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Topic: Time flies when you're busy (Read 682 times) |
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
  
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Time flies when you're busy
« on: 2004-08-09 20:48:54 » |
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"When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped."
-- Marcel Achard
Scientists prove time flies when you're busy
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/uoa-spt080604.php
Dr. Anthony Chaston and his research colleague, Dr. Alan Kingstone, have proven, once and for all, that time really does fly when you're having fun. Or, at least, it flies when your attention is engaged.
Working in the University of Alberta Department of Psychology, Chaston and Kingstone devised a test that required subjects to find specific items in various images--a sort of "Where's Waldo" activity. However, before the subjects started the test they were told that once they had completed it they would be asked to estimate how much time had passed during their test.
There were seven levels of difficulty among the tests. In some cases, the items were easy to find because they were different colours from everything else, or the items were set among just one or two others. In the more difficult tests, the items were placed among many similar looking items, or they didn't even exist in the image, at all.
"The harder and harder the search tasks were, the smaller and smaller the estimates became," said Chaston, whose study is published in the latest edition of Brain and Cognition. "The results were super clean--we have created a new and powerful paradigm to get at the link between time and attention."
<snip>
[rhinoceros] He could have asked a chess player.
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Time flies when you're busy
« Reply #1 on: 2004-08-10 17:18:17 » |
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rhinoceros
Sent: 10 August 2004 02:49
"The harder and harder the search tasks were, the smaller and smaller the
estimates became," said Chaston, whose study is published in the latest
edition of Brain and Cognition. "The results were super clean--we have
created a new and powerful paradigm to get at the link between time and
attention."
<snip>
[rhinoceros] He could have asked a chess player.
[Blunderov] There is a story about a chess player who completely failed to
notice anything at all when a large jug of iced water was very noisily
knocked over in crypt-like silence of a tournament. Afterwards, in spite of
the fact that everybody else in the room at the time had been most startled,
he was completely unaware that the event had even taken place.
This degree of concentration is by no means uncommon and players who get
into the zone like this are usually almost entirely oblivious to the passing
of time - and it is not unheard of for players to lose the game because of
it.
(BTW Just in case anyone had any lingering doubts on the matter, that legend
about a chess player's head exploding because of an intense intracranial
electrical phenomenon is bogus. Can't happen.)
Best Regards.
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