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Ghufran ali khan

Ghufran ali khan

I write about productivity, self-improvement, habits, and the ideas that help us work smarter and live better.

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The Strange Way Your Brain Experiences Time

2 min readOct 12, 2026
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Photo by Enrico Da Prato on Unsplash

The unusual way your brain handles time.

Have you ever noticed that five minutes went by, you looked at the clock and realized an hour had passed? Spent an entire day doing something fun without realizing the time passing?The unusual way your brain handles time.

Time passes at the same rate, but how you perceive it does not. The weird thing is that there isn’t a single, perfect clock in your brain.

Consider being in a dull class. Imagine being in a dull class. You look at the clock, listen for a while, and check again. Somehow, only three minutes have gone by. However, when you are engaged in a game, talking with someone you like or watching an interesting movie, hours can go by without you realizing it.

One of the reasons is attention.

When life is boring, one way to be more conscious of the passage of time is to pay attention to it. You are aware of each and every minute, as there is little else in your mind. If you’re engrossed in an activity, you lose track of time, causing it to fly by.

However, there’s another twist. Time can seem so different when lived than when remembered. Think about a day that you don’t do anything special. It may seem long as you’re going through it, but once you’re done, you probably won’t remember much.

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Ghufran ali khan
Ghufran ali khan

Written by Ghufran ali khan

I write about productivity, self-improvement, habits, and the ideas that help us work smarter and live better.