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While most time perception studies focus on how well we judge durations, there is a second closely related issue to consider. 'Relative timing' refers to our ability to judge whether one event happened before, after, or at the same time as another event. And according to Derek Arnold, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, who studies relative timing, "our ability to distinguish the order of events is quite poor".

In a recent study in the journal Neuron, Eagleman demonstrated how easy our relative timing skills are to manipulate. He asked subjects to press a button that triggered a flash of light, with the flash delayed by about 100 milliseconds. After several presses, the delay was removed – suddenly the subjects felt as though they could see the flash before the button press. "It's an illusory reversal of action and effect," says Eagleman. "Your brain recalibrates its expectations in time."

In fact, Eagleman thinks schizophrenia might be a relative timing disorder. A common symptom of the illness is 'credit misattribution', in which a patient will perform an action and then deny it was their own. "That's exactly what you'd expect if you had an illusory reversal of action and effect, if your timing was a little bit wrong," says Eagleman. Other symptoms might also be explained: "We all talk to ourselves, but if you get the timing wrong you attribute the voice to someone else – that's an auditory hallucination."

When it functions normally, however, the plasticity of our relative timing system – the brain's ability to recalibrate – serves an important evolutionary purpose. When someone speaks to you from a few metres away, since light travels faster than sound, the audio should register a few milliseconds after the sight of their lips moving. But as Arnold explains, our brains synchronise these sensory inputs so our social lives don't play out like a spaghetti western.

Recalibration also helps us learn about cause and effect. "We quite often need to determine the causal relationships between events and doing so can be important for our survival," says Arnold. Think 'snap of twig' coinciding with 'arrival of a hungry lion', or 'request for raise' coinciding with 'look of horror on a boss' face'. "Plasticity in relative timing might have evolved to link pieces of information together, rather than to separate them," he says.

OUR PERCEPTION OF TIME is far from objective, which makes it all the more remarkable that it sometimes appears to us as such. But even deceptions can be illuminating if they give us insight into the machinations of the mind. It's to this end that scientists such as Buhusi, Meck, Eagleman and many others hope to explore the strange world of time distortions.

The rest of us need to satisfy ourselves that time will fly when we want it to crawl, drag when we want it to race, and at the end of the day, we must make the most of it, since there's never quite enough to go round.

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