If when we are young the years never pass, the older we get the more time seems to slip through our fingers: this sensation could partly be explained by a mechanism whereby, with age, the brain is able to process fewer and fewer events per unit of time, decreasing “mental resolution” and giving the impression that the days are shorter.
The results of the study that talks about this neuroscientific phenomenon are published on Communications Biology.
Less reactive brain. The authors examined data on 577 people aged 18 to 88 who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching an eight-minute episode of the TV series. Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Bang! You’re Dead.
The scans showed that, during the video, the brains of the older participants switched to a new state of activity less frequently, and remained in the same state for longer than those of the younger participants. In other words, the mind was less “reactive” to events: “This suggests that longer (and therefore fewer) neural states in the same time interval may contribute to the fact that older adults perceive time as passing more rapidly,” explain the authors.
Less precise neurons. The researchers attribute what they observed to a phenomenon known as Age-related neural dedifferentiationa process by which, as we age, areas of the brain become less specialized in their functions.
It happens when, for example, groups of neurons specialized in recognizing faces are activated in elderly people even in the presence of objects that are not faces. This lack of precision, the authors hypothesize, could concern the functioning of the brain in general, which could therefore have a harder time recognizing when one event ends and another begins.
How to stop timeor? Is there a way to make time run slower? According to Steve Taylor, author of the book Time Expansion Experiencesto counter the feeling that time is speeding up we can introduce new things into our lives (traveling, learning new hobbies, meeting new people) or – even better – live with more awareness, paying attention to everyday experiences.
“Both methods increase the amount of information that the mind processes and, consequently, broaden our perception of time,” concludes the expert.
