Do we have a sense of time?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science, Technology

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

CrowdScience listener Marie, in Sweden, has always had difficulty with her sense of time. She often thinks that events that happened years ago took place recently or that a holiday coming up is happening sooner than it is. So she wants to know if time is a sense, like the sense of taste or touch, and if it’s something she can learn.

Anand Jagatia talks to scientists who’ve studied time, memory and how our brains process and store the events in our lives to find an answer to Marie’s question.

Along the way he discovers why time speeds up as we get older, how our bodies register time passing and how our brains put everything that happens to us in order.

Featuring:

Dr Marc Wittmann, Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany Dr Maï-Carmen Requena-Komuro, former PhD researcher, Dementia Research Centre, University College London Professor György Buzsáki, Neuroscience Institute, New York University Professor Adrian Bejan, Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University

Presenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Jo Glanville

Sound Design: Julian Wharton

Production Co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris

Image credit: Peter Cade/ Stone/ Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of
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0:14.4	to share that science with you.
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0:37.0	From Global Current Affairs to Art, science and culture.
0:42.6	The documentary from the BBC World Service
0:45.8	tells the world's stories.
0:48.1	Search for the documentary, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:55.2	Hello, my name is Marie and my question is about the sense of time.
0:59.3	If it is a sense or if it's just an ability that you can learn because I have none. I can be off by
1:05.1	several years in my guesses and I have always been bad at telling time the way I
1:09.8	remember it. Hello and welcome to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service.
1:16.0	This is the show that answers your science questions,
1:19.0	and this time we're looking at time.
1:22.0	Or rather the way we experience time because for one of our
1:26.8	listeners Marie time is something that really causes her quite a lot of trouble.
1:37.3	I have two kids 18 and 22 and in my mind I know I had them about four years ago because that's how it feels. I can make chicken for dinner, something I have done hundreds on time, but I can't for the life
1:47.5	for me remember if it takes 20 minutes or 90 minutes. I can ask a friend or a family member something important like when is the
	...

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