For complex beings, humans aren't that great at perceiving time. We're especially bad at measuring time in the short term – seconds, minutes and hours. Our sense of how much time is passing is subjective, easily biased by other things that are going on around us, our mood or what we're doing at the time.
This leads to a lot of odd phenomena, including the "return trip effect." You're probably familiar with the sensation: When you go to an unfamiliar destination and come back again, it often seems like the way back takes less time than the initial trip, even though you traveled the same distance.
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Now, new research published in the journal PLOS ONE adds weight to the idea that the return trip effect actually exists.