MIKE HALL has taught himself to stretch time. He uses his powers to make him a better squash player. “It’s hard to describe, but it’s a feeling of stillness, like I’m not trapped in sequential time any more,” he says. “The ball still darts around, but it moves around the court at different speeds depending on the circumstances. It’s like I’ve stepped out of linear time.”

Hall, a sports coach from Edinburgh, UK, is talking about a state of mind known as “the zone”. He puts his abilities down to 12 years of studying the martial art t’ai chi, and now makes a living teaching other sportspeople how to “go faster by going slower”.

For most people, getting into “the zone” at work or home isn’t a realistic option. But the idea of stretching time – or at least having more control over its frantic pace – is an attractive one (see “Slow living”). And there may be things we can do. There is a growing understanding of how our brains measure the passage of time, and it turns out we have more conscious control over it than previously thought.

Biologists traditionally divide our timekeeping abilities into three domains. At one end are circadian rhythms, which control things such as sleep and wakefulness over the 24-hour period. At the other end is millisecond timing, which is involved in fine motor tasks. The middle ground – the seconds-to-minutes range – is known as “interval timing”. This is the system through which we consciously perceive the passage of time.

Until recently, interval timing was something of a psychological backwater, says John Wearden of Keele University …