As we age, why does it feel like time is getting faster and faster?
When I was a child, I thought that a day was very long, and a weekend was like a big holiday. From the morning when I wake up, I feel that I can participate in a lot of activities and play a lot of things until noon.
Now it's different, from the morning when I got up, I already thought about tomorrow morning. After a busy day without doing much, it is already evening, and every day is so repetitive that time is really not enough.
This phenomenon is not unique, but universal, why is this?
01
The first thing to understand is what time is, and the philosophical definition of time is the continuity and sequence of material existence and motion.
The translation of the adult language is: the order of things is time.
Our fingernails are constantly growing, the earth is constantly flying around the sun, the light is constantly spreading, this is the continuous movement of things, and this movement change can only move forward and not backward.
The principle of entropy increase of the second law of thermodynamics can be well explained, a drop of ink into the water, the ink will spread to the entire water, but can not be re-aggregated into a complete drop of ink, so it can only be a cause and then an effect, time can only be the past present and the future.
In order to measure time, the ancients used a stick of incense to represent two hours, and the earth to rotate a week to represent 24 hours a day, that one second is equivalent to 1/86400 of a solar day, but such a second is not accurate.
With the development of science and technology, astronomers have observed that under the influence of the moon's gravity, the rotation rate of the Earth is not set in stone, but slows down by an average of 0.0164 seconds per century.
Over time, 1 second became 1.1 seconds, an additional 2.4 hours a day, and the time increased instead of decreasing.
In order to accurately define 1 second, physicists found cesium atoms and measured time with the frequency of cesium electron transitions, with an accuracy of one second every 15 billion years.
Time is eternal from now on, at least in the objective world, time is unchanged, one second is one second, one minute is one minute.
02
What really gives us the illusion that time is getting faster and faster depends on two factors: one is time perception and the other is brain memory.
Time perception is usually called the sense of time, part of which is derived from the biological clock of the human body, the most obvious embodiment is the law of day and night, we will know when to sleep, when to wake up, which is the result of human beings after a long period of evolution, just corresponding to the sunrise and sunset of the sun.
The body's circadian laws and light are not much related but internal rhythms, and the brain synchronizes rhythms with each organ and cell, which is the basic time perception ability that the human body has, but with the change of age and life, the perception ability also changes.
For example, sleeping late and getting up late, irregular work and rest lead to confusion in the perception of time by cells and organs.
The perception of time is biased.
This explains why we gradually feel that time is getting faster after we join the work.
During the school period, the work and rest are regular, the human body clock is stable, and the perception of time is also normal. However, when people are old, the circadian rhythm is not obvious, and the time feeling will no longer be sensitive, so it is easier to feel that time has become faster, and subjective time and objective time have a deviation.
On the other hand, the weakening of time perception ability will be multiplied, just like the previously said earth rotation rate slows down, the perception time becomes 1.1 seconds, a day becomes 26 hours, then 28 hours, 30 hours, and the real time is only 24 hours, so it will feel that time is getting faster and faster.
Someone did a time-sensing experiment and asked young and old people to estimate 1 minute of time each. The final perceived time and the real time comparison show that they have a difference in the speed at which time passes.
Young people are relatively accurate about time, while old people are relatively slower in their ability to perceive time. You can also close your eyes and feel the difference between your own minute and the real one.
Of course, the result is not necessarily that you are getting older, but that your schedule is chaotic.
03
The second factor is brain memory. A person's life is actually made up of memories.
An Austrian designer designed an interactive web page to show the effect of age on faster time. When you're one year old, one year is your whole life.
When you're two years old, one year old is 50% of a lifetime.
At the age of eight, one year old accounts for 12.5% of a lifetime.
When you're 18, one year old accounts for 5.56 percent.
After the age of 35, this proportion began to slow down, accounting for 2.86% of the life at the age of one.
In fact, most people start remembering after the age of three or even later, so subtract the first three years. In other words, when you are 30 years old, half of your life memories before the age of 8 or 9 are occupied.
This phenomenon is that the human brain relies on memory fragments to estimate the length of time. Early in life, there will be many firsts, the first time to swim, the first time to go to school, the first time to ride a roller coaster, the first time to fall in love.
The whole world is fresh and every experience is deeply remembered.
With the increase of age, although you can also be exposed to a lot of information, there is not much fresh information that can be truly felt, and no strong stimulation is formed.
When a person sleeps, the brain screens the memory and selectively remembers certain events. Preserve valuable memories and consolidate these important things by discarding some unimportant details.
For example, if you have to eat at noon every day, does the brain have to write down what you eat every day?
Obviously not, and the brain doesn't have that ability either.
Eating is like going to work, and the brain doesn't have to write down the details of the work.
So since we've been working, we've noticed that time is getting faster, and the reason is that there aren't many things that can be remembered.
With the increase of age, people's memory will also decline, 12-24 years old is the peak of memory ability, rebellion in middle school, sweetness in early love, nervousness during the college entrance examination, etc., you can remember clearly.
And after the age of 24, short-term memory slowly begins to decline, you want to remember something starts to become difficult, but it becomes easy to forget an event.
04
To summarize the above reasons:
1. The regularity of work and rest changes, and the human body's ability to perceive time becomes chaotic.
2. The ability to perceive time becomes weaker.
3. Fewer things to be remembered, the same every day.
4. Memory declines, and I can't remember the things I want to remember.
Changing these problems is where the solution lies, so it is not an illusion to think that time is getting faster and faster, but it is related to changes in the brain.
Time also constantly reminds us that when you look back at your life, it is no waves, tasteless, a long life, do not leave the memory of a lifetime only in the student era, a short life, do not waste a good year.