Tobacco causes a feeling of slow time

One test shows that tobacco has the ability to affect people's sense of time.

For decades, some scientists have speculated that addictive substances can alter people's sense of time. Some experts have investigated the relationship between drug use and perceived time, but no research has focused on tobacco.

Laura Cousino Klein, psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), said smokers had a different sense of time than non-smokers. To prove this hypothesis, she and her colleagues conducted a test for 20 people who regularly smoke and 20 who have never smoked. A scientist says 'start' and 'finish' and asks the volunteers to guess how long it takes between the two words.

Initially, both groups correctly guessed the interval between two commands (45 seconds). Experts asked the drug addict to not smoke for a day and then repeated the test. They find the majority of smokers guess wrong. On average, the number of seconds the whole team guessed increased to 67-69 seconds (about 50%).

'The people who are fasting are irritable and they feel time passes more slowly. It's like when you're rushing to work, but you're forced to stop at the intersection because of the red light and it doesn't seem to want to turn green, ' Laura said.

The team thinks that the sense of time deviation is related to feelings of hostility and anger. "The decrease in smokers' ability to perceive time can be one of the reasons why they feel more stressed and unable to focus on anything ," Laura explained.

Laura commented that the levels of some hormones in the blood of drug addicts increase or decrease when they stop smoking and that makes them unable to perceive the time correctly. Some previous studies have shown that cortisol and vasopressin hormones affect our sense of time.