People may fall down the “Facebook hole” far longer than they realize. If that time you spent on social media didn’t seem like an hour, you’re not the only one whose brain was fooled.
Researchers at the University of Kent found that the stimuli from Internet – and Facebook in particular – can distort a person’s time perception because of “attention- and arousal-related mechanisms.”
They found that we lose track of time when we’re online – especially when we’re on Facebook, when we’re prone to experience an “impaired perception of time.”
Imagine that -- Facebook as a mind-bender and time-bender.
General use of the Internet also created the effect, the study found, but not to the degree that Facebook does.
The major finding was that online users underestimated the amount of time they’d been spending on Facebook images more than to general Internet images, but that in both cases time was underestimated.
The findings may suggest that the “times flies” effect lead to the future study of addictive behavior.