When we were little seemed that summer vacation would last forever and that the waiting time between one Christmas and the following was eternal, Does anyone know why when we get older time flies and weeks, months and seasons disappear calendar at a breakneck pace?
The pace of life typical of adults, full of responsibilities and concerns, distorts our sense of time. According to some research, it is because older people feel that time passes faster, making hasty lives we take full stress.
Theories about the perception of time
There are several theories to explain why our perception of time is accelerating, as we get older and an idea is the gradual alteration of our biological clocks internal: the slowing of our metabolism as we get older is synchronized with the slowdown of our heart rate and our breath. The heart beats stronger child, hence the number of heartbeats and breaths is greater, making it appear that more time has passed.
Another theory suggests that the way we perceive the passage of time is related to the amount of new information perceived to absorb: to have many new stimuli, our brains need more time to process information, making the time seem more long. This would explain the “slow motion perception” of the events just before an accident: the unusual circumstances do you have too much information to consider.
In fact, it may in facing new situations our brains register memories in more detail, hence our reconstruction of events seems slower than the event itself. This has been demonstrated in experiments with people exposed to a free fall.
The unexplored world vs. the world is usual
But how is it that every time time pass faster as we age? The theory suggests that the older we get, the more we get used to our environment. No longer we realize the details of our homes or our workplaces. In the case of children, the world is rather an unexplored place full of possibilities, something that makes children need to work harder with the brain to reconfigure their mental ideas about the outside world. This theory suggests that this is what makes the time pass more slowly for children than for adults engaged in routine.
Hence the more familiar we are with the experiences of everyday life, faster time seems to pass and, generally, familiarity increases with age. The biological mechanism behind this theory is supposed to be the release of dopamine in the perception of new stimuli that help us measure time. From 20 and mature dopamine levels drop, making the time seem to go faster.
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But none of these theories coincides with the almost mathematical and continuous rate of acceleration time. The apparent reduction in the duration of a certain period of time aging suggests a “logarithmic scale” in terms of time. Logarithmic scales are used instead of traditional linear scales when measuring earthquakes or sound. Because the quantities to be measured can vary greatly, we need a major scale measurement to really understand what is happening. This also applies to time.
In the logarithmic Richter scale (for earthquakes), increased magnitude 10 to magnitude 11 does not correspond with an increase in the movement of the earth 10%, as would be the case on a linear scale. Each increment on the Richter scale corresponds to a 10-fold increase in the movement.
Time young children
But why our perception of time would also follow a logarithmic scale? The idea is that we perceive a period of time as the proportion of time that we have lived. In the case of a two years, one year is half of his life, hence when you’re young the time between each birthday seems to be eternal. In the case of a ten years, one year is only 10% of his life (hence the wait for the next birthday more bearable) and in the case of a twenty years, one year is just the 5 %.
In the logarithmic scale, for a 20-year receives the same proportional increase in a child age two years would have to wait to turn 30. Given this view, it is not surprising that the time seems to accelerate the get older.
We tend to think of our lives for decades (20, 30, etc.), suggesting that each period has the same weight. However, in the logarithmic scale we perceive different periods of time as if they have the same duration. According to this theory, we perceive the following differences of age in the same way: from five to ten, from 10 to 20, from 20 to 40 and 40 to 80.
I’d hate to end a depressing note, but the five-year period you had between five and ten years might seem like longer than the period between 40 and 80.
So to get to do things. Time flies, you’re having a good or not and every day flies faster.
