Does time feel slower to experienced meditators?
Experienced mindfulness meditators felt that time passes more slowly and that recent weeks lasted longer, yet they were no more accurate than non-meditators at lab timing tasks.
Source
Subjective expansion of extended time-spans in experienced meditators
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session two-site comparison of experienced mindfulness meditators with age-, sex- and education-matched non-meditators on questionnaires and psychophysical timing tasks.
- N
- N=84 · 42 experienced meditators and 42 matched controls.
- Population
- German adults aged 21-50: meditators with at least 3 years of continuous practice, and meditation-naive controls
- Outcome
- Subjective passage of time ratings, and accuracy/precision on duration discrimination, reproduction, estimation and production tasks
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The researchers compared 42 long-term mindfulness meditators (on average about 10 years of practice) with 42 controls matched on age, sex and education, in labs in Freiburg and Munich. Everyone rated how fast time usually passes and how long past and future periods seemed, filled in mindfulness, impulsiveness and time-perspective questionnaires, and completed timing tasks from milliseconds to a minute plus an attention test.
What they found
Meditators reported less time pressure, more feeling of time expansion and a slower general passage of time, and judged the past week and month as having passed more slowly, with medium-to-large effects. They also scored much higher on mindfulness and lower on past-negative time perspective. However, there were no group differences in accuracy or precision on any psychophysical timing task, and none on the attention network test. Unexpectedly, meditators scored higher on motor impulsivity, which the authors attribute partly to ambiguous translated items.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because it is a one-time comparison of self-selected groups, it cannot show that meditation causes the slower sense of time; people who already experience time this way may be drawn to meditation. The subjective time effects rest on self-report ratings that meditators might answer in line with their beliefs, while the objective tasks showed nothing. The proposed memory explanation (richer episodic memories lengthen retrospective duration) was not tested, and the higher impulsivity scores hint that the meditator group may be unusual in other ways.
Key terms
- Prospective timing
- Judging an interval while knowing in advance you will be asked about its duration, thought to depend on attention to time.
- Retrospective timing
- Judging how long a period lasted after the fact, reconstructed from how many changes and events are stored in memory.
- Pacemaker-accumulator model
- A model where an internal clock emits pulses that are counted when attention is paid to time; more pulses means a longer felt duration.
- Duration reproduction
- A task in which people see or hear a stimulus of some length and then try to produce an interval of the same length.
- Trait mindfulness
- A person's general tendency to attend to present-moment experience without judgment, measured here with the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory.
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Quiz yourself
Which result did the study find for experienced meditators?
Common questions
If meditators feel time slows down, why weren't they better at timing tasks?
Feeling that time passes slowly is a different thing from accurately judging a few seconds. The authors suggest large individual differences, a cross-sectional design and the group's higher impulsivity may also have hidden any effect.
Why would being mindful make the past week feel longer?
The authors propose that paying closer attention to the present stores more distinct experiences in memory, and retrospective duration is judged from how many changes are remembered.
Does this prove meditation changes time perception?
No. Meditators were compared with non-meditators at one time point, so pre-existing differences between people who choose to meditate could explain the results.
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