Why does it feel that time passes faster and faster?

The following is the Why does it feel that time passes faster and faster? recommended by recordtrend.com. And this article belongs to the classification: Life data.

“How time flies…” how many people will sigh about 2021 just ended. I believe many people have this feeling about the passage of time. When I was a child, I had a long day, and I could play with my friends for a long time after school; But now the day is too fast. It’s not early to go home for dinner after work. It’s past zero when you lie down and brush your mobile phone.

Obviously, 24 hours a day has never changed. Why do we feel “time flies” more and more deeply as we grow older?

Age proportion theory

Neurobiologists point out that it is a very common experience for people to have a leisurely childhood and a fast adult.

The reason for such changes is not much related to the passing speed of time itself, but to our ability to perceive time.

But why is it that the older the age, the faster the time seems, rather than reverse it?

In order to explain this problem, the philosopher Paul Janet put forward the age proportion theory, which holds that people’s perception of time is relative, in which the influence of age is very important. With the increase of age, the percentage of unit time in our life decreases, so this period of time becomes relatively fast.

How to understand this theory?

For example, for a 10-year-old child, a year is equivalent to 10% of their life, for a 20-year-old young man, this proportion has rapidly dropped to 5%, while for a 60-year-old man, a year is less than 2% of their life. If calculated as a percentage, the child’s year is naturally longer.

Memory theory

Age is not the only factor that affects our perception of time. Memory also affects our judgment of the length of time.

A common view is that the brain often measures the length of time according to the number of events experienced. When we were children, the brain would receive a lot of new things and ideas every day. These new things stimulated the brain deeply. With a lot of memory points every day, it would appear that the time of the day is very long.

As we grow older, we become more and more familiar with the things around us, life becomes more and more regular, there are fewer and fewer memory points in a day, and the brain lacks fresh stimulation. Naturally, we will feel that time is getting faster.

Similar to this theory is the “holiday paradox”. The so-called “holiday paradox” refers to that when you feel that time passes quickly when you are on vacation, but when you recall this vacation at the end of the vacation, you feel that the vacation is very long.

The reason why we emphasize the “holiday paradox” is that this theory mentions that our judgment on the speed of time is often not based on the experience at that time, but a retrospective judgment made when recalling the past (that is, we are talking about the time in memory).

Our retrospective judgment of time is related to how many memories we created during that time. The brain always tends to encode unfamiliar experiences as memories, and we often come into contact with the most new things from childhood to early adulthood. Therefore, when we look back on the past after adulthood, we will feel that childhood is long.

Brain changes

If we look at the present period of time instead of looking at the past period of time from a retrospective perspective, is there a difference in the perception of objective time between young people and the elderly?

In order to find out this problem, the researchers conducted such an experiment, randomly selected subjects of different ages, asked them to close their eyes, silently count for one minute in their hearts, and then open their eyes to see whether it is consistent with the actual one minute.

The results showed that the young group’s judgment of time was relatively accurate, while the elderly group thought that more than one minute was in the range of 80-90 seconds.

This different understanding of objective time in different age stages can also explain to a certain extent why time becomes faster with age.

Think about it. You feel like you’ve just rested for a minute, but when you look at your watch, one and a half minutes have passed. Do you think time is passing faster?

Why does our perception of time change?

One hypothesis is that this is related to changes in the transmission of nerve signals in the brain.

This view holds that, on the one hand, with the growth of age, the scale and complexity of neural networks in the human brain increase, so the signal transmission between neurons needs to go farther and take longer time; On the other hand, aging will lead to the accumulation of nerve damage, which will block the transmission of electrical signals between neurons, which further increases the time required for the brain to process information.

Combining the above two factors, the actual time for the brain to perceive specific things becomes longer, but the brain does not think it is slowing down, but feels that time is accelerating.

In addition to the above mainstream views, there are many other explanations for why time is getting faster and faster, but most of them are related to people’s memory, age, nerve conduction, subjective emotion and other factors.

Therefore, if you “extend” your time as much as possible (this refers to extending the time in feeling), you should also start from these factors.

Since time is getting faster and faster is actually just a psychological illusion, we can make the brain constantly experience new things and become active by learning new skills, reading widely and making new friends.

These methods can not only enhance your sensitivity to the passage of time, but also make your life more colorful.

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