LEARN
Something Worth SharingSpeed of Time We went away over the Bank Holiday weekend just gone - as we have done for the past 9 years. It has become a family tradition to gather with the same people at the same place. We generally only see the majority of the group for this annual event - most of whom were my husband’s university friends and their families. I noticed that this year, many people discussed the passing of the past 12 months since we were sat in the same place. The recognition of how quickly the year has gone was considerable, something I think most of us have experienced. This applies to assorted time including weekends coming upon us at an increasingly alarming rate. I decided to look into this more from a research perspective and discovered assorted papers that explained the phenomenon of time speeding up as being connected to our memories and experiences. We perceive ‘actual time’ through the arrival of newly-created neural images. Children are forming these as they experience things for the first time and therefore everything feels slower as they process. As adults, we have a greater bank of neural images stored and so fewer ‘new’ images are created - almost like we’ve been there and done that already. A good example of this is a journey where we don’t remember parts of it because the brain is almost on auto-pilot. A child’s day feels longer because their cognitive processing is less developed - new stimuli take longer to register and process. Their internal clock (perception) and the genuine passing of time is more disconnected than for adults. What’s most interesting is the perception we have of time. If you holiday for 7 days, but change where you stay after 3 days, your holiday will feel longer than a holiday all in one place. This is simply due to new stimuli and experiences creating a different perception of time. The BIG learn here is not so much that time is speeding up - but that it is vital to keep creating new experiences, being curious and learning. What you do with time (quality) is far more important than how much time there is (quantity).
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