The Brain’s Inner Clock Runs Long in OCD, Study of Minute Estimation Finds

Time is the one dimension of experience that no instrument can measure for us directly. Clocks tick in the external world, but the feeling of a minute passing is generated entirely inside the brain, assembled from attention, memory, emotion, and the slow drift of bodily signals. A new study published in Current Psychology by Pavel Safronov, Galina Portnova, Guzal Khayrullina, Olga Sysoeva, and Olga Martynova of the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences asks a deceptively simple question: when people with psychiatric conditions are asked to feel out a minute without counting, does their internal clock run at the same speed as everyone else’s? The answer, drawn from 179 participants, suggests that the answer depends on the diagnosis, and that obsessive-compulsive disorder leaves a measurable imprint on how the brain accumulates duration.

The experiment centered on what researchers call a subjective minute production task. Participants were asked to indicate when they believed sixty seconds had elapsed, first with their eyes open and then with their eyes closed. Crucially, they were instructed not to count, because counting converts the task from a felt sense of duration into a deliberate cognitive calculation. The production paradigm is one of the cleanest windows into interval timing: if a person signals that a minute has passed only after ninety real seconds, their subjective minute is stretched, meaning their internal accumulator is filling more slowly than the external clock. If they signal at forty-five seconds, their inner clock is running fast. Three groups took part: patients with remitted depressive disorder, patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and neurotypical controls.

The headline finding was a statistically significant main effect of diagnostic group on the length of the produced minute. Descriptively, the pattern was striking in its ordering: the OCD group produced the longest subjective minutes, the neurotypical group the shortest, and the depression group fell numerically in between. The statistical effect was driven specifically by a pronounced overproduction in the OCD group relative to the controls. In other words, people with OCD needed more real time to experience a minute as complete, a sign that their internal timing mechanism accumulates temporal information at a slower rate. Notably, this distortion held steady across both sensory conditions, whether participants sat with eyes open taking in the room or eyes closed in darkness, indicating that the effect is not an artifact of visual attention or environmental distraction but reflects something more fundamental in the timing system itself.

Perhaps the most intriguing result was what did not reach significance. The depressed group did not differ significantly from controls, nor from the OCD group. This is a nuanced outcome, because depression has long been associated with altered time experience. A well-known 2015 meta-analysis by Thönes and Oberfeld found that depression distorts time perception in specific ways, and earlier work by the same Russian team, published in 2023 in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, reported a lower loss rate in a serotonergically modulated neuronal accumulator for time in patients with major depressive disorder. The authors of the new study are careful to caution that these null findings should be interpreted with restraint, because the study had limited statistical power to detect small effects. A real but subtle difference between the depression and control groups could easily have escaped detection at this sample size, a reminder that absence of evidence in psychophysics is rarely evidence of absence.

Why would OCD stretch the subjective minute? The leading hypothesis points to the neurochemistry and circuitry of the disorder. OCD is characterized by dysfunction in cortico-striatal loops, the recurrent pathways linking the prefrontal cortex with the basal ganglia that are implicated in habit formation, error monitoring, and the sense of when to stop a behavior. Interval timing in the seconds-to-minutes range is itself thought to depend on striatal circuits, in which dopamine signals act as a gating mechanism that lets pulses from a pacemaker-like process accumulate. Serotonin also modulates timing, as a 2024 systematic review of the serotonergic system’s role in time perception documented. Given that both dopamine and serotonin systems are implicated in OCD, and that glutamate, described in one review as a forgotten target for interval timing, is increasingly central to OCD research, a slowed internal accumulator in OCD fits a coherent neurophysiological picture rather than standing as an isolated curiosity.

The study also probed what predicts individual differences within each diagnostic group, and here the results diverged sharply by condition. In the depression group, maladaptive stress coping predicted time overestimation, meaning that patients who coped poorly with stress tended to stretch their subjective minutes further. Pharmacotherapy showed no effect, so the distortions were not simply a byproduct of medication. Autonomic dysfunction and a history of psychological trauma likewise showed no measurable influence. This dissociation is theoretically important: it suggests that in depression, the experience of time is modulated less by the core illness biology or its treatment and more by psychological resources for handling stress, whereas in OCD, the timing distortion appears tied to the disorder’s neurophysiology itself. Emotion is known to color time perception, as Droit-Volet and Meck argued in their influential 2007 review, and stress coping may represent one channel through which emotional regulation shapes the felt flow of duration.

The eyes-open and eyes-closed manipulation deserves attention in its own right. Recent EEG source analysis work by Proshina, Mitiureva, and Sysoeva, published in 2024 in Frontiers in Neuroscience, showed that distinct brain systems are engaged when people estimate a subjective minute with eyes open versus closed, with visual input recruiting different cortical networks than introspective darkness. The fact that the OCD-related overproduction appeared in both conditions strengthens the case that the effect reflects a core timing deficit rather than condition-specific attentional strategies. It also demonstrates the robustness of the subjective minute as a behavioral measure: whatever the sensory context, the internal accumulator in OCD runs slow, and the consistency across conditions makes the finding harder to dismiss as a testing artifact.

The theoretical framing of the study draws on models of internal time representation such as the dual klepsydra model proposed by Wackermann and Ehm, which treats timing as the flow and accumulation of a biophysical resource rather than the ticking of a literal pacemaker. In such frameworks, psychiatric conditions that alter arousal, neurochemistry, or the gain of cortical networks would be expected to alter the rate of accumulation, and therefore the mapping between subjective and physical duration. Matthews and Meck’s broader account of temporal cognition connects subjective time to perception, attention, and memory, and the present findings add clinical psychiatry to that list of connective tissue. A behavioral signature like minute overproduction is valuable precisely because it is cheap to measure, requires no imaging equipment, and could in principle complement existing diagnostic assessments.

The clinical implications are tentative but real. OCD is a condition in which patients constantly struggle with the feeling that something is not yet finished, that a check must be repeated, that a ritual must run its course. A slowed internal accumulator offers a speculative but testable bridge between that phenomenology and its neural substrate: if the brain’s sense of completion in time arrives late, behaviors oriented toward closure might be correspondingly prolonged. The authors position subjective minute overproduction as a candidate behavioral signature of OCD-related neurophysiological dysfunction, a phrase that signals their intent for the measure to be validated in future work rather than treated as a finished diagnostic tool. For depression, the finding that stress coping, not medication or trauma, modulates temporal experience suggests that therapeutic work on coping strategies might have downstream effects on how depressed patients experience the passage of their days.

What makes this study resonate beyond the clinic is the reminder it offers about the constructed nature of time. Every reader who has watched a minute crawl during anxiety or vanish during absorption is already familiar with the plasticity of subjective duration. What this research adds is specificity: the plasticity is not random, it differs systematically across psychiatric conditions, it survives changes in sensory context, and it correlates with measurable psychological traits like coping style. With 179 participants, two sensory conditions, and three carefully defined groups, the study provides one of the more direct comparisons to date of interval timing across depression and OCD. The caveats about statistical power for the depression findings are honest and appropriate, and they define the next experiment almost by themselves: larger samples, and ideally longitudinal designs that track whether the subjective minute normalizes as symptoms remit. Until then, the study stands as evidence that the inner clock is not merely a metaphor, but a measurable physiological system that mental illness can visibly bend.

Subject of Research: Subjective time perception and minute production in depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder

Article Title: Subjective time perception in depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder

Article References: Safronov, P., Portnova, G., Khayrullina, G., Sysoeva, O., & Martynova, O. (2026). Subjective time perception in depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1472. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10039-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10039-2

Keywords: time perception, subjective minute, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressive disorder, interval timing, cortico-striatal circuits, serotonin, dopamine, stress coping, psychiatry, neurophysiology, Current Psychology