Depression Makes Time Feel Slower | Hacker News Reader

Depression Makes Time Feel Slower

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47 pointsDiabloD316 comments

Reminds me of Dunbar in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 :

"Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?" Dunbar asked Clevinger. "This long." He snapped his fingers. "A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man [...] You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?" Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.

"Well, maybe it is true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. "Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?"

"I do," Dunbar told him.

"Why?" Clevinger asked.

"What else is there?"

I used to think like this. But the idea of no consciousness, the complete lack of everything, total emptiness, absolute void - pure nothing, to be nothing, to cease to exist in all forms. That can appeal to a particular kind of someone. It is a sense of eternity, but it is eternity at rest.

Interesting. A New Yorker story on time perception which I remember being interesting too: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian

Personal anecdote: I have (according to my medical record; it hasn't been too bad lately but still rears its head from time to time) chronic depression and my time perception is quite screwy but not always in the same direction.

When I was first diagnosed time did drag a bit. Now I sometimes feel like time's on fast-forward, and not in a good way: I get home from work, buy dinner, cook dinner, wash the plates, it's time for bed - repeat. People tell me things that happened a year or 4 years ago were a long time ago and I'm surprised because they feel like only a few months ago to me.

I think, as bnegreve says, I need to fit more new experiences in.

Ah yes, David Eagleman. You can see him talk about his research in video-lecture form here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/11/08/...

(among other time-related talks)

It is completely the opposite for me.

I've had clinical depression during part of my college years, and what I remember is time passing by very fast. When you don't get up from your bed, hours and days blur together. Before you know it, it's time for finals and you're fucked.

Wait, one mental construct - an umbrella term for behavior-driven neurochemical imbalance, makes another mental construct, an abstract notion of a constant rate of change within some process, makes it to be felt slower? By what? By another set of electro-chemical processes?)

It would be exciting if this ever led to an accurate detection/diagnosis technique.

If it does, then I must be quite depressed.

I don't think depression is especially hard to detect/diagnose. The big problems are more in treatment and in getting health services to give a flying fsck in the first place.

Insurance coverage for mental health is a complete joke.

> I don't think depression is especially hard to detect/diagnose.

Diagnosis is easy, it's accurate diagnosis which is hard.

I mean, how do you even start to figure out the false-positive/false-negative error rates of our current techniques, let alone know that they are "pretty good"? This is especially worrisome when you consider how the very definition of "depression" is slippery and subjective with an additional cloud of minor variations.

That's exactly why objective and measurable tests should be pursued: They offer us tools to start figuring out how much of our confidence for a yes/no diagnosis is misplaced, and whether we might be muddying the waters by lumping disparate conditions together.

Time is still something we don't fundamentally understand. All we have is the instant when we do some kind of analysis in our heads of events and try to make a decision about time as it relates to those events. "Time flies when you're having fun", but it also flies when you're working hard toward a deadline, and while sleeping!

The title gets it right -- time "feels" slower because "time feels X" is as good as science gets right now.

How is that surprising? "Time flies when you're having fun" has been a phrase for ages. I'd kinda taken it as a given.

Although it's common wisdom I actually disagree.

It may be true for short time blocks (days, maybe weeks) but I don't think this is the case for longer time blocks (month, years).

- If you do the same thing every day, years will pass by very fast.

- If you move to a different country for a couple of months, afterwards, it'll feel like you've been there for years. It's because you seen/learned much more. I've experienced that a couple of times, it's a strange feeling.

I believe that this is because our perception of time is nothing else but perception of self-change.

Perhaps it's not what you do, but the quality of how you do it. If you do the same thing every day mindlessly or in a rote fashion, then time passes quickly. If you are attentive to the moments of doing, even the same thing every day can feel fresh and new.

I want to know how to make time feel slower while enjoying life and having more "presence" in my day. I think mindfulness meditation might help. I've also heard that practicing a martial art can increase your awareness.

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