“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.”
Plus, the less time we’ve experienced, the greater a proportion of our lives a set period of time actually is. For a four-year-old, a year is a much bigger percentage of their overall lifespan thus far than it is for a 40-year-old – so no wonder it feels longer and more significant.
While there’s not much we can do about these physiological elements, there are other important factors at play that we do have some control over. Another reason that time feels longer when we’re younger is that the brain is programmed to hang on to new experiences, says Bejan – and when we’re young, we’re having new experiences all the time. There’s so much for a child encountering the world afresh to absorb and digest each day. After all, in the beginning, everything we do is the first time we’ve ever done it.
Read the full article on Independent.
