UCI News

Why dates and times seem to lose their meaning

The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 7, 2022

October 7, 2022

Why dates and times seem to lose their meaning

“One of the most fundamental and important and underlying principles, so critical to our ability to function, is we have a sense of the flow of time,” said Alison Holman, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine. She has recently published research showing a majority of Americans likely experienced at least some temporal disintegration during the pandemic era. That finding, she said, could hamper recovery from the pandemic: “When people have a really disrupted sense of time, they have a hard time moving on. They have a hard time focusing on getting back into their lives and rebuilding their sense of future.”