Time Flies Slowly

Why does time fly when you’re immersed in a captivating novel, but when your train has a three minute delay, those minutes suddenly feel like hours? While all our everyday behaviour is driven by time, no other human trait seems to be more subjective and driven by context than our sense of time. But where “is” time in our brain? Neuroscientist Hedderik van Rijn will explain why we can easily sense the shortest hesitation in a conversation, but when it comes to estimating the duration of one hour, we get it wrong by tens of minutes.

Hedderik van Rijn works as a professor on the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Groningen. Supported by a VICI grant, he and his team are researching the role of time in everyday behaviour in illness and aging, and in the neuronal processes that are the basis of having ‘a sense of time’. He is also involved in developing the SlimStampen method, a learning method that adjusts to the knowledge and skills of individual students.