that can be done in 5 minutes:

  • Write a song
  • Write a poem
  • Break a world record
  • Break multiple world records (some are only ‘Most amount of…in 30 seconds’)
  • You could even fall in love, but to me, this can only take a second

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