Think, it really was like that in childhood - the summer holidays seemed to have no end, and we had to wait forever for the New Year holidays. So why, over the years, it seems that time is picking up speed: weeks, or even months, pass unnoticed, and the seasons change at such a dizzying speed?
Isn't such an obvious acceleration of time the result of responsibilities and concerns that have piled on us in our adult life? However, in fact, research shows that perceived time does indeed move faster for adults, filling our lives with hassle and bustle.
There are several theories that try to explain why our sense of time accelerates as we get older.
One of them indicates a gradual change in our internal biological clock. The slowing down of metabolic processes in our body, as we get older, corresponds to a slowdown in our pulse and respiration. Biological pacemakers in children pulse faster, which means that their biological parameters (heart rate, respiration) are higher in a set period of time, therefore, it feels and lasts longer.
Another theory suggests that the passage of time that we experience is related to the amount of new information that we perceive. As more new stimuli arise, our brains take longer to process information - thus, this period of time is felt longer. This could explain the “slow perception of reality”, which is often reported to occur seconds before the accident. Faced with unusual circumstances means an avalanche of new information that needs to be processed.
In fact, it may be that when faced with new situations, our brain captures more detailed memories, so that our memory of the event appears more slowly, and not the event itself. That this is true has been demonstrated in an experiment with people experiencing free fall.
But how does all of this explain the continually shrinking perceived time as we age? The theory is that the older we get, the more familiar our environment becomes. We do not notice the details of our environment at home and at work. For children, the world is often an unfamiliar place, where there are many new impressions that can be obtained. This means that children must use significantly more intellectual power to transform their mental ideas about the outside world. This theory suggests that in this way, time passes more slowly for children than for adults who are stuck in the routine of everyday life.
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Thus, the more habitual our daily life becomes, the faster, as it seems to us, time passes, and, as a rule, a habit is formed with age.
It has been suggested that the biochemical mechanism underlying this theory is nothing more than the release of a neurotransmitter hormone when we perceive new stimuli that help us learn to measure time. After 20 and before old age, the level of this hormone of happiness falls, which is why it seems to us that time passes faster.
But still, it seems that none of these theories can explain exactly where the coefficient of time acceleration comes from, which increases almost with mathematical constancy.
The apparent shortening of the length of a given period as we grow older suggests the existence of a "logarithmic scale" in relation to time. Logarithmic scales are used instead of traditional linear scales when measuring earthquake strength or sound volume. Since the quantities we measure can vary and reach enormous degrees, we need a scale with a wider range of measurements in order to really understand what is happening. The same can be said for time.
On the Richter logarithmic scale (for measuring the strength of earthquakes), an increase in magnitude from 10 to 11 differs from an increase in ground vibrations by 10%, which would not show a linear scale. Each point of increase on the Richter scale corresponds to a tenfold increase in oscillation.
Infancy
But why should our perception of time also be measured using a logarithmic scale? The point is that we relate any period of time to a part of life that we have already lived. For two-year-olds, a year is half of their lives, which is why when you are young it seems that birthdays have to wait so long.
For ten-year-olds, a year is only 10% of their life (which makes waiting a little more bearable), and for 20-year-olds it is only 5%. If you take a logarithmic scale, you can see that a 20-year-old would have to wait until he was 30 to experience the same proportional increase in time as a 2-year-old in anticipation of his next birthday. not surprisingly, time seems to accelerate as we get older.
We usually think of our lives on the scale of decades - our 20s, our 30s, and so on - they are presented as equivalent periods. However, if we take a logarithmic scale, then it turns out that we mistakenly perceive different periods of time as periods of the same duration. Within the framework of this theory, the following age periods will be perceived the same: from five to ten, from ten to 20, from 20 to 40 and from 40 to 80 years.
I don’t want to end on a depressing note, but it turns out that your five-year experience, spanning the age of five to ten, is perceived to be equivalent to a period of your life spanning the age of 40 to 80 years.
Well, mind your own business. Time flies, whether you enjoy life or not. And every day it flies faster and faster.
Here is a little more related topic, why we do not remember how we were children
According to Freud
Sigmund Freud drew attention to childhood forgetfulness. In his 1905 work, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he reflected in particular on amnesia, which covers the first five years of a child's life. Freud was convinced that childhood (infantile) amnesia is not a consequence of functional memory disorders, but stems from the desire to prevent early experiences in the child's consciousness - traumas that harm their own "I". The father of psychoanalysis considered such traumas to be experiences associated with cognition of his own body or based on sensory impressions from what he heard or seen. Fragments of memories that can still be observed in the child's mind, Freud called masking.
Activation
The results of a study by scientists from Emory University, Patricia Bayer and Marina Larkina, published in the journal "Memory", confirm the theory about the time of birth of childhood amnesia. According to scientists, its "activation" occurs in all, without exception, the inhabitants of the planet at the age of seven. Scientists conducted a series of experiments involving three-year-old children who were asked to tell their parents about the most vivid experiences. Years later, the researchers returned to the tests: they again invited the same children and asked them to remember what they had said. Five to seven-year-old participants in the experiment were able to recall 60% of what was happening to them before the age of three, while eight to ten-year-olds - no more than 40%. Thus, scientists were able to put forward a hypothesis that childhood amnesia occurs at the age of 7 years.
Habitat
Canadian psychology professor Carol Peterson believes that, among other factors, the environment influences the formation of childhood memories. He was able to confirm his hypothesis as a result of a large-scale experiment in which Canadian and Chinese children took part. They were asked to recall in four minutes the most vivid memories of the first years of life. Twice as many events have come to life in the memory of Canadian children than in the memory of Chinese children. It is also interesting that Canadians mostly recalled personal stories, while the Chinese shared memories of which their family or peer group was complicit.
Guilty without guilt?
Specialists at the Ohio State Research University Medical Center believe that children cannot reconcile their memories with a specific place and time, so at a later age it becomes impossible to recover episodes from their own childhood. While discovering the world for himself, the child does not bother himself by linking what is happening to temporal or spatial criteria. According to study co-author Simon Dennis, children do not feel the need to remember events along with "overlapping circumstances." The child may remember about the funny clown in the circus, but he is unlikely to say that the show began at 17.30.
For a long time it was also believed that the reason for forgetting the memories of the first three years of life lies in the inability to associate them with specific words. The child cannot describe what happened due to the lack of speech skills, so his consciousness blocks "unnecessary" information. In 2002, the journal Psychological Science published a study on the relationship between language and child memory. Its authors Gabriel Simcock and Harlene Hein conducted a series of experiments in which they tried to prove that children who have not yet learned to speak are not able to "encode" what is happening to them into memories.
Cells that "erase" memory
Canadian scientist Paul Frankland, who is actively studying the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, disagrees with his colleagues. He believes that the formation of childhood memories takes place in the zone of short-term memory. He insists that young children can remember their childhood, colorfully talk about the events taking place, in which they were recently. However, over time, these memories are "erased." A group of scientists led by Frankland suggested that the loss of infant memories may be associated with an active process of new cell formation, which is called neurogenesis. According to Paul Frankland, it was previously thought that the formation of neurons leads to the formation of new memories, but recent studies have shown that neurogenesis can simultaneously erase information about the past. Why then do people not remember most often the first three years of life? The reason is that this is the most active period of neurogenesis. The neurons then begin to reproduce at a slower rate and leave some of the childhood memories intact.
Empirically
To test their hypothesis, Canadian scientists conducted an experiment on rodents. The mice were housed in a cage with a flooring that was used to send weak electrical discharges. The repeated visit to the cage caused the adult mice to panic even after a month. But young rodents willingly visited the cage the next day. Scientists have also been able to understand how neurogenesis affects memory. To do this, the subjects were artificially induced to accelerate neurogenesis - the mice quickly forgot about the pain that arose when visiting the cage. According to Paul Frankland, neurogenesis is more good than evil, because it helps protect the brain from an overabundance of information.
