How the pandemic messed with our perception of time

Oshan Jarow at Vox:

It’s tempting to imagine memory as a videotape that stores and plays back the past just as it happened. But the workings of the mind are not so simple. Memory is more of a creative act, reconstructing the past under the often hasty and biased influences of the present.

The “creation” of memory doesn’t only influence what we remember, it influences our sense of time’s duration too. Having more memories available for recall can stretch our sense of how much time has passed, while our moods and emotions can tune the richness of what we remember up or down.

This all means news, current events, and the technologies that convey them (like the internet) can influence our perception of time passing slowly or quickly, by influencing how strongly we remember things.

More here.