"2020, the Year of the Pandemic". Quarantines, protocols, races to find a vaccine. Openings, closings, openings, closings again. Chaotic people, lost authorities, and in the middle of all that... time, or rather, its passing. Some people are astonished just by looking at the clock. Others don't even know what day of the week it is. The perception of time is upside down, and one of the reasons points to the so-called Oddball Effect, which involves abrupt changes and constant repetitions.
The Illusion of Time
The perception of time is... complicated. Many try to study it from the philosophical side. Others dive fully into the neurological and physiological. Consensus is scarce, and we must also add the enormous impact of illusions. For physics, the duration of the second has not changed (9,192,631,770 oscillations of radiation emitted in the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom at 0 K), but among us, there are days when it seems to be worth double, and others when it's cut in half.
Want a demonstration? The folks at Reuters have shared a series of exercises under the article "Why Time Feels So Weird in 2020", and I guarantee the results will surprise you more than once. There, they explore concepts like the "Illusion of Time", and highlight that according to neuroscientists, there is no "organ" or "system" responsible for measuring the passage of time. On the contrary, psychologists indicate that it's tied to multiple factors, including the emotional one.
The Oddball Effect
One of the effects that interests us most is the "Oddball" effect, something like "strange bug" according to several automatic translations. The Oddball effect suggests that humans tend to overestimate the perceived duration of exceptional events within a series of identical and homogeneous events... which explains a lot in this COVID-19 era. Entire days and weeks that essentially "fly by" in our heads, with isolated situations that seem almost frozen in time.
How exactly does this work? A study published by researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany proposes two explanations: a low-level "suppression of repetitions" and a high-level "stimulus expectation". In other words, having a prior record of the "repeated object" in memory, we pay less attention, and it feels as if time passes faster. Conversely, when a "new object" appears, our attention focuses on creating a new memory, causing the perception of time to slow down.
Why Quarantine Feels Different
In summary, the Oddball effect is one of the reasons why part of our time in quarantine feels like it evaporated into thin air. Personally, I still can't believe the calendar already says August 8, when my brain screams that the pandemic started the day before yesterday. As if that weren't enough, the Oddball effect is also responsible for the acceleration in the perception of time as we age. Want to know more? We have a complete article on the subject.
