Why the trip home always seems shorter

Dear Matthew Alice: From a perceptual point of view, the trip home from a destination always seems shorter. Anything to it? — Sugar Van Tassel, San Diego

Definitely. Scientists have studied this phenomenon, and their data match your hunch. Mostly they looked at trips to places people hadn’t been to before. So if your daily commute seems faster coming home...well, you’re not commuting my route, that’s for sure.

After all their poking and probing, the science guys concluded that the more external information we have to process, the slower time seems to move. When we’re bombarded with visual and auditory stimuli, five minutes can seem like ten, apparendy. Driving to a new destination or driving a new route to an old destination, we’re more aware of the new things around us, especially if we’re looking for route numbers and turnoffs and landmarks. Going home, the route is at least a little familiar, we don’t have to examine it quite so closely, so we have less to process, and time glides by. It occurs to me that die anticipation of reaching some interesting destination may make things drag — a sort of “watched pot” phenomenon. But none of this explains why time moves glacially when we’re sitting around, comatose, waiting for our food in a restaurant or why we only seem to have ten minutes for that one-hour final exam. If the science guys track down those answers, I’ll let you know.

Apologies to JAP and Jan Steudtel for any confusion in the “restaurant check vs. bill” reply two weeks ago. Somewhere in the sludgy digital pipeline, I guess the file exploded. Once the smoke cleared and we retrieved the pieces, they were reassembled a little too creatively. That may have obscured the profound wisdom in the answer. As a disciplinary measure, I have the all elves locked in a small room until they complete a 3000-piece jigsaw puzzle titled “Mist Over Mashed Potatoes.” I’m unmoved by their whimpering. Periodically, they get Twinkies and Gatorade to keep their spirits up. I’m stern, but I’m fair.