How to accelerate time…

…or just your perception of it.

I own a pair of those  90-degree prism glasses that allow you to watch the TV on the bedroom wall while lying flat on your back with your  face toward the ceiling.

Yes, I’m a geek.

And sometimes I read geeky articles .  One of those is in Psychological Science.  A recent article contains language  like:

These findings not only confirm that temporal intervals are represented as horizontally arranged in space, but also reveal that spatial modulation of time processing most likely occurs via cuing of spatial attention, and that spatial attention can influence the spatial coding of quantity in different dimensions.

New Scientist offers more accessible coverage.  But in essence, here’s what they discovered:

If you wear prism lenses that shift your vision just ten degrees to the right, you’ll tend to underestimate the passing of time.  Ten degrees to the left and you overestimate.  This backs up the theory that time and space are linked in the brain.  It’s bolstered by victims of brain damage that affects the visual field – they have difficulty estimating time.

My 90-degree prisms have a temporal effect as well:  They constrict  the time necessary to fall asleep if the TV doesn’t grab me.