Walk a mile with 20 balloons

Matt Danzico, a full-time journalist with the BBC News, is the force behind a charming project called: TheTimeHack.com. It is an experiment aimed at exploring whether our perception of time is influenced by our actions. Each day, Matt engages in a new experience to understand how his perception of time speeds and slows in relation to each event. Can he accurately gauge how long each new experience lasted? Does he remember the details of the new experiences more accurately than repetitive events during the day?

Research suggests a person’s perception of how much time has passed between two points and how well memories are recorded onto an individual’s brain are partially dependent on the amount of new experiences that person has during any given day. Experts argue that when one engages in a new experience, that person’s perception of time differs from when that individual engages in a mundane or repetitive task.

He records each experience with the help of a stopwatch, a camera and, at times, a video camera. This documentation is then uploaded to the web and archived through the project’s Twitter and Vimeo accounts, both of which he is prohibited from viewing.

I especially like his Day 10 experiment, in which he walked a mile with 20 balloons.

www.thetimehack.com: A web-based effort to challenge one person’s perception of time through new and unusual experiences.

(Thank you Liz)