Everyone’s perception of time is unique. It is a subjective experience shaped by factors such as age, emotions, memory and environmental contexts. And it may also be influenced by background noise, as scientists have demonstrated in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Previous research has shown that approaching noise can stretch our perception of time. But in this paper, researchers in Japan discovered that even when people were concentrating on a different sound, moving sounds in the background still changed their sense of time.