The Curious Case of the Fast Feelers: a Possible Malfunction in a Timing Mechanism for Perceived Happening

Abstract There have been numerous reports of people experiencing events as speeded up or slowed down; for example, other people are perceived moving as if in fast-forward mode. This paper proposes a possible explanation for that. One part of the explanation is an information structure on the subsecond scale that represents recent perceptual history with events located and connected in time by means of time marker information. The other part is a calibration mechanism for updating the time marker information. It is proposed that a perturbation to the calibration mechanism may result in time markers being updated significantly more or less frequently than normal, resulting in apparent speeding or slowing, respectively, of events. Things are perceived not as happening more quickly than normal, which is impossible, but as having happened more quickly than normal, because of the incorrect time marker information in the historical register.