Not completely unrelated, the mechanical horse race game that used to be at The D in Vegas, and now is at the Linq (I think?) has a similar effect on the human psyche. As does gambling on most sporting events. Anything with a lot of ups and downs. I really started to think about this when I was developing casino games about 15 years ago. But the same is true with any game, or any future event. When an outcome is unknown, we experience time as a set of discrete emotional peaks and valleys - we experience an extra dimension of time, the high/low. Apart from being a highly successful design hook, I think it can be a really powerful way to encode information. Especially if you have time-referenced data and you've already exhausted the other axes or relative sizes you might use to convey your dimensions. Like, my main argument with using that "race" is that you could use the x-axis for something else, and have the whole graph change over time.
But you're very right that this indeed relies on an emotional component to achieve the full effect of conveying time in two dimensions. If there's no emotional attachment to the outcome, our brains don't process the highs or lows. In that case, a variance chart like open/close prices on the stock market might work better.