Who has never thought that childhood holidays lasted an eternity, while today the weeks whiz by like a moving train? It’s not an impression, nor just nostalgia. According to recent research from the University of Birmingham, the adult brain processes time differently: as we age, it stops perceiving all the small changes that happen around us.
Scientists have called this phenomenon “neural dedifferentiation”: in practice, the brain areas dedicated to perception, memory and attention become less distinct, as if the boundaries between one experience and another are blurred. Our mind records fewer “events” per second and the subjective sensation of time contracts. It’s like watching a film that, little by little, loses the editing cuts: the scenes become longer, they merge together, and everything seems to flow faster.
A Hitchcock-style experiment to understand the passing of time
To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed data from 577 volunteers aged between 18 and 88, already part of the Cambridge Center for Aging and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) project. During the experiment, participants watched an Alfred Hitchcock short, “Bang! You’re Dead,” while an fMRI machine recorded their brain activity moment by moment.
Using an artificial intelligence algorithm called Greedy State Boundary Searchscholars have identified the moments in which the brain “changed scene”, that is, it passed from one neural state to another.
And here comes the surprise:
The older we get, the fewer “cuts” we make in the mental film of our lives. The film flows, but the scenes seem to merge, and time passes.
Time doesn’t really flow faster: it’s the brain that changes pace
The good news is that we are not victims of a crazy clock. Our brain, with age, tends to simplify, to combine experiences, a bit like closing too many open windows on the computer to save energy. But this process, the authors explain, does not erase emotions, it simply reduces their perceived number.
Linguist Joanna Szadura, from Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, adds another piece:
Inner time is not linear. A year for a five-year-old is 20% of his life, for a fifty-year-old only 2%.
In essence, each age weighs time differently: not only from a biological point of view, but also psychological and perceptive.
Can we slow down our perception of time?
The great thing is that the solution doesn’t require miracles. According to Linda Geerligs, co-author of the study, there is a way to “slow down” the feeling of time fleeting: live new, stimulating and meaningful experiences:
Learning, traveling, discovering something new or simply dedicating ourselves to what we love can make time more ‘dense’ and memorable.
In practice, the brain measures time based on the changes it perceives. The photocopy days, made up of routines and habits, slip away without leaving a trace; those that excite or surprise us, however, are imprinted in the memory and dilate the perception of time.
Maybe it’s true: time flies when we’re having fun, but it also flies when we stop watching it.
A brain that tells stories, not minutes
In the end, scientists agree on one point: time is not a clock, but a narrative.
Our mind constructs the story of life as a montage of salient moments, and with age the “scenes” become longer, the cuts rarer, the days more similar.
This is why, at a certain point, we wake up and it seems like ten years have passed in a flash. It’s not magic, nor destiny: it’s the brain that, in its own way, is just telling the same story with less detail.
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