How Do Drugs Distort Time

Have you ever been waiting for a bus, with the timetable saying it’s only three minutes away, but that waiting time has felt like an eternity? How about when you were a child, where being at school for 6 hours felt like a whole lifetime? What about the opposite, where you might have been at a party or a festival, or perhaps on vacation, only for it to end way sooner than you expected? Time can often feel slippery, and our perception of it isn’t always such a rigid thing – the environment we’re in and how we’re responding to different stimulation might radically alter our experience of how time is actually flowing. How we perceive time can be seen as being fundamental to our awareness, as we understand our sense of self in relation to memories about the past, sensations within the present moment, or anticipation of future events. 

We all know that time flies when you’re having fun, and there’s some research to back this up to suggest that increases in dopamine during pleasurable experiences may cause changes to our internal clock, resulting in an altered perception of time. This also seems to happen with increases in serotonin, and both of these neurotransmitters are closely linked to the effects of a wide variety of substances. If both changes in dopamine and serotonin alter our perception of time, then it’s probably a bit of a no-brainer that certain drugs are going to radically distort how we experience it. 

But is this perception of time distortion simply limited to what’s going on inside our brains, or are there wider perspectives beyond just neuroscience? Can exploring the phenomenological or cultural experiences of the passing of time allow us to understand how certain drugs, when taken in different contexts or environments, might impact how we perceive it? We can look at these different ways of interpreting how time passes to provide a fuller picture of what’s actually happening to time when we’re on drugs.

So what is actually going on when our brains are keeping track of time? I certainly don’t keep track like a stop-watch (maybe some people do, but I imagine this would be rather obsessive), and it’s more as if there’s an awareness of a series of events that happen one after another. When we remember one of these events, our brains record information related not only to the place where it happened, but also the time it happened. This is how episodic memories are formed, and we can lose some of these in cases of Alzheimer's or dementia, where damage to certain regions of the brain can result in the degradation of memories of where and when something has happened. 

Episodic memories are created in the medial temporal lobe, which is necessary for remembering durations within a sequence of events, and this seems to be involved in the internal representation of elapsed time. 

Cognitive processes, as well as environmental stimuli, can impact our perception of time. Our five senses receive information and relate this to our central nervous system, where our perception of time involves a complex neural mechanism which may be influenced by our emotional state, level of attention, memory, or diseases. Due to the complex nature of the neural mechanism involved, it seems that the neuroscience behind time perception isn’t necessarily so well understood. 

What has been understood so far is that there are two main areas of the brain that are involved in the perception of time – the parietal cortex and the hippocampus. Activity in the parietal lobe is related to how accurately our brain is able to actually keep track of time, whereas the hippocampus is involved in how we perceive time on a longer range, which allows for the development of long-term memory. Research has even shown that the hippocampus contains neurons that represent the flow of time in specific memories, leading them to be dubbed ‘time cells’. These cells have firing properties that are parallel to the place cells within the hippocampus, which allow for the cognitive mapping of a specific location in space. This representation of time and space within the hippocampus seems to be fairly robust, and it suggests this mechanism is essential for organising all the different elements of our experiences into consistent memories. 

At a very young age, our brains are only able to perceive time as we pay attention to it, with the perception of time improving as our attention and capacity for forming short-term memory increase. This process is dependent on the slow maturation of the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in things such as planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, and the moderation of social behaviour. To understand the time required for a task, children must be able to pay attention to it while also memorising a stream of time data without losing concentration. This might explain why children with a diagnosis of ADHD might find that their perception of time is warped, often with the experience of struggling to manage their time properly and stay on top of tasks.

Other areas in the brain – such as the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula cortex, prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, the supplementary motor area, and cerebellum – are all involved in the perception of time. It’s unclear, however, which aspects of time perception the different areas relate to, and some research has focused more specifically on the basal ganglia – this is down to it being a region of the brain that is at the intersection of timing, reward, and dopamine. 

We briefly touched on the impact of dopamine on the perception of time, and it seems that dopamine neurons in an area of the brain known as the substantia nigra pars compacta can alter the perception of time. Stimulating or inhibiting these dopamine cells can either make time seem like it’s moving slower or faster, where boosting dopamine activity has been shown to slow down our internal clock, which in turn leads us to underestimate time intervals. Research has shown that animals given drugs that trigger the release of dopamine responded to tasks more quickly than usual, which might suggest the internal sense of time was sped up. So what are the different drugs that humans are taking which might impact our perception of time? 

LSD is one of the most popular psychedelics, and one which seems to have a big impact on our perception of time. I’ve had experiences that I know from looking at the clock have lasted for around 12 hours, but within the experience itself, there have been moments that have felt like they’ve lasted forever, with my whole perception of the linear passage of time being turned on its head. This is one of the reasons why I have a lot of fondness for LSD, as it provides me with the feeling of having so much time on my hands (almost an eternity!) to create and explore so many different things. 

Some research has shown that consuming small doses of LSD can impact the way in which we perceive time, without necessarily impacting other areas of perception. The increase in attentional awareness seems to result in the overproduction of time intervals, as well as the dopaminergic effect of LSD via activation of the D2 dopamine receptor, which has an effect on time-keeping. Other research has shown that LSD can alter time perception by decreasing the impact of local temporal priors, which allow us to understand patterns and regularities over a short period of time. 

Other psychedelics, such as magic mushrooms, can also alter our perception of time via the serotonergic system, where psilocybin seems to selectively disrupt our processing of time intervals. This is most likely down to interactions of the cognitive dimension of temporal processing, where activation of the 5-HT2A receptors can result in disturbances in the subjective sense of time. 

Psychedelics that have the potential to induce a state of ego-dissolution in a more swift fashion, such as DMT, might allow those who take it to completely transcend space and time altogether, where our perception of time ultimately becomes irrelevant. My personal experience with a potent form of salvia extract in my younger years radically altered my understanding of time altogether, where I had forgotten that I’d even smoked something and felt like the “I” that didn’t even really exist anymore would be stuck in this altered dimension for all eternity. 

The powerful effect that psychedelics can have on our consciousness and the relationship with time perception might be an indicator of how important time is to consciousness itself. Our experiences aren’t just static, and it seems quite clear that they flow through a series of moments, from engaging with past memories to predicting the future to being present in our current experiences. 

The Default Mode Network area of our brain plays a role in how we process information as our experiences flow through this series of moments, and psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin can have an impact on the synchronisation of this region, which can alter our perception of time. This network has often been thought of as the controlling region of the brain where everything is kept in order – psychedelics have the potential to disrupt this order, where the brain is more chaotic, and our perception of everything, including time, can be radically altered. 

But are there other substances which are consumed more frequently than psychedelics that might impact our perception of time? 

I’m sure everyone who has consumed cannabis has, at some point, found their short-term memory to be impaired. Cannabis consumers have often been regarded as being forgetful and sort of existing on their own time. 

This seems to happen over a number of different cognitive domains, including learning and episodic memory, attention control, and motor inhibition. The research is lacking in regard to the long-term impact of cannabis consumption, but these effects on memory seem to be apparent when it comes to short-term consumption. This is more than likely due to the developing tolerance that long-term cannabis consumers have, where they have probably got used to the level of impairment and effectively trained their mind to deal with any short-term memory issues. The effects that cannabis can have on our short-term memory might potentially impact our perception of time regarding how we process a series of events or pay attention to the flow of time itself. 

Reports from the Club des Hashischins (Club of the Hashish-eaters), a Parisian group of explorers of drug-induced experiences in the 1800s, often described how the consumption of hash in large doses would often result in the perception of time slowing down. One of the founding members, Charles Baudelaire, wrote of his experiences that: 

a new stream of ideas carries you away: it will hurl you along in its living vortex for a further minute; and this minute, too, will be an eternity, for the normal relation between time and the individual has been completely upset by the multitude and intensity of sensations and ideas. You seem to live several men’s lives in the space of an hour.

It seems like cannabis has the potential to slow down our perception of time, but what about substances which speed it up? 

One of the last times I took MDMA was at a house party in 2019, where I totally lost 5 hours of time from about midnight until 5 AM. This wasn’t the first time I’d experienced this, and probably every experience I’ve had with it has involved a level of time acceleration to some degree or another. 

MDMA and other stimulants can potentially alter our perception of time in a few different ways – it might be that these kinds of drugs turn our attention away from the passing of time, in a “time flies when you’re having fun” fashion, where it’s the total opposite of clock-watching when we’re utterly bored. If we’re taking these drugs at somewhere like a rave, festival, or even just a house party, there’s a lot of external stimulation going on as well as the internal stimulation from the drugs. The release of serotonin during an MDMA experience seems to be what’s behind the feeling of time having passed by so quickly.

It always seemed to come as a shock when it was time to leave somewhere, and I often got a sense of being cheated by time or that it didn’t really exist. I often longed to experience these profound moments of encountering people or music, and I always wished things didn’t fly by so quickly. But maybe here’s where the lesson is…to appreciate the magic you can experience with something like MDMA without trying to hold onto it too much. 

Other stimulants, such as cocaine or methamphetamine, can also impact our perception of time in possibly less of a joyful manner compared to MDMA. Research has shown that stimulant-dependent individuals might experience time distortions and misperceptions due to altered function in areas of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex and striatal dopaminergic circuits, which are involved in temporal processing and motor timing. 

So we’ve looked at some drugs which could either stretch and slow down time, and ones which could potentially speed it up. But are there other experiences where time seems to just be absent or collapse in on itself?

One of the most popular dissociatives, ketamine, seems to impact our perception of the flow of time itself. Research has shown that this substance might selectively impair the way in which information is temporally manipulated within the working memory, which leads to a distortion in time. 

My personal experiences with ketamine have made time feel more or less irrelevant, where there doesn’t necessarily seem to be any perception of something passing or moving through time. The dissociative nature of ketamine might cause us to do away with the reference points relating to sequential events within our experience. If the “I” is no longer so present, then there might not be any sense of the temporal flow, as to think about the “I” being somewhere before and now being somewhere else might be a totally useless thing to conceive of under the influence of ketamine. 

Dissociative drugs such as ketamine or nitrous oxide can seriously fragment our perception of time, where things might unfold in a non-linear fashion, or where we might experience different realities or entire lifetimes where time itself simply vanishes. 

But is our perception of time simply limited to brain function? 

The 19th-century philosopher Henri Bergson challenged the flow of time itself, arguing that life is simply made up of different moments which we string together into what we perceive to be a ‘flow’. We think what we’re seeing is continuous moments, but much like the stills which make up a movie, Bergson argued that what we actually perceive is a succession of separate, discrete, spatial constructs. His doctoral thesis, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), put forward the idea that time as we experience it (known as ‘lived’ time) is different from the mechanistic time of science, and to think that one can measure real durations by counting between these separate moments is an illusion, noting, “We give a mechanical explanation of a fact and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself.”

Time might not be what we think it is, and some practices within cross-cultural shamanic traditions have utilised the flexible perception of time to allow for healing in non-linear fashions, where we might be able to ‘travel’ to areas in the past or different parts of our reality to heal certain aspects of ourselves in this realm. There is some belief that imbalances and illnesses are a result of ‘soul-loss’, and shamans can engage with the concept of 'soul-retrival’, where they travel to the spirit world to reunite the soul with the physical body. This nonlinear perception of time can allow for quite profound healing, especially when combined with psychedelic plants or fungi. 

Do these ways of looking at time allow us to take a more malleable perspective, especially under the influence of drugs?

It might not be that drugs necessarily ‘distort’ time, but more so that they allow us to play with the concept of it, revealing its subjective nature and allowing us to see where the flexibility can be useful. If we are simply existing within spatial constructs that are simply joined up together to provide the illusion of a flow, then certain drugs might allow us to explore things we thought were lost to the past, or parts of ourselves that could exist in the future. They can also allow us to be more in the present without distractions, where small moments feel like eternities, and I think psychedelics in particular have a real potential to allow for this kind of exploration. 

We might often feel like time is running away from us in our daily lives, and I certainly notice this the older I get – but the more I can engage with positive experiences with certain plants or fungi, I’m able to slow down and take notice of everything, where there feels like all the time in the world.

Oli is one of our community bloggers here at Chemical Collective. If you’re interested in joining our blogging team and getting paid to write about subjects you’re passionate about, please reach out to Sam via email at [email protected]