Learn

Temvo is a game about a sense most people never think about until they test it. These guides are the background: what the research says about how humans time things, why the same interval feels different depending on what you were doing, and what actually makes you better at it.

None of it is required reading. You can play the game perfectly well without knowing that psychologists argue about pacemakers and accumulators. But most people, after a few runs, want to know why they keep overshooting the long intervals and undershooting the short ones, and that turns out to have an answer.

The guides

• 7 min readHow your brain keeps timeThere is no clock organ. So what is doing the counting when you judge ten seconds?
• 6 min readWhy time flies when you're having funThe same ten seconds can feel like four or like thirty. Attention is the reason.
• 6 min readWhy time speeds up as you get olderEveryone over thirty says the years are shorter. The explanations are better than the cliché.
• 8 min readHow to improve your sense of timeTiming is trainable, but only in a narrow way. Here's what transfers and what doesn't.
• 7 min readThe science of keeping a beatTapping along is easy. Holding the beat once the music stops is a different skill.
• 6 min readReaction time vs anticipationReacting to a cue costs you a fifth of a second. Anticipating it costs nothing.

Where to start

If you've just played a run and want to know why you scored what you scored, start with how your brain keeps time. If you want to get better rather than understand why, how to improve your sense of time is the practical one, and it's the only guide here that will change your score this week.

For how the game turns your accuracy into a number, see Scoring. For everything else, the FAQ.