Count ten seconds
Press to start, count ten seconds in your head without looking at any clock, then press to stop.
The experiment starts as soon as the page has loaded (JavaScript is required).
Try the experiment: your result will appear here, next to what most people do.
What just happened (read it after the experiment)
What most people do: Most people are off by one or two seconds.
Few people hit it exactly: the inner clock speeds up with excitement, fever or stress, and slows down with boredom and fatigue.
In the 1930s, the physiologist Hudson Hoagland noticed that his wife, who had a fever, found time dragging. He had her count out a minute: the higher her fever, the shorter her minute.
The time you feel is not the time of clocks: your brain makes it.
More experiments
Sources
- Hudson Hoagland, “The physiological control of judgments of duration,” Journal of General Psychology, 1933.