If you are over 20 years old, it is very likely that it has happened to you many times: You remember an event that you remember vividly and realize that it happened 10 years ago… or even more!
It also happens when you try to see when a television series appeared that you followed since its beginning, or when the premiere of a movie that marked you was, or even when you realize that the actor or actress who had a child role in an audiovisual fiction can no longer even be considered too young.
And yet, between 7 and 15 years of age everything seemed to go very slowly Furthermore, it is even likely that you wanted to turn another year older and be closer to “the grown-ups”, and that the wait seemed eternal.
As time goes! Stepping on the temporary accelerator
Of course, there is something that is clear: time goes equally fast for all people, it does not stop for some and does not speed up for others (at least if we stay within this planet). However, the perception of this time does change, and much
This was confirmed in 2005 by Sandra Lenhoff and Marc Wittmann, two researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Their research consisted of giving a series of surveys to 499 people between the ages of 14 and 94, and asking them to rate the degree of “speed” with which they estimated time passed during a period.
When the period was a few days or weeks, everyone had a similar opinion about the speed with which that season had passed, but when the time frame was longer (years) they found that People tended to rate the passage of time faster the older they were
Specifically, people over 40 years of age estimated that they had felt how time passed very slowly during their childhood and how it accelerated slightly during adolescence to reach high speeds in adulthood.
Why does this psychological effect occur?
It is not clear what triggers this phenomenon, but a very reasonable explanation has been proposed that has to do with the number of temporal references that are available in our memory when we evaluate our life path retrospectively.
This explanation is based on a well-documented fact: More memories are accumulated about the first years of life than about a period of time of similar duration that occurred during adulthood That is, the number of memories about what happened between the ages of 8 and 12 tends to be much greater than the amount of memories about what happened to us between the ages of 30 and 35, for example.
This could be due, on the one hand, to the fact that our brain is more plastic (that is, more sensitive to stimuli) during our childhood and adolescence, which allows us to learn many things quickly and, at the same time, would make what we are doing living is more likely to remain in our memory.
On the other hand, it could also be explained by a very simple fact. A large part of the most important life events accumulate at the beginning of our lives : entering school and college, the first time we meet friends that we will keep for a long time, the moment when we come of age, our first love experiences, etc.
So, on the one hand, we know that the brain is very sensitive to the environment, and on the other we assume that a lot of new and exciting things happen during the first two decades of life. To this we have to add an important fact: memory seems to retain memories related to new and rewarding experiences well, and less so those that are familiar and do not arouse such a strong emotional reaction.
All of the above means that we have many more temporal references located at the beginning of our lives than in the second half of this life which can make it seem like more time has passed when you look back.
It seems that, if in the last year we do not remember anything particularly notable having happened, we go down an ice rink faster and faster, because due to the lack of temporal references stored in our memory we tend to think that this period has been much longer. short of what it has been. In this way, we can dedicate more resources to processing information about the life stages in which truly interesting things did happen.
It may be cruel, but After all, our nervous system is not built to give us an objective view of time and space
