You know how time can shrink and expand in your brain; there are times at work when I look at my watch and it’s 2:30, and then I look again what seems like hours later and it’s 2:45. (Those are usually Fridays.) But on days when I’m busy, it will be 2:00 before I’ve even had time to think about lunch. Evidently distance is also a flexible concept in the brain, with variables like familiarity with a route and its intrinsic interest playing a role in our perception of how long a distance is. This news story from Nature describes some research into the way people estimate distances and how that’s influenced by their familiarity with a route. It’s interesting that according to this, people generally find an unfamiliar route shorter, but when I’m driving someplace for the first time it usually seems longer going out than coming back (i.e., the route feels longer when it’s less familiar). I have thought that maybe this had to do with not knowing how to judge where I was along the way, so I can’t break the trip up into stages in my mind or watch for milestones, and it winds up seeming longer. But of course I’m just one data point.
The perception of distance varies
