So this summer I had a boring data monkey job and I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts about everything. Anyways, one of my favorites is wnyc radiolab, which is two guys who cover a whole bunch of topics that are super interesting. Some of the ones they've done are on the concept of time. They go around an interview legitimate scientists and put together their knowledge in a 1 hour show. It's actually pretty sweet.
Point is, one of their shows on time has an interview with Oliver Sacks who is this crazy British neurologist who writes popular books about case studies of patients who reveal something about the way the human brain works. In the episode on time, they talked to him about this story of two patients he had that perceived time totally differently from normal people. But the weird part is, not only do they think time is moving faster or slower, they actually act faster or slower based on that.
So there was this one guy who looked like he never really moved. If you left him alone for a long time you would come back and he would be frozen in a slightly different position. What Sacks did was tape him for a period of time and then watched it and sped it up. It turned out he was just like wiping his nose, but it took him all day! And then there was a girl who had the exact opposite problem. She talked so fast you couldn't understand her; she caught a ball with record-breaking fast reflexes. Everything in the world for her was just moving super slow. And this is all because some mechanism in the brain got messed up. Pretty cool.
Here's the link if you want to listed to the show. Oliver Sacks also has a book or article about this, but I can't find it again. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/
