We often repeat that time passes faster and faster, that time flies, that the days are too short, we don’t realize the passing of the months and the years end without hardly having lived them. These phrases that may seem clichés are actually objective and very common perceptions, a feeling that is accentuated as we age.
The reason we feel like time is passing faster and the days are getting shorter as we get older lies in our brain and how it processes information. This is reflected in a research article by Adrian Bejan, a professor at Duke University in the United States, published in the European Review.
Adrian Bejan emphasizes that the real time marked by clocks is not the same as the time perceived by the human mind. What he calls the “time of the mind” is a sequence of images, reflections of nature fed by stimuli from our sensory organs. “The speed at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases with age, due to various physical characteristics that change with age,” he explains, citing the change in our body size and the frequency of saccadic movements as examples ( a rapid movement of the eye or head).
Furthermore, our rest also interferes with how we perceive time. As a general rule, the days that we perceive as slower and longer are productive days, full of events and memories. This is so because productive days usually occur when our mind and body are rested, after regular sleep.
Our brain perceives information much faster when we are young, which contributes to the days feeling longer and time seeming longer. Bejan explains that the human mind perceives reality through images that are produced when visual inputs reach the cerebral cortex and the mind feels the change of time when that perceived image changes.
The so-called “clock time” in the professor’s words is the one that unites all living flow systems, animate and inanimate, it is a measurable time. However, physical time is not the same as “mind time” and the time that each one perceives is different from how others perceive it. This occurs because the young mind receives more images during a day than the same mind in old age. In addition, it processes them faster.
In other words, children and young people process much more images than adults, which is why it gives them the feeling that time passes more slowly. While as we age we not only perceive images more slowly, but we also stop perceiving many details that make time pass faster and more fleeting.
