Heartbeats can shape our perception of time, study finds

The new study from Cornell tackles something different: how we perceive the passage of microseconds. Understanding these mechanisms can help us deal with trauma, in which instantaneous experiences are remembered as prolonged, Dr. Ogden said.

When trying to assess the significance of an experience, she says, “our brain just looks back and says, Well, how many memories have we made?”

She added: “When you have this really rich memory, richer than you normally would in a 15 minute period of your life, it’s going to make you think it was a long time.”

Research into time perception has, until recently, focused on different areas of the brain, said Hugo Critchley, professor of psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, who has studied how heartbeats affect word memory And fear reactions.

“I think there’s a much greater appreciation that cognitive functions are intertwined, perhaps even grounded in control of the body, whereas most psychology until the 1990s dismissed the body as being something controlled at the brainstem level,” said Dr. Critchley, who was not involved in the Cornell Heart Rhythm Study.

Previous research has investigated how physical arousal relates to stress processing, and emotional states like anxiety and panic, said Dr. Critchley. The new study expands on this by focusing on the role of the heart in a non-emotional function, the perception of time, which may be linked to larger distortions in thinking.

“You can’t look at cognitive function in isolation,” he said. “Even understanding how the brain develops and begins to represent internal mental states, people look at the primacy of the inescapable internal information that you need to control to stay alive.”