Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

UnDisciplined: The psychology of time

The UnDisciplined logo features an atom circling a microphone.

It’s a question psychologists have been wrestling with for decades: What exactly is time?

Not the time kept by clocks or calendars, but the time we actually experience. Why do some moments stretch and others collapse?

Martin Wiener has spent much of his career trying to understand those questions. His work suggests that our experience of time is not fixed at all. Instead, it may be something the brain continuously constructs and reshapes according to the information it decides is worth remembering.

Stay Connected
Matthew LaPlante has reported on ritual infanticide in Northern Africa, insurgent warfare in the Middle East, the legacy of genocide in Southeast Asia, and gang violence in Central America. But a few years back, something occurred to him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be so brutally depressing all the time. These days, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects with his work on UnDisciplined — Utah Public Radio's weekly program on science and discovery.