Do we have a sense of time?

CrowdScience listener Marie, in Sweden, has always had difficulty with her sense of time. She often thinks that events that happened years ago took place recently or that a holiday coming up is happening sooner than it is. So she wants to know if time is a sense, like the sense of taste or touch, and if it’s something she can learn.

Anand Jagatia talks to scientists who’ve studied time, memory and how our brains process and store the events in our lives to find an answer to Marie’s question.

Along the way he discovers why time speeds up as we get older, how our bodies register time passing and how our brains put everything that happens to us in order.

Featuring:

Dr Marc Wittmann, Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany Dr Maï-Carmen Requena-Komuro, former PhD researcher, Dementia Research Centre, University College London Professor György Buzsáki, Neuroscience Institute, New York University Professor Adrian Bejan, Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University

Presenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Jo Glanville

Sound Design: Julian Wharton

Production Co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris

Image credit: Peter Cade/ Stone/ Getty Images