Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Think back to a summer holiday when you were a child. Six weeks could feel endless. The afternoons seemed to stretch forever, and the next day always felt a long way away.
Now think about the last few months. They may have passed in a blur. You blink, and it is December again. You look up, and another birthday has arrived, quicker than the last.
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This is one of the strange things about getting older: time can feel as though it is speeding up. But the clock is not moving any faster. So why does it feel that way? The answer may lie in the way our brains process new experiences, form memories and judge the passage of time.
WHY DOES TIME FEEL FASTER AS WE GET OLDER?
The short answer is that your brain has seen most of it before.
When we are young, almost everything is happening for the first time. “Young brains are like sponges, absorbing so much information and processing new sights, sounds and experiences,” Dr Athul Vyas V, a specialist in the Department of Geriatrics and Healthy Living at KIMSHEALTH, Thiruvananthapuram, tells India Today Digital.
A brain busy drinking in the new lays down richer, more detailed memories. That can make a period of time feel longer when we look back on it.
As we grow older, life often settles into routine. The brain no longer needs to pay as much attention to familiar experiences, such as the daily commute or a workday that looks much like the one before it. Fewer new experiences stand out, and fewer detailed memories are formed. As a result, Dr Vyas says, the days can seem to slide past faster.
The little rush of dopamine, the feel-good chemical the brain releases in moments of novelty and delight, also comes less often in our predictable grown-up lives, and it is dopamine that helps keep our inner clock ticking in the here and now.
IS THERE A MATHEMATICAL REASON TIME SPEEDS UP WITH AGE?
There is, and it is beautifully simple. It is called the proportional theory, first put forward by the French philosopher Paul Janet in 1877 and later made famous by the pioneering psychologist William James.
The idea runs like this. Each passing year is quietly measured against all the years you have already lived. To a five-year-old, a single year is a vast 20 per cent of their entire life. To a person of 70, that same year is a mere 1.4 per cent. The year has not changed length. Your yardstick has. And so each new year feels thinner and slighter than the one before.
Memory deepens the effect. To save effort, the adult brain does not form strong memories of ordinary, repetitive days, Dr Vyas explains.
Instead, vivid and unusual experiences stand out in our memory and help us distinguish one period of time from another. When weeks look much the same, fewer experiences stand out. As a result, whole months can seem to blur together when we look back.
THE PHYSICS BEHIND WHY TIME FLIES
Physics has a theory too, and a rather interesting one. In a 2019 paper, Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, argued that clock time and mind time are two different things.
Your mind, he suggests, measures time by the pace at which it takes in fresh mental images. In youth, those images arrive thick and fast.
As we age, the brain’s networks grow larger and more tangled, and signals travel along longer, slower, more worn paths.
Fewer images are processed in the same span, so the outside clock appears to race ahead. It is not that your days are shorter. It is that your mind is taking fewer snapshots of them.
CAN YOU MAKE TIME FEEL SLOWER?
You cannot stop the clock, but you can make time feel more memorable, and the key may be novelty. Breaking out of routine and trying something new gives the brain fresh experiences to process and remember.
Dr Vyas suggests small rebellions against sameness. Change up your day, he says: take a new route to work, cook an unfamiliar recipe, rearrange the furniture, anything that hands the brain new information to wrestle with. Learn and play, whether a musical instrument or an old board game like carrom or snakes and ladders, so the mind has to solve rather than simply coast.
Stay socially engaged, since volunteering or joining a community group fills the calendar with meaningful moments that break the monotony. And practise a little mindfulness, a few quiet minutes a day spent noticing the world as it actually is, rather than racing ahead into what comes next.
None of this adds hours to your life. But it does something gentler and just as precious. A little novelty, threaded through ordinary days, hands you back a richer, more textured, more memorable stretch of living, one in which time, once again, feels like it belongs to you.
So the next time a year vanishes before you have caught your breath, do not mourn it. Do something you have never done before. Your brain, handed something new to notice, will happily slow the world down for you.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
