The clock in your head
Nobody has a clock in their head, only attention. When attention is busy, time slips, which is why exams feel shorter than they are.
To feel time pass, your head has to PAY ATTENTION to time passing.
Give attention another job, counting dots, solving sums, and fewer moments get noticed.
Fewer noticed moments feels like less time. The busy mind's ten seconds ends early.
Then and now
A century of stopwatch experiments settled into a clear model: the inner clock is attention doing double duty, and it bends under load in predictable ways.
Zakay, D. and Block, R. A. (1997)
Where it began“Temporal cognition”
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 6, 12-16
The attentional-gate account: judging time as it passes depends on attention, so a busy mind registers fewer moments and produces shorter intervals.
Matthews, W. J. and Meck, W. H. (2016)
State of the art“Temporal cognition: Connecting subjective time to perception, attention, and memory”
Psychological Bulletin, 142, 865-907
The modern synthesis: subjective time is built from perception, attention and memory together, and attention remains the lever that bends it most reliably.
What we do and do not claim
This game measures how you judge a few seconds, here, today. It says nothing about punctuality, patience, or anything else about a person.