Every year Christmas seems to come faster. That is not true? When we were young, summer holidays seemed to last forever. Now the summer has disappeared in a flash.
We use clocks and calendars to mark the passage of time in a reliable manner. We also have an internal clock that gives us our sense of time. However, our inner perception seems rarely to reconcile external auditors with our time.
Most of us first noticed that the time seems to accelerate when we are anchored in life, that is, have fallen to a routine dictated by work, marriage and family ... we will go to work every day , At home we had dinner, we go to the gym, cinema or at night in ordinary weekdays.
After a few years, we believe that the time they take these routines appear to be decreasing, as if we were slow in a spinn but unstoppable speed.
At the same time, we have developed a tendency to think that past events in recent times have actually occurred to them, a phenomenon known as a telescopic breakthrough.
Personally, I'm still far away when I think that when something happened. If I think about it two years ago, it usually turns out to be over five years.
So what causes the time to accelerate our perception?
There are many theories ...
Proportional theory
This theory states that as you get older, each time (year, month, week) is a decrease in lifetime as a whole fraction.
For example, for a child of five years, one year is one-fifth of your life as a whole, while for a man of fifty years, in the year is 1/50 of your life.
Therefore, as one gets older, becomes a year a smaller period and seems to happen more quickly.
This theory provides an explanation of why the perceived speed of time seems to increase gradually. The problem is that it explains the current time just in terms of time spent with it.
But, as a rule, we live in terms of small periods, like every hour, every time he tries to get into the past without reference.
While this is an interesting idea, it does not seem possible that the scientists believe that this theory might prove to be right or wrong.
Theory Metabolism
In this theory, the perception that acceleration is slowing down to the fact that our metabolism slows down as we age. Children breathe faster when your heart beats faster and the blood circulates faster than the elderly, suggesting that their internal clocks have more time in the space of a day than adults.
Therefore, the internal clocks of the children are faster than normal external clock, while the internal clocks of the elderly are slower than the norm.
The metabolic theory is an interesting explanation, and it seems intuitive right. The only problem is that since the proportional to the theory there is no way to verify this.
The theory of body temperature
The experiments in the 1930s showed that body temperature had an effect on our perception of time ... had the body temperature of a person can increase your sense of slow down how fast the time passes by 20 percent.
This makes sense ... the children have a higher body temperature than adults on average, suggesting that the time is being "expanded" to them (for example, a duration of one hour seems to them).
As we get older, our body temperature gradually increases. This provides an explanation of why we believe that time passes faster and faster as we age.
This theory is also intuitive logic. But also here there is no way you can prove.
Perceptual Theory
According to this theory, the acceleration of time will change our perception of the world around us and our experiences and how this perception changes as we age.
Our perception of the speed of time seems to depend on how much information our minds absorb and process ... More information, the slower the time passes.
In experiments, in the sixties, the subjects listened to tapes of simple tones (including experiences of perception). The strips were erased after a certain time. We asked subjects to estimate how long they were listening to the sounds. Hits increased tapes and subjects were tested again.
The researchers found that more information about the ligaments was (ie, it sounds clicked), over the period appreciated by the subjects.
The researchers also found that when participants presented paintings and drawings that had the most complex images felt that the time would be longer.
Thus, the amount and complexity of the information expands to the perceived length of time.
This suggests that one of the reasons why the time seems to flow more slowly for children is to take large amounts of perceptual information of the new world for the first time. They take all sorts of details that adults ignore ... small insects, patterns of sunlight, cracks on surfaces and so on.
As we grow older, we lose this intensity of perception ... the world is sad and routine, with a few surprises, so we keep the attention paid to them. We look at the buildings, streets and other parts of our environment that we see every day. In other words, we left.
So we get less information, which means that the time passes faster.
This theory seems logical and provable.
The decline of new experiences as we age
The longer we live, the more familiar we are with the world. This means that according to the theory of perception, the amount of perceptual information that we absorb with each year decreases, which goes by, so that the time seems to accelerate.
This is done for two main reasons:
[1] For a child and teenager, the world is a fascinating place to explore. This innovation gradually disappears and when we came in forty years the world has, for most of us, much less ignorance ... unless we have a job that involves significant foreign travel and interaction with a variety of crops and technologies .
Consequently, more and we eat less useful information and speed up our sense of time.
As we spent almost all our stock of new experiences when we are in quarantine, one might think that the acceleration of time would slow down much later in life. But that is not true ... sometimes higher speeds as we continue to grow.
[2] The subjective time continues to accelerate as we pass middle age because the experiences we have had, and we are getting more familiar ... with each year becoming a kind of automatic routine.
In this way, our lives become boring and unreal as we move in our environment and in recent years gradually. Therefore, we take less information and less fees, so that time to speed up to continue.
How to slow down the time
The time seems to decrease when we are exposed to new environments and experiences, as most of us have noticed. In fact, the lack of new experiences can be much more meaningful to us.So how can we reduce the time to recognize, reduce?
The theory of perception and its effects are key.
Just make every effort to expose the greatest possible new ... new environments by traveling abroad, new challenges, new situations, new information and ideas. Try to learn a new career or new skills. Look for multicultural environments and swimming in unknown cultural waters.
Not only will the time be slowing down, so you seem to live longer, you will feel fresher and look younger. And for the first time in 20 years you begin to truly enjoy life.
