Ever heard of getting a “dopamine hit” from something you enjoy? These exciting moments also appear to influence memory, although perhaps not in the way you’d expect.

New research by UCLA psychologists suggests your brain may use dopamine to distort and expand time between distinct events, separating the flow of experience into pieces that can be flexibly reconstructed in the future.

The study, published in Nature Communications, found that a key dopamine-producing area of the brain—the ventral tegmental area—was activated when volunteers participating in an MRI scan detected the start of a new event. Importantly, when this dopamine hub was strongly activated, people reported more time had passed. The researchers also found that when people blinked more during a new event—an action thought to be related to dopamine signaling—their memory for time once again expanded.