I also have a fascination with this, and studied Neuroscience in my undergrad!

I recall a segment from an episode of Radiolab where Neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the perception of time slowing down when you're falling. 

I also recall reading an essay from Oliver Sack's "River of Consciousness" that was about how people with Tourette's experience time slowed down so much so that they could catch a fly because it moves in their time. And I also vaguely recall reading that for people with Parkinson's, or maybe just older people, they estimate/perceive that time is moving slower than it is. 

Similar to you, I find that the feeling of slowing down time has to do with attention and creating distinct memories. It helps to have novelty, especially with travelling to new places that bring shared experiences with new people. Paying attention in order to write poetry puts me into the perfect space for slowing down time :)

OP, you might want to check out 'Research Summary: The Subjective Experience of Time' (Schukraft, 2020).

We can separate 3 things:

• the feeling of how fast time is passing now
• your estimate of how much time has passed in the past day or year for example
• the actual amount of experiences that happened in the past day or year

I think those three are distinct things (even though they correlate). For example the feeling of the passage of time can be drastically altered with psychedelics - it's possible to feel that time is not passing at all. (Here is a nice video which lists spooky time-effects and speculates how are they produced). But even though that moment may feel like eternity, it's not that there's actually an infinite amount of experience happening.

As for the estimate of the time passed, as you and other commenters noted, it looks to be based on how much memories you have from some time period. So someone with dementia would probably estimate that much less time has passed recently, even if a lot of experiences actually happened.

It's nice to have good memories, but I think what ultimately matters are the actual experiences and their valence and intensity (even if you forget them later).

Still, the things you list sound cool, so thanks for reminding me to do them :)

My first thought was also David Eagleman (How to Slow Down Time) but really most of his lectures and ted/google talks are fascinating, even those outside time perception.

This paper came out today and may be relevant as well, The neural bases for timing of durations at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00623-3