Latest findings by psychologists show that when recalling an exciting recent event people tend to overestimate the time that it lasted. That’s because people tend to remember more when they enjoy something and being able to recall more of the detail leads them to estimate the time elapsed to have been longer than it was.

The findings, published in the online version of the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, resulted from a study of people at a fair in Leuven, Belgium, who were asked to estimate the duration of the fairground rides.

Researchers at the University of Leuven found that the more people rated the rides as exciting, the longer they estimated them to have lasted.