The quarter-of-a-second rule

Mother Jonesexcerpts my brief essay on the malleability of our sense of time, “The Patience Deficit,” from the anthology What Should We Be Worried About?Here’s the essay’s first paragraph:

I’m concerned about time — the way we’re warping it and it’s warping us. Human beings, like other animals, seem to have remarkably accurate internal clocks. Take away our wristwatches and our cell phones and we can still make pretty good estimates about time intervals. But that faculty can also be easily dis...