Anaesthetics and time perception: A review

Abstract

Consciousness requires subjective experience in the ‘now.’ Establishing ‘now’ however necessitates temporal processing. In the current article, we review one method of altering consciousness, anaesthetic drug administration, and its effects on perceived duration. We searched PubMed, PsycInfo and ScienceDirect databases, and article reference sections, for combinations of anaesthetic drugs and time perception tasks, finding a total of 36 articles which met our inclusion criteria. We categorised these articles with regards to whether they altered the felt passage of time, short or long interval timing, or were motor timing tasks. We found that various drugs alter the perceived passage of time; ketamine makes time subjectively slow down while GABA-ergic drugs make time subjectively speed up. At short interval there is little established evidence of a shift in time perception, though temporal estimates appear more variable. Similarly, when asked to use time to optimize responses (i.e. in motor timing tasks), various anaesthetic agents make timing more variable. Longer durations are estimated as lasting longer than their objective duration, though there is some variation across articles in this regard. We conclude by proposing further experiments to examine time perception under altered states of consciousness and ask whether it is possible to perceive the passage of time of events which do not necessarily reach the level of conscious perception. The variety of methods used raises the need for more systematic investigations of time perception under anaesthesia. We encourage future investigations into the overlap of consciousness and time perception to advance both fields.