Do you know that feeling when two hours with your best friend fly by in a flash, but those last fifteen minutes right before the end of your workday seem to last forever? Chances are you’ve experienced this before, because our brains are quite capable of perceiving time in a unique way. We know we measure time in hours, minutes, and seconds, but the way time feels is much more flexible than that. This way of perceiving time is put to the test when using various types of drugs. But why does time (for most users) seem to pass so incredibly slowly while on magic mushrooms or magic truffles?
Time in slow motion
During my personal truffle trips, I always noticed that time seemed to pass in slow motion, but because we always chose to put away all clocks and watches within our group to maintain the atmosphere, we never really knew how long or short a situation lasted. Until one evening we left a clock out. At one point, one of my friends decided to lie down in a separate room for a little while because the sensory overload was getting to him. It went on and on, until he came back after a while and said that lying down alone for about an hour had done him quite a bit of good. We, too, were convinced that he had indeed been gone for well over an hour.
The clock, however, told a different story: not even ten minutes had passed since he left the room.
This flexibility in the perception of time is discussed in various user reports. For example, a 1913 report stated that the use of mescaline—the compound found in psychedelic cacti—gave the user the feeling that “the immediate future was proceeding at a chaotic pace and time was boundless.” During a 1954 study, more than half of all test subjects experienced a distorted sense of time while under the influence of psychedelics. Most of them felt a “sense of temporal insularity,” in which only the present was real and the past and future were far, far away. Others experienced so-called time dilation, the idea that the passage of time was slowed down.
A Distortion of Time Perception
The way we experience time in our lives is part of a complex brain process, closely linked to attention, emotions, memory, psychiatric and neurological disorders, and self-awareness. In recent decades, scientists have increasingly observed how drugs such as MDMA, psilocybin, or other psychedelics can cause our perception of time to shift significantly, but what is actually happening in our brains remains unclear. As a result, there is currently no single, definitive theory on how time perception works.
Marc Wittmann, a neuropsychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany, tested 12 healthy people with moderate and high doses of psilocybin in 2007 and found that psilocybin significantly impaired their ability to accurately reproduce intervals longer than 2.5 seconds. Wittmann believes that subjective time is closely linked to the body and how much we are in touch with our bodies—a phenomenon known as interoception—and that a brain region responsible for perceiving signals from our internal body may also be responsible for the sensation of time passing.
So exactly what it is that makes time seem to pass so incredibly slowly during a magic mushroom or truffle trip is simply not yet known. What is clear, however, is that it happens. And why should we even complain about it? The longer that amazing psychedelic trip lasts, the better! Unless, of course, you’re having a bad trip. Read more here about what to do during a bad trip, or order our bad-trip stopper so you’re at least prepared. Happy tripping!
