Anxiety Did Not Speed Every Clock
A brain-scan experiment made volunteers anxious while they estimated time. The group did not uniformly lose timing accuracy; awareness of bodily signals may matter more than the simple “fear slows time” story.
The Experiment
Does a threatening moment change the clock inside your head? In an October 2026 Human Brain Mapping study, Gaia Lapomarda and colleagues tested 30 participants in an fMRI scanner. Volunteers reproduced time intervals during alternating safe and threatening blocks; in the latter, an unpleasant scream could arrive unpredictably.
What the Brain and Behaviour Said
The screams raised reported anxiety and recruited regions associated with salience and emotion, including the amygdala, hippocampus and insula. Yet the threatening blocks did not produce a systematic group-wide change in timing accuracy. That is the result to keep, even if the familiar story says fear always warps time.
- Observed: anxiety and neural responses to the scream.
- Not observed: a consistent across-the-group shift in reproduction accuracy under threat.
- Individual difference: participants more accurate at sensing their internal bodily state tended to maintain better timing accuracy when anxious.
The Invisible Dial
The researchers suggest interoception—the ability to detect signals from inside the body—may moderate how anxiety and time estimation relate. That is a measured association in a small experimental sample, not a proven switch that anyone can flip to slow time. The task also cannot recreate every frightening real-world moment.
The strange part is not that clocks are unreliable. It is that people facing the same laboratory threat may read their own passing seconds differently.
The threat registered. A universal time distortion did not.