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How short is your time?

Research

Our perception of time can depend on a number of factors – what we’re doing, how much we’re focusing on it, how we’re feeling. But there's also quite a bit of variability between us in our individual sense of time passing.

Researchers at Oxford University have investigated what plays a part in our perception of short, fleeting times of under a second.

In a new paper published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, they show that levels of a chemical in the brain – a neurotransmitter called GABA – accounts for some of the difference in our perceptions of subsecond intervals in what we’re seeing.

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