The Temporal Doppler Effect

The Temporal Doppler effect, so called, can be defined as a personal perception that events in the future seem closer than those in the past. Research conducted by psychological scientist Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and colleagues and published in Psychological Science, has shown that you tend to feel closer to the future because you sense you are moving toward it. There has been an implicit assumption that distance to the past is the same as distance to the future. And although philosophers may continue to debate the directionality of time, Caruso’s studies suggest that your subjective experience of time is clearly directional and that there is a systematic difference in people’s perceptions of distance to the past and the future.