“Physical time is not mind time,” as mechanical engineering professor and author of Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies, Adrian Bejan, puts it. “The time that you perceive is not the same as the time perceived by another.”
One side of the equation in explaining this phenomenon is physiological. Remember as a kid when the summer holidays felt elastic, a never-ending wad of chewing gum that kept on extending as hours melted away on lazy afternoons? There’s an actual science behind that. “The brain receives fewer images than it was trained to receive when young,” argues Bejan. He theorises that the rate at which we process visual information slows down as we age; as the size and complexity of the networks of neurons in our brains increase, the electrical signals must travel greater distances, leading to slower signal processing. The result? We perceive fewer “frames-per-second” as we get older, and therefore time feels like it’s passing quicker. It’s like a flipbook – the fewer the number of pictures, the quicker you flick to the end.
“People are often amazed at how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth,” he said. “It’s not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful, it’s just that they were being processed in rapid fire.”
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The older we get, the more likely it is that we’re clocking up fewer and fewer new experiences with each year that passes. This is partly because, naturally, the more stuff we experience, the less new stuff there is to experience. But part of it is due to human nature; with age, we can become increasingly stuck in old habits, overly comfortable with the familiar and unwilling to pursue novelty or challenge ourselves to step into the unknown. Even trying a new food can feel like a bridge too far.
If we’re doing the same things week-in, week-out though, we’re not presenting our brains with anything juicy or remarkable to hang on to. With few fresh memories made, weeks blend into months, blend into years, with little to differentiate them. Time has, to all intents and purposes, sped up.
Conversely, when we remember a period packed with events, it “makes it seem like time stretches out... and it feels very long”, according to Cindy Lustig, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
Routine is the enemy of expanding your time; shifting things up, whether it’s simply walking a new way to the shop, dabbling in a new hobby or branching out and listening to a different kind of music, could be the key to elongating each year rather than looking back on an increasingly ill-defined blur.
Read the full article on Independent.
