For people suffering from depression, hours often seem to pass unbearably slowly. Clinicians refer to this phenomenon as "depressive time dilation", a subjective experience of a slowed down passage of time. Despite patient testimonies, science has yet to discover conclusive proof and biological mechanisms. The study, "Emotional Blunting and Time Estimation in Depression", published in "Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science," by a research team in bioengineering at the University of Pisa and a psychology team at the University of Padua, correlated subjective perception of time and mood to neural mechanisms linked to bodily dynamics, specifically brain and cardiac activity. The study, which included 120 university students (60 with depressive symptoms and 60 healthy people in the control group), sheds light on this dilemma by explaining how the depressed mind interprets time in radically different ways. Researchers used high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor participants' brain activity while they performed a specific task, such as estimating the duration of a time interval after watching videos with neutral or sad emotional content, and then combined the EEG and electrocardiogram (ECG). At the end of the video, a visual cue appeared on the screen, and the participant was asked to estimate the time between the visual cue and the present time. The statistics showed a striking distinction between healthy people and those with depressed symptoms. In healthy individuals, emotions act as a “modulator", while watching sad videos alters the perception of time, as if they were caught in an emotional short circuit. In these individuals, researchers found a significant correlation between time perception and the brain’s beta waves, suggesting that the process had become more purely cognitive or “mechanical,” losing the emotional flexibility typically found in mentally healthy people. As a result, emotions no longer influence the estimation of time."Our results", the researchers add, "indicate that while healthy individuals tend to underestimate the duration of a negative visual stimulus, those with depressive symptoms show no difference in estimation. This is consistent with the hypothesis that depression undermines the functional connection between time perception and emotional perception. Additionally, the retrospective estimate of stimulus duration was substantially correlated with varying brain activity in the two distinct types of subjects, indicating that distinct neurological regions were activated in healthy and depressed subjects. Additionally, we anticipate distinct activation of the brain-heart axis, which implies that the perception of time is dysfunctional in depressed individuals due to bodily neural dynamics".