The time of our brain and the time of the clock are two totally different things. Did you know? They flow at variable speeds.
The chronological passage of hours, days and years on clocks and calendars is a constant and measurable phenomenon. However, our perception of time is constantly changing, depending on the activities we do, our age and even how much we rest. Now a study carried out by Duke University mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan and published in the European Review magazine explains the physics behind changing the senses of time and reveals why the years seem to fly by as we we grow older.
Bejan, who in 2018 won the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute for “his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions and for constructive theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific and social systems,” believes that the principles of physics can explain everything.
He has written extensively on how the principles of flow in physics dictate and explain the movement of abstract concepts, such as economics. In this article, he examines the mechanics of the human mind and how it relates to our understanding of time, providing a physical explanation for our changing mental perception as we age.
According to Bejan, who reviewed previous studies in a variety of fields on time, vision, cognition, and mental processing to come to a conclusion, the time we experience represents perceived changes in mental stimuli. It is related to what we see. As the physical processing time of the mental image and the speed of the images change, so does our perception of time. And, in a sense, each of us has our own “mental time” unrelated to the passing of hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars, which are affected by how much rest we have and others. factors.
These changes in stimuli give us a sense of the passage of time. Thus, the present is different from the past because the mental vision has changed, not because someone’s clock is ticking. The “clock time” that ties all live, animate, and inanimate flow systems together is measurable. The day-night period lasts 24 hours on all clocks; however, physical time is not mental time. The time that one perceives is the same that another perceives.
Time passes in the mind’s eye. It is related to the number of mental images that the brain finds and organizes and the state of our brain as we age. As we age, the rate at which changes in mental images are perceived slows due to several transformative physical characteristics, including vision, brain complexity, and subsequently the degradation of the pathways that transmit information. And this change in image processing leads to the feeling that time is speeding up.
This effect is related to saccadic eye movement (rapid unconscious, jerk-like eye movements that occur several times per second). In this movement, the eyes are fixed and the brain processes the visual information it has received. All of this happens unconsciously, without any effort on our part. In human babies, these fixation periods are shorter than in adults.
There is an inversely proportional relationship between stimulus processing and the sense of time acceleration, says Bejan. So when you are young and you experience a lot of fresh stimuli, everything is new, time seems to pass more slowly. As you age, the production of mental images decreases, giving the feeling that time is passing faster.
Fatigue also plays a role. A tired brain cannot transfer information effectively when it tries to see and make sense of visual information simultaneously. It is designed to do these things separately. This is what leads to poor performance in athletes when they are exhausted. His powers of processing are confused and his sense of time is deactivated. They cannot see or respond quickly to new situations.
Another factor in the perceived passage of time is how the brain develops. As the brain and body become more complex and there are more neural connections, the pathways through which information travels become more and more complicated. They branch like a tree and this change in processing influences our experience of time, clarifies the expert.
Finally, the degradation of the brain as we age influences perception. Saccadic eye movement studies in older people show longer latency periods, for example. The time in which the brain processes visual information is lengthened, making it difficult for the elderly to solve complex problems. They “come” more slowly but feel that time passes faster.
Still, we are not entirely prisoners of time. The clocks will continue to tick the hours strictly, the days will pass on the calendar, and the years will seem to fly faster and faster. But if we sleep well and eat well, Bejan says we can alter our perceptions. This, in a sense, slows down the rate at which time passes …
Referencia: “Why the Days Seem Shorter as We Get Older.” Adrian Bejan. European Review, 2019. DOI: 10.1017/S1062798718000741
