Tick, tock, tick - Hugs and life in 3 second intervals

And an icebear hug. Have you timed this?

Have you timed you hugs. I've not. As in stock brokerage - timing is everything. You should definetly read this, and also rest of the post.

A post from Psycology today by Adi Jaffe, Ph.D. has the whole story. Here is a part:

Have you ever timed your hugs? Your kisses? How about the lengths of your inhales and exhales? 

Would you be surprised if I told you they're all about as long? How about if I told you that most other animals seem to experience life using roughly the same time window we're apparently looking through?

A moment = about 3 seconds

Our 3 second window into life seems to influence not only specific behaviors or activities but rather the entire way in which we perceive our world. A recent study published in the Journal of Ethology examined the duration of hugs given and received by Olympic athletes in the recent 2008 Olympic Games. The sample was pretty comprehensive including 89 men and 96 women, athlete-athlete and athlete-coach embraces, and teammate embraces as well as competitor hugs. The researchers used frame by frame analysis to examine just how long each embrace lasted and then conducted the usual analysis to see which factors affected how long embraces and touches lasted. 

The overall average per hug was 3.2 second with a standard deviation of 3.2 seconds. Further analysis revealed that the only significant differences betweeen hug lengths had to do with athletes hugging their coaches (3.8 seconds) for significantly longer than their competitors (1.8 second), which is pretty much to be expected I guess given the setting. Apparently even within our usual confines, subtle differences reflect underlying intentions. 

These findings fall in line with a whole slew of research from humans and animals showing that somewhere between 2-5 seconds is the longest window of what we can perceive as an independent event - a moment. Anything longer, or separated by a longer window, is perceived by us as a seperate occurence - close in time, but distinct. 

When we know something is coming, our autonomic system prepares us about 3 seconds ahead of time, which makes sense because that's about how long our vagal nervous system takes to alter our heart rate and breathing. The cool thing about this study is that it extends our knowledge about this time-window to social interactions and not simply to individual experiences. Apparently, our own moment-clock affects the way we interact with others (ever have one of those really long awkward hugs?)