For anyone that is of a mature age, have you ever noticed that time seems to slip by so much faster than when we were kids?
When we were young, days seemed endless but for me now, the days just burn by so fast it’s hard to even keep up. I’m sure the same goes for anyone that is aging.
Apparently, there is a reason for this and scientists tell those ‘older and wiser’ that we can slow down time even at our age. Who doesn’t want to do that?
They tell us that part of the reason time seems to speed up as we age is due to our perception.
An article found at https://blog.idonethis.com/science-of-slowing-down-time/, How to slow down time: the science behind stopping life from passing you by written by Janet Choi says, “For a 10-year-old, one year is 10 percent of their lives,” says neurologist and neuro-scientist Dr. Santosh Kesair. “For a 60-year-old, one year is less than two percent of their lives. We gauge time by memorable events and fewer new things occur as we age to remember, making it seem like childhood lasted longer.
And there’s evidence that young children actually experience time as moving more slowly. “Children’s working memory, attention and executive function are all undergoing development at the neural circuit level,” neuro-scientist Dr. Patricia Costello says. “Their neural transmission is in effect physically slower compared to adults. This in turn affects how they perceive the passage of time.
“Another reason time seems to pass us by is that time seems to constrict when you encounter the familiar, and when you acquire new knowledge, it expands.
“Our sense of time is weird and pliable — stretching, compressing, and seemingly coming to a standstill. And we can mold our perception of time, to some extent. In other words, we can slow down time.”
In another interesting article, The Science of Time Perception: Stop It Slipping Away by Doing New Things written by Belle Beth Cooper, found at https://buffer.com/resources/the-science-of-time-perception-how-to-make-your-days-longer/ she shares five ways you can put slowing down time into practice:
- Learn new things, try new activities, take courses or learn new skills.
- Expose yourself to new environments that will send a lot of new information to your brain…smells, sounds, people, colours and textures give your brain something new to process.
- Meet new people and interact. It gives us new information to make sense of…processing facial features and body language, names, voices and possibly accents.
- Do new stuff to heighten your senses.
- Be spontaneous and engage in surprises. They make us pay attention and heighten our senses
Cooper says that we should try surprising our brains with new experiences spontaneously, and that we can make time slow down for us as individuals. I’m all-in to try it! What about you?
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
