How does the human brain keep track of time? [VIDEO]
1 Mar 2013
A little end-of-the-week brain candy. This video isn’t directly about web performance, but it’s about a fascinating overlapping area of study: how and why we perceive time the way we do. (Short answer: No one quite agrees on the how, though they have some theories about the why.)
Luke Jones of the University of Manchester talks about the fact that we’re uncannily good at telling the difference between durations of sound, down to one-tenths of a second, yet we’re terrible at predicting how long it’s going to take us to do something, especially if it’s something you’ve done before. (Apparently, we always underestimate.)
Mar 01, 2013 @ 14:06:36
That was interesting; thank you for sharing!
To bring this back to our arena, do you think it is reasonable to say that users will perceive familiar sites as being faster? I think this has some interesting implications, especially for sites that are looking to attract new users.
Web meets brain - Colorblind Programming
Mar 04, 2013 @ 06:19:08
[...] How does the brain keep track of time – by Joshua Bixby in Web Performance Today Luke Jones of the University of Manchester talks about the fact that we’re uncannily good at telling the difference between durations of sound, down to one-tenths of a second, yet we’re terrible at predicting how long it’s going to take us to do something, especially if it’s something you’ve done before. (Apparently, we always underestimate.) [...]
Mar 04, 2013 @ 08:54:39
Interesting question, Jared. Off the top of my head, I’d say the opposite, based on the finding that we seem to underestimate the anticipated duration of an activity we’ve performed in the past. I understood this to mean that we’re more likely to be frustrated, because for some irrational reason we expect familiar activities to happen faster.
The psychology of waiting (and 5 things you can do to make online checkout feel faster)
May 06, 2013 @ 10:52:58
[...] How does the human brain keep track of time? [VIDEO] [...]