Oct 23, 2026 · 50 min
Your heart and attention can bend time
How we experience time
The episode shows that felt time is not a fixed inner clock but a changing construction shaped by bodily signals, attention, emotion, music, and habit.
- 1Heartbeats, stress, novelty, attention, and meditation can change how long moments feel.
- 2Active listening can absorb attention so completely that elapsed time disappears into rhythm, melody, texture, and visual focus.
- 3A habitual orientation toward the past, present, or future influences behavior, morality, and how people move through life.
Don't miss
Irena Arslanova explains how stimuli presented during heart contractions can seem shorter, revealing the body’s role in constructing time.
The brief
Katie Paterson opens the episode with art that stretches beyond human scale, from a hydrophone inside an Icelandic glacier to music bounced off the moon.
Cognitive neuroscientist Irena Arslanova explains how the brain uses bodily signals to construct time, with heart contractions, stress, novelty, attention, and meditation changing its felt passage.
Conductor Robert Franz shows how rhythm, melody, texture, and visual attention can pull listeners so deeply into music that hours feel like minutes.
Philip Zimbardo connects time perspective to behavior and morality, examining how people and cultures habitually orient themselves toward the past, present, or future.
The episode’s central tension is that time is physically measurable yet psychologically elastic, expanding across geological eras and disappearing inside an absorbed moment.
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