Think about it, this was really how it was in childhood - the summer holidays seemed to have no end, and we had to wait forever for the New Year holidays. So why does time seem to gain momentum over the years: weeks, or even months, fly by unnoticed, and the seasons change at such a dizzying speed?

Isn’t this obvious acceleration of time the result of the responsibilities and worries that have befallen us in our adult lives? However, in fact, research shows that perceived time actually moves faster for adults, filling our lives with troubles and bustle.

There are several theories that try to explain why our sense of time speeds up as we get older.

One of them points to a gradual change in our internal biological clock. The slowing of our body's metabolic processes as we get older corresponds to a slowing of our heart rate and breathing. Biological pacemakers in children pulse faster, which means that their biological indicators (heartbeat, breathing) are higher in a set period of time, so the time feels longer.

Another theory suggests that the passage of time we perceive is related to the amount of new information we perceive. With more new stimuli, our brains take longer to process the information—thus, the time period feels longer. This could also explain the “slow perception of reality” that is often reported to occur in the seconds before an accident. Facing unusual circumstances means receiving an avalanche of new information that needs to be processed.

In fact, it may be that when faced with new situations, our brains imprint more detailed memories, so that it is our memory of the event that emerges more slowly, rather than the event itself. That this is true was demonstrated in an experiment with people experiencing free fall.

But how does all this explain the constant reduction in perceived time as we age? The theory says that the older we get, the more familiar our surroundings become. We do not notice the details of our surroundings at home and at work. For children, the world is often an unfamiliar place, where there are many new experiences that can be gained. This means that children must use significantly more intellectual power to transform their mental representations of the outside world. This theory suggests that time thus moves slower for children than for adults stuck in the routine of everyday life.

Thus, the more familiar daily life becomes for us, the faster it seems to us that time passes, and, as a rule, habits are formed with age.

It has been suggested that the biochemical mechanism underlying this theory is the release of a neurotransmitter hormone upon perception of new stimuli that helps us learn to tell time. After 20 and until old age, the level of this happiness hormone decreases, which is why it seems to us that time passes faster.

But still, it seems that none of these theories can explain with complete certainty where the time acceleration coefficient comes from, increasing almost with mathematical constancy.

The apparent shortening of the duration of a given period as we grow older suggests the existence of a "logarithmic scale" in relation to time. Logarithmic scales are used instead of traditional linear scales when measuring the strength of an earthquake or the loudness of a sound. Because the quantities we measure can vary to enormous degrees, we need a scale with a wider range of measurements to truly understand what is going on. The same can be said about time.

On the logarithmic Richter scale (for measuring the strength of earthquakes), an increase in magnitude from 10 to 11 is different from a 10% increase in ground oscillations, which a linear scale would not show. Each increment on the Richter scale corresponds to a tenfold increase in vibrations.

Infancy

But why should our perception of time also be measured using a logarithmic scale? The fact is that we relate any period of time to a part of life that we have already lived. For two-year-olds, a year is half of their life, which is why when you're little, birthdays seem to take so long.

For ten-year-olds, a year is only 10% of their life (which makes the wait a little more bearable), and for 20-year-olds it's only 5%. On a logarithmic scale, a 20-year-old would have to wait until he was 30 to experience the same proportional increase in time that a 2-year-old experiences waiting for his next birthday. It's no wonder that time seems to speed up as we get older.

We usually think of our lives in terms of decades - our 20s, our 30s, and so on - they are presented as equivalent periods. However, if we take a logarithmic scale, it turns out that we mistakenly perceive different periods of time as periods of the same duration. Within this theory, the following age periods would be perceived equally: five to ten, ten to 20, 20 to 40, and 40 to 80.

I don't want to end on a depressing note, but it turns out that five years of your experience, spanning ages five to ten, is perceived to be equivalent to a period of life spanning ages 40 to 80.

Well, mind your own business. Time flies, whether you are enjoying life or not. And every day it flies faster and faster.

Here's a slightly related topic about why we don't remember being kids.

According to Freud

Sigmund Freud drew attention to childhood forgetfulness. In his 1905 work, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he reflected in particular on amnesia, which covers the first five years of a child's life. Freud was sure that childhood (infantile) amnesia is not a consequence of functional memory disorders, but stems from the desire to prevent early experiences - traumas that harm one’s own “I” - from entering the child’s consciousness. The father of psychoanalysis considered such traumas to be experiences associated with knowledge of one’s own body or based on sensory impressions of what was heard or seen. Freud called the fragments of memories that can still be observed in the child’s consciousness masking.

"Activation"

The results of a study by Emory University scientists Patricia Bayer and Marina Larkina, published in the journal Memory, support the theory about the timing of childhood amnesia. According to scientists, its “activation” occurs in all inhabitants of the planet without exception at the age of seven. Scientists conducted a series of experiments in which three-year-old children participated and were asked to tell their parents about their most vivid impressions. Years later, the researchers returned to the tests: They invited the same children again and asked them to remember the story. Five- to seven-year-old participants in the experiment were able to recall 60% of what happened to them before the age of three, while eight- to ten-year-olds were able to recall no more than 40%. Thus, scientists were able to hypothesize that childhood amnesia occurs at the age of 7 years.

Habitat

Canadian psychology professor Carol Peterson believes that environment, among other factors, influences the formation of childhood memories. He was able to confirm his hypothesis as a result of a large-scale experiment, the participants of which were Canadian and Chinese children. They were asked to recall in four minutes the most vivid memories of the first years of life. Canadian children remembered twice as many events as Chinese children. It is also interesting that Canadians predominantly recalled personal stories, while the Chinese shared memories in which their family or peer group were involved.

Guilty without guilt?

Experts at the Ohio State University Medical Center believe that children cannot connect their memories with a specific place and time, so later in life it becomes impossible to reconstruct episodes from their own childhood. Discovering the world for himself, the child does not make it difficult to link what is happening to temporal or spatial criteria. According to one of the co-authors of the study, Simon Dennis, children do not feel the need to remember events along with “overlapping circumstances.” A child may remember a cheerful clown at the circus, but is unlikely to say that the show started at 17.30.

For a long time it was also believed that the reason for forgetting memories of the first three years of life lies in the inability to associate them with specific words. The child cannot describe what happened due to lack of speech skills, so his consciousness blocks “unnecessary” information. In 2002, the journal Psychological Science published a study on the relationship between language and children's memory. Its authors, Gabriel Simcock and Harleen Hein, conducted a series of experiments in which they tried to prove that children who have not yet learned to speak are not able to “encode” what happens to them into memories.

Cells that “erase” memory

Canadian scientist Paul Frankland, who actively studies the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, disagrees with his colleagues. He believes that the formation of childhood memories occurs in the short-term memory zone. He insists that young children can remember their childhood and talk colorfully about ongoing events in which they were recently involved. However, over time, these memories are “erased.” A group of scientists led by Frankland suggested that the loss of infant memories may be associated with an active process of new cell formation, which is called neurogenesis. According to Paul Frankland, it was previously believed that the formation of neurons leads to the formation of new memories, but recent research has proven that neurogenesis is capable of simultaneously erasing information about the past. Why then do people most often not remember the first three years of life? The reason is that this time is the most active period of neurogenesis. The neurons then begin to reproduce at a slower rate and leave some of the childhood memories intact.

Experienced way

To test their assumption, Canadian scientists conducted an experiment on rodents. The mice were placed in a cage with a floor along which weak electrical discharges were applied. A repeated visit to the cage caused adult mice to panic, even after a month. But the young rodents willingly visited the cage the very next day. Scientists have also been able to understand how neurogenesis affects memory. To do this, the experimental subjects artificially caused an acceleration of neurogenesis - the mice quickly forgot about the pain that arose when visiting the cage. According to Paul Frankland, neurogenesis is more a good thing than a bad thing, because it helps protect the brain from an overabundance of information.

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neurologist, top blogger of LiveJournal

Nowadays two polar opinions about old age are popular. The first belongs to the generation of thirty-year-olds, fascinated by the philosophy of the “biohacker” Sergei Fage. It seems to them that old age does not exist. It is enough to take a strictly defined number of pills every day, play sports according to a cunning system, go on regular hunger strikes - and the trick is in the bag, immortality is guaranteed. They believe that it is a shame to be old. These are fans of the excessive use of filters on Instagram, and each of them at least sometimes imagines himself as Dorian Gray.

Others are representatives of the older generation, people who have experienced too little happiness and satisfaction with themselves and life. They consider themselves old, about thirty-five years old, and are confident that it is not worth resisting the steady decline of all body functions. It is much more important to live this life in momentary pleasures like a pack of cookies or a liter of beer every evening. Euphoria from physical activity is unknown to them. Not long ago I tried to convince a middle-aged patient that physical activity was vital for her. She agreed. But when it turned out that this would mean getting up ten minutes earlier to walk two blocks every day, she was deeply outraged. I was never able to convince her that ten minutes to improve the quality of life is a very small price to pay.

When does old age begin? Is it true that the whole point is how old we feel, and the body simply follows a psychological attitude?

Where does old age hide in the body?

There are many theories of old age. Scientists have not yet been able to convincingly prove any of them.

One way or another, aging occurs at the level of chromosomes and genes. It is the DNA chains that are the very cuckoo that knows exactly how long a person is destined to live. Geneticists focus on the ends of chromosomes, called telomeres. Long telomeres are a sign of a young cell. With each division, telomeres become shorter and shorter. Until, finally, the cell reaches the complete inability to reproduce itself. This triggers dramatic changes in metabolism, which can be considered the beginning of aging at the cellular level, a countdown point.

Although not everything comes down to this simple scheme. In embryos, telomeres increase themselves, which means that their cells become immortal for a while. Stem cells, which are well known to everyone from the “yellow” headlines in the press (“Alla Pugacheva grew herself new lungs, looked 50 years younger and at the same time created three children and a young lover from stem cells!”), also have an almost unlimited ability to divide. Alas, cancer cells also have the superpower to grow telomeres, and therefore remain “forever young” in 80% of cases.

Feb 2, 2018 at 6:38 am PST

Feb 16, 2018 at 8:33 am PST

However, if we are talking about ordinary body cells that make up skin, bones, muscles and everything else (except for germ cells - these also know how to grow telomeres), their ability to divide is normally limited. And this is good, because the growth of tissues in geometric progression would not lead to anything comforting: we would simply turn every year into immense bags of skin, bizarrely filled with huge deformed internal organs. Telomeres rapidly decrease as the body grows. Then this process is suspended to resume after 60 years, when a period of gradual decline of all functions begins. Does this mean that everything is predetermined, and therefore there is no point in trying to delay the onset of old age? Of course no.

Because, in addition to heredity - the kaleidoscope of genes that we inherited from our parents, there is the influence of the external environment. Studies on people with unhealthy lifestyles who suffered from excess weight, high blood pressure and an unhealthy love of sweets due to impaired carbohydrate metabolism showed optimistic results

The group of patients who began to exercise regularly, and also revised their diet in favor of reducing animal fats and sugar in favor of more fiber, showed not only weight loss and improvement in carbohydrate metabolism over the course of 4 years, during which observation, but also an increase in the length of telomeres in chromosomes. Other studies have shown an increase in the activity of the enzyme telomerase (the one that causes the growth of telomeres) against the background of regular aerobic physical activity, a decrease in caloric intake (provided that it was unreasonably high) and a decrease in initially increased body weight.

This means that we can influence the functioning of the “internal clock”, which inexorably counts down the time until old age.

How to avoid “senile insanity”

Old age of the mind manifests itself as slower thinking. A person needs more time to extract the necessary information from the depths of memory, and therefore the pause before making any decision can become longer and longer with age. Another typical symptom is the loss of the ability to multitask: the brain’s “operating system” seems to become single-tasking. And this often causes irritation for those who are accustomed to a “multi-channel” mind.

The solution to the problem is to make maximum use of the brain's capabilities. To do this you need to combine intellectual and physical labor. This helps the formation of new connections between nerve cells and even, under certain conditions, stimulates the formation of new ones!

It is very important to detect age-related diseases in time. These are arterial hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus and other ailments. Controlling blood pressure, sugar and “bad” blood lipids, as well as its clotting functions, helps maintain normal blood circulation in the brain and preserve its youth.

How to stay strong

After 30 years, muscle mass begins to decrease and is replaced by adipose tissue, if there is no regular physical activity. Physical activity helps maintain normal blood pressure and has a good effect on carbohydrate metabolism and even hormonal levels. Therefore, physical activity, selected in accordance with a person’s preferences and capabilities, will help not only look, but also feel younger.

But you shouldn’t get carried away with low-calorie diets. Modern research shows that weight gain and fat gain after 50 years are not necessarily the result of laziness, inactivity and general promiscuity. It's normal to gain a few pounds as you age: Fat tissue protects against early death, according to research. Therefore, a well-fed person may well be athletic and even healthy. Of course, we are not talking about morbid obesity, when excess adipose tissue interferes with movement, breathing and causes serious changes in metabolism.

How to be happy

Old age is inevitable. Paradoxically, understanding this fact will make you happier.

Somehow I came across a catalog of a famous Swedish company, a recognized professional in creating cozy, “family” interiors. On the cover was a photograph of an elderly woman, her wrinkled hands in focus. The contrast was emphasized by the snow-white cup that the old woman was holding, immersed in some pleasant thoughts. Scandinavians - renowned experts on happiness and life satisfaction - publish a photo of old age! Yes, such that you immediately understand: at 80 years old, you can also be one hundred percent satisfied with life and enjoy the little things, remain sane and still enjoy the capabilities of your body: dance, walk, carry grandchildren in your arms, travel, play sports .

For a long time, for many centuries, the dream of mankind was to create an elixir that gives youth to prolong human life. In nature, everything is interconnected, just as the seasons change in it, so in human life.

Throughout life, a person passes through different milestones of his age: the first healthy, which prepares for active maturity is carefree youth, over the years gives way to a reasonable and unhurried, in other words, noble old age.

Sumerian Scriptures, dated back about 3-4 thousand years, they recommended various drugs to help with gray hair or poor eyesight. According to ancient egyptians, people can live up to 110 years and this is precisely the age that is the limit, according to modern views.

Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician, recommended a moderate diet, vigorous exercise, and hot baths for those who want to live in good health into old age. After all, aging was previously explained by the leakage of human natural heat and the fact that the body dries out.

Plato, the famous ancient Greek philosopher mentioned that the lifestyle a person leads affects the aging process. And those people who know how and can adapt to the surrounding life circumstances wage a more active fight against old age and aging.

Aristotle supported Hippocrates and also believed that the cause of aging is the loss of human natural heat. To slow down the aging process, Cicero recommended not only physical exercises together with moderate nutrition, but also mainly the development of intellectual activity. His call was for people to study not only at a young age, but also in old age, since learning will preserve spiritual freshness.

Seneca He emphasized that the lifestyle a person leads is much more important than the number of years he has lived.

Jewish philosopher Maimonides, in his opinion, the life expectancy of each person is already given in advance, but he also believed that its duration can be increased if appropriate preventive exercises are performed.
According to the English philosopher Roger Bacon, the human body ages due to wear and tear.

And if we try to trace the whole history, we will see that our primitive ancestors, according to scientists, lived only until they were 19 or 20 years old. And during the Roman Empire, life expectancy, its average, did not exceed 25 years of age, but already during the period of the feudal system the age reached from 30 to 35 years. Today, life expectancy ranges from approximately 63 to 70 years, but scientists believe that a person has the opportunity to live from 100 to 150 years.

And the period of life, old age should be considered as well as youth and maturity, everything is equally valuable. Since knowledge and, most importantly, experience come to a person with age.

How can one extend a person’s life so that it remains full, at all its stages, and at the same time maintain health, so that old age is a joy even at the end of life?

It is possible that over time, old age will become an opportunity to acquire vigor, physical as well as mental abilities, more fruitful and interesting activities and will no longer be compared with decrepitude. Will take on new meaning. After all, old age is a physiological state that is normal for the body and is not some unnatural and pathological process.

The French consider old age to be the third stage, arguing that it is a time of old age, an equal age in life, comparing it with maturity and youth. And many people associate this stage of life with the time of year, it’s like autumn, so you need to make sure that this time becomes golden, because this is a real and quite feasible task.

Bernard Show, English writer, said: “You don’t need to think that if you become old, wisdom comes, since a person’s wisdom does not depend on age, but brings experience that young people may not have. Old age brings with it many valuable and positive qualities into a person’s life. Because over time, a person becomes experienced and reasonable, and this is difficult to overestimate.”

The conclusion of scientists is that those who do not want it succeed in not aging. Old age can be compared to relationships with the external environment, because for the most part it is not what has been lived, but what has been acquired. Maturity of thoughts and experience have always been and will remain the main function of time; they, as before, will be the privilege of older people. Time leaves its mark on everything, everything living is subject to it.

No less important is a certain attitude, with positive emotions and an optimistic outlook on the environment, the ability to take a philosophical approach to life’s phenomena and at the same time not lose heart. We should not forget that those who do not want to will not grow old. And remember that creative and active old age is very real. No less important is the life position with which a person approaches everything. After all, the aging process affects the emotional sphere and character of a person.

There are also individual differences that are much more pronounced than age differences. After all, we determine age not by date of birth, but by how a person looks, by his appearance. And forget about... that you are 25, oh, horror. Stay beautiful, cheerful and young. Try to lead a healthy and active lifestyle.

And just be happy. Live for today. Don't stir up the past and look into the future. Everything is just great today!

As a child, it seemed like summer holidays lasted a lifetime, and we had to wait forever for each New Year. Why does time fly faster as you grow older, and weeks, months and even seasons change each other at a breakneck speed? Let's figure it out together with "Futurist".

A matter of perception

Apparently, such accelerated “time travel” is not at all connected with the responsibilities and anxieties of adulthood. Research shows that our perception time, making us feel increasingly busy and constantly running around.

There are several theories to explain this shift. According to the first of them, this is due to a gradual change in a person’s internal biological clock. The slowing of metabolism as we age is reflected, among other things, in slower heartbeat and breathing. Children experience a much greater number of biological markers (heartbeats, sighs) in a given period of time than adults, making them feel that time is taking longer.

According to another theory, the time we perceive is related to the amount of new information we absorb. It is more difficult for the brain to cope with a large volume of new stimuli, which is regarded as a longer period of time. This explains situations with so-called slow motion, which often occurs a second before an accident. Unfamiliar circumstances mean an influx of new information that the brain needs to process.

In fact, when faced with an unexpected situation, the brain records the memory in much more detail, as was shown in an experiment in which participants experienced free fall. So it is more likely that this event appears to slow down in our memory, rather than time slowing down at that moment.

Where does the time go

However, such explanations do not answer the question of why time is shortening while our age is only increasing. Psychologists have put forward a theory that the older we get, the more familiar our surroundings become. We stop noticing the details of a house, apartment or workplace. For children, on the contrary, the world is full of unfamiliar things, interacting with which they gain new experiences. That is why children devote a significantly larger part of their brain activity to restructuring their mental ideas about the outside world. According to this theory, processing ideas slows down time for children, but for busy adults it slips through their fingers like sand.

The more familiar everyday life is, the faster time flies, and with age, more and more things become painfully familiar. This explanation is based on a biochemical mechanism: during the perception of new stimuli, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released, which helps to judge time. After 20 and until old age, dopamine levels drop, thereby speeding up time.

Logarithms in time

But none of these theories correspond to the almost mathematical constant acceleration of time. The marked reduction in the duration of a certain period of time with aging suggests a logarithmic scale in time. The logarithmic scale is used instead of the traditional linear scale when measuring earthquakes (Richter scale) or sound (decibels), because it allows you to display a very large range of values. The same is true for time.

On the logarithmic Richter scale, an increase in magnitude from 10 to 11 does not correspond to a 10% increase in earth motion, as it would on a linear scale. Each increment on the Richter scale represents a tenfold increase in motion. On a logarithmic time scale, all important historical events known to us can be written down on one page in ten lines.

Kids time

But why does our perception of time follow a logarithmic scale? The idea is that we evaluate a period of time as a proportion relative to the life we ​​have lived. For example, for a two-year-old child, one year is half of his life: this is why in early childhood you wait endlessly for each birthday. For a ten-year-old, a year is already 10% of his entire life (which makes the wait a little less cruel), and for a twenty-year-old it is only 5%.

On a logarithmic scale, for a twenty-year-old to experience the same proportion of increase in age that a two-year-old experiences between birthdays, he would have to wait until he is 30 to celebrate. Given this fact, the acceleration of time with age no longer seems so surprising.

We typically think of our lives in terms of decades (our 20s, 30s, and so on), which assumes equal weight for each. However, on the same logarithmic scale, we perceive different periods of time as the same length. On this scale, the following age differences will appear the same: five and 10 years, 10 and 20, 20 and 40, 40 and 80.

I would not like to end on a sad note, but the five years that you lived from the age of five to ten are equivalent in duration to the period between 40 and 80 years.

In general, take action. Time flies whether you are having fun or not. And it will run faster and faster every day.

" Time flow

Why does time speed up with age?

“Why does time fly so fast?” middle-aged people often ask. Many of us feel like time is speeding up as we enter adulthood. According to psychologist and BBC columnist Claudia Gemmond, "the experience of time speeding up in midlife is one of the biggest mysteries in the psychology of time." The quest to solve this mystery has led to several interesting discoveries.

In 2005, psychologists Mark Wittmann and Sandra Lengoff from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich surveyed 499 people aged 14 to 94 about how they felt time passed, from “very slowly” to “very quickly.” In the case of short periods, such as a week, a month, or even a year, the participants' sense of time did not differ much: most people responded that the clock was ticking “quickly.” But for long periods, such as decades, a pattern emerged: older people, unlike young people, tended to have an accelerated sense of time. People in their 40s said time passed more slowly in childhood and then began to speed up during their teenage years and into early adulthood. There are good explanations for how older people perceive time. The passage of time can be assessed from two positions: prospective, when the event is still ongoing, and retrospective, when it has already ended. The perception of time depends on what we do and how we feel. When we are having fun and interest, time goes by much faster. In addition, when we take on some new business, we also feel the acceleration of time. But if we remember this activity later, then, on the contrary, we will assume that time passed slowly. The reason is that our brain encodes into memory only new experiences, and not familiar ones. Our retrospective sense of time depends on how many memories it creates during a certain period. That is, the more memories a weekend trip leaves us with, the longer it will seem in hindsight. This phenomenon, which Claudia Gemmond calls the “weekend paradox,” serves as a pointer to why, in retrospect, time seems to speed up with age. After all, in childhood and early adulthood we have many new memories and learn many skills. But as an adult, life becomes routine, monotonous and less rich in bright moments. As a result, our autobiographical memory reflects our youth much more widely than our adult years. And therefore, when we reflect on them, they seem to flow longer. Importantly, these insights also suggest how time can be slowed down in adulthood. To do this, you need to keep your brain active, constantly learn something new, travel and experience more unforgettable moments. Then our life will seem longer to us. James M. Broadway