Digital Perception
A recent study looking at the difference between our perception of our smartphone usage and how often and for how long we actually use them found that participants, on average, estimated they used their smartphone 37 times each day when in reality they used their smartphone 87 times a day.
This gap in perceived device-use versus actual device-use isn’t unusual when it comes to our assessment of our own behaviors, especially when such behaviors are generally considered to be non-ideal or anti-social in some way: smoking, drinking, playing video games, and so on.
There are plenty of reasons to subconsciously delude ourselves about our habits when admitting to such habits, even to ourselves, could diminish our social status or our sense of self—who we are, what we value, how others see us.
That said, there's reason to believe that digital distractions have an especially time-distorting effect, whether that distraction is a video game, a news-broadcasting kiosk at the airport, or a social networking app on your smartphone.
There are several reasons why this might be the case.
One potential source of the perceived time-contraction experienced by people after engaging in pixel-based activities could be related to the way our brains store memories.
Most such memories are heavily reliant on data from our sensory organs, and when we lack such data—either because we’re not paying conscious attention, or because we’re absorbed by something that gives us a lot less sensory data than real life, like video games or socializing that takes place online instead of in person—that can make us retroactively underestimate the amount of time we spent doing that thing: we simply didn’t store as much of what happened because we soaked up less sensory information.
It’s also possible that our chemical reward systems are more consistently and intensely triggered in distortion-inducing ways by digitized entertainments because of the nature of those entertainments.
Games on our phones, for instance, have gotten very good at keeping us glued to our screens by pacing out the rewards, allowing us to feel a sense of growth and accomplishment, and making us experience a type of withdrawal from familiar and desirable motions, sounds, vibratory feedback, and other such indications of having done something well when we’re doing other things.
Social networks can stimulate parts of our brains that make us want to maintain awareness of what’s happening in our social environments for both safety and ladder-climbing purposes.
Always-on, always-available networks of this kind can be especially engaging because of what they represent: a simulacrum of real-world social dynamics that we can’t ever really turn off, and which therefore endlessly spark a “fear of missing out” response that can attract all of our available attention.
It’s also possible that the dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins released by these digital activities play a role in our tendency to truncate time while we’re engaged in them.
Dopamine in particular influences our internal sense of chronology, and having more of it in our system can cause us to underestimate how much time has passed: which is part of why “time flies when you're having fun.”
Notably, this is also why such activities tend to feel so addictive, despite not involving synthetic, addictive chemicals like nicotine.
We can get hooked on the release of these internally produced chemicals and underestimate how much time we engage in the behaviors that produce them; a distortion that may support the generation and perpetuation of relevant behavior-based habits.
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