Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles reported on May 4 that dopamine signaling in the brain could affect how people remember the passage of time during events. The study, published in Nature Communications, found that when a key dopamine-producing area known as the ventral tegmental area was strongly activated at the start of a new event, participants later recalled those moments as having lasted longer.
This research is significant because it sheds light on how our brains break up continuous experiences into distinct memories and why our perception of time can differ from actual elapsed time. Understanding this process could help explain why certain periods feel stretched or compressed in memory.
The team observed volunteers inside an MRI scanner while they looked at images paired with repeated tones. When a tone switched to signal a new event boundary, both blinking rates and activation in the ventral tegmental area increased—both linked to dopamine activity. Participants later judged images separated by these boundaries as further apart in time than they actually were. “Dopamine is often talked about in the media as a chemical that makes things feel rewarding… But the dopamine system in our brain also responds strongly to novelty and change,” said first author and UCLA doctoral student Erin Morrow. “We found that activation of the dopamine system at the beginning of a new event is likely one of the ways that our brain segments experiences into memorable episodes.” Morrow also said, “The purpose of memory is not always to reconstruct the past completely accurately… It helps us remember past experiences in the most useful way possible so that we can change our future behavior.”
UCLA psychology professor David Clewett said, “Time is often treated as a physical dimension… But in psychology, time isn’t fixed. It’s something the brain constructs and is shaped by experience.” Clewett added, “Perhaps most importantly, our findings suggest that we don’t simply move through time… It is something we help create. By embracing change and variety, we expand our memories and, in that sense, expand our lives.”
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While these findings highlight possible mechanisms for how memories are formed based on changes or novel events—and their relationship with dopamine—the researchers note limitations such as not being able to directly measure dopamine release or establish causation from these scans alone.
