How Novelty, Memory, and Presence Shape Our Perception of Time

Lately, it feels as though time moves like water instead of clockwork. Moments pool and rush and eddy back on themselves. You live so fully in some experiences that looking back feels like examining artifacts from another life, evidence of how radically our perception of time can shift.

The neuroscience is straightforward: our brains don’t measure time evenly. They stretch and compress it based on attention, novelty, and emotional intensity. But the lived experience is stranger. It’s realizing you’ve been multiple people in the span of a season, each one leaving traces that the next can barely recognize.

How do you track time when identity itself is shifting? When three days in a new country hold more change than entire months at home? When the woman who boarded the plane feels like a stranger by the time you land?

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How the Mind Measures Time

Cognitive Load and Time Distortion

Time is not measured evenly by the mind. It stretches, contracts, or slips depending on how much we are processing.

This is shaped by cognitive load, which is how hard your brain is working in a given moment. When you’re navigating unfamiliar terrain, emotionally activated, or adapting to rapid change, your brain uses more energy. That extra effort leads to denser encoding of information.

But there’s more happening beneath the surface. The hippocampus, your brain’s memory-making center, works closely with the prefrontal cortex to decide what’s worth remembering. When something feels novel or emotionally significant, the hippocampus gets more active, laying down richer, more detailed memories. ¹ These dense memories take up more mental space, which makes the original experience feel longer in retrospect.

Your Brain’s Internal Clocks

Meanwhile, your brain’s internal timing systems are more complex than a single clock. The master clock sits in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a tiny region of the hypothalamus that orchestrates your 24-hour rhythms and coordinates with cellular clocks throughout your body. ² But there are also specialized timing systems: the cerebellum (your brain’s movement coordinator) handles millisecond precision for tasks like catching a ball, while the prefrontal cortex (involved in planning and decision-making) tracks minutes and longer intervals like how long you’ve been working on a project. ³

These systems are influenced by attention and arousal. Dopamine, released during novel or rewarding experiences, doesn’t just make things feel good; it also affects how we perceive duration. Higher dopamine can make moments feel extended, while routine activities with low dopamine barely register.

The more detail we record, the longer the moment seems, especially when we look back on it.

Time, as we experience it, is built from attention and memory.

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Why Travel Changes Our Perception of Time

Travel changes the brain by introducing unfamiliar input: new languages, landscapes, social cues, and rhythms. Each element requires the brain to work harder to interpret and integrate information. This increased activity stimulates neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire based on experience. ⁵

In familiar environments, much of what we do is automated. We rely on patterns that don’t require conscious attention. This is efficient but results in lower memory encoding. When we’re in a new place, our brain can no longer rely on automation. Every detail requires assessment and adjustment.

And as it processes, it changes. New neural connections form. New perspectives are absorbed. Over time, this shapes not just how we think, but who we become.

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When Inner Work Accelerates Time

Some seasons are about inner shifts. Identity softening or reshaping in ways that carry their own momentum. When you’re processing deeply, grieving, or moving through internal changes, time compresses.

The inner work of questioning old patterns, releasing limiting beliefs, and stepping into new ways of being creates its own temporal distortion. When you’re actively dismantling fear-based thinking and opening to exponential growth, the pace of change can feel startling. Internal shifts that once took years now happen in months, weeks, or days.

This acceleration intensifies when you engage deeply with wherever you are. Walking neighborhoods with curiosity. Sitting in cafés and watching how people move through their rhythms. Letting yourself be present to the texture of a place rather than just passing through it. Presence slows down the moment while speeding up transformation.

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Photography as a Way to Hold Time

The act of lifting a camera and framing a scene requires focus. That focus pulls the brain out of passive observation and into active engagement. In that moment, we’re choosing what to see, what to keep, and what to mark as meaningful.

Photography creates a visual record and also creates a neural marker. It allows the brain to encode a moment more fully by reinforcing the spatial, emotional, and sensory context around it.

Memory is influenced by how much sensory data and emotional meaning are present when something happens. A photograph captures what we see, but it also acts as a trigger for everything else we experienced in that moment: sounds, smells, temperature, and emotions. ⁶

This is why certain images hold so much more than what’s visible in the frame. They unlock the whole surrounding experience.

Photography becomes a kind of portal back to that time and place.

Taking the photo helped me stay in the moment, imprinting it in time. For me, it is one of the ways I like to track time, and without the record of the frame left behind, I often wonder how we can measure and fix time otherwise. Is it in milestones and achievements? The wrinkles on our skin? The aches or pains from injuries and ailments? Or is it watching the kids as they grow?

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What Time Leaves Behind

When I look back and can’t remember who I was just a few weeks ago, I realize maybe that’s just how growth works. Maybe becoming someone new means leaving pieces of the old self scattered across time and place.

Not everyone experiences time in seasons of spaciousness. For some, it’s marked by waiting rooms, caregiving, or holding things together. Even then, meaning finds its way in. Through ritual, through noticing, through remembering.

Maybe the point isn’t to slow time down or speed it up. Maybe it’s just to feel it moving through you, to notice the shape it makes as it passes, and to choose to experience each moment as an offering or a creation with a sense of agency.

Join us!

If these ideas resonated, I explore similar themes of perception and presence in my newsletter, The Frame, where I share the observations that shape how I see the world. For further reading, be sure to check out The Allure of Beauty, Shifting Perspectives, and Neuroscience and Perception.

x

Anna

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Citations

1. Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. Penguin Books. ↩︎
2. Smarr, B.L., et al. (2014). The Role of Circadian Clocks in Learning and Memory. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. ↩︎
3. Ivry, R.B. (2000). The cerebellum operates as an internal timing system. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. ↩︎
4. Medina, J. (2008). Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Pear Press. ↩︎
5. Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. Penguin Books. ↩︎
6. Roland Barthes (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography ↩︎