Many people testify that, when they have reached a certain age, the years ‘fly by’. From the beginning of work life, time passes much faster than when you were a student. Have we got it right?
Naturally, time itself does not “change speed”, but our perception of it. In the V century a. C., Antiphon of Athens wrote that time is “a concept or a measure.” For physics, time can be defined as the magnitude that is used to measure the duration of events. However, since time is part, we believe, of a fabric, space-time, in a way, one could consider that time exists only in our mind.
And, what is this subjective distortion of the, also called, fourth dimension due to?
Depending on the activity we develop at a given moment, the people we surround ourselves with or even our age, it will seem to us that time passes very slowly or that it flies by. Among the experiences that modify the perception of time is motivation.
When we feel stimulated and try to achieve a specific and desired goal, especially if we have the firm hope of achieving it and if it responds to a basic need, such as eating or drinking, time slides by at full speed. According to a study by the University of Alabama published in Psychological Science, this phenomenon is due to the fact that in these circumstances the processes of memory and attention are minimized, to remove irrelevant thoughts and emotions.
For his part, the psychologist Steve Taylor, a researcher at the John Moores University of Liverpool, in the United Kingdom, argues that the perception of the passage of time is largely conditioned by the amount of information we process. Thus, it passes more slowly for children because they are very attentive to what is happening around them. They experience many things for the first time, forcing them to constantly assimilate a wealth of information.
However, for adults there is little new in everyday experiences , they have become used to the world and everything is familiar, according to Taylor. Hence, a year lived after fifty seems much shorter than twelve months of childhood or adolescence.
This effect is even more noticeable in accident victims, who often describe these traumatic situations as if they had happened in slow motion. But it is not because time passed more slowly in their brains, as neuroscientist David Eagleman, of the Baylor College of Medicine, in Texas, has shown, but because of a memory trick.
When an experience scares us, an area of the brain called the amygdala comes into play, which causes more memories to be stored than in other types of events. In other words, in critical situations we accumulate a large amount of information in memory in a minimum amount of time. For this reason, terrifying experiences generate richer and denser memories, which make us believe that the time elapsed was greater.
