I’ve always been partial to Dunbar, the character in Catch-22 who seeks out boredom and discomfort in order to make time pass more slowly, thus effectively prolonging his life. It’s a sensation that’s familiar to any endurance athlete: the seconds agonizingly stretching as your effort mounts. Forget cardiovascular benefits and weight control; maybe the real life-extending power of exercise is the way it distorts your time perception.
That sensation is the topic of a new study in the journal Brain and Behavior, by a research team led by Andrew Edwards of Canterbury Christ Church University in Britain. Edwards and his colleagues put a group of 33 volunteers through a series of all-out, 4-kilometer cycling time trials, periodically asking them to estimate the passage of 30 seconds. Sure enough, hammering made the cyclists’ internal clocks faster, which in turn made the efforts feel longer—but not quite in the way the researchers expected. Instead, the results join a series of recent studies suggesting there’s more to time perception than even Dunbar might have suspected.
Back in 2017, Edwards and a colleague
