Why Time Seems to Stop When You Look at the Clock
You are in a long and boring meeting. You look at your watch again, hoping that time is ticking faster than it seems, but instead the watch’s second hand doesn’t seem to be moving at all. No, the clock stops not only to laugh at you, your brain is playing a cruel joke with you.
According to Amelia Hunt, a neuroscientist at the University of Aberdeen, this phenomenon is known as the “clock stopping illusion.” As Hunt explains to Popular Science , pause occurs when our brain expects what we will see faster than we actually see it. That’s right – your brain is trying to predict what you’ll see before your eyes even get there. Why? When you move your eyes, everything you see changes position in your eyes, creating a different image in your brain. Your brain expects some of these adjustments when your eyes move and updates your mental map of where you think everything is located so you don’t feel disoriented.
When you look away from the clock and back, your brain is already thinking ahead for almost half a second, predicting where the second hand will be based on what you’ve already seen. By the time your eyes line up with the clock again, the second hand will appear to be hanging there for an additional moment before continuing to operate normally because you expected it to be there. So don’t panic – what you see is completely normal. If you start to see the clock going backwards, you might be a little worried.
Blame Your Overly Prepared Brains When Time Seems To Stop | Popular Science