Pardon the internet silence. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in living that I can't seem to sit down long enough to recollect any of it. I guess that's not really a bad thing.
A little while ago, I decided to test out a theory. The world seemed to be spinning just a little too quickly for me. Not out of control, just so fast that I was beginning to see recurrences of small seasonal events what seemed like just weeks after they'd happened the last time. I wondered if I could somehow slow down my perception of time by being awake for more of it.
The experiment wasn't exactly a success. Turns out that if you're awake longer, there's just more to see and hear and do, though maybe that's a good distraction from the ticking clock and the crossing off of the days on the calendar.
I can't even remember when I took these photos. I know it was a pleasant walk on a trail I can see from my kitchen table. Since that day, I inhaled as much apple and plum blossom perfume as I could before they faded (we're done with lilacs already, too). I heard the first hummingbird and goldfinch. Ate too much Eton mess. Witnessed north-bound cormorant migration.
The honey locust blossoms are already on the verge of opening. I got to eat the first kick-ass breakfast sandwiches of the season this week (chimichurri sauce, fresh spinach, sliced tomato and a fried egg on toasted light rye). Bees are swarming the borage every day now. In a week or two, there might even be peas.
I guess there's no slowing it down. Stuff just keeps happening. It would be weird if it didn't. Sometimes the stuff sucks and sometimes it makes my day. Either way, I'm glad I'm around to witness it all.
Changes with aging
ReplyDeletePsychologists have found that the subjective perception of the passing of time tends to speed up with increasing age in humans. This often causes people to increasingly underestimate a given interval of time as they age. This fact can likely be attributed to a variety of age-related changes in the aging brain, such as the lowering in dopaminergic levels with older age; however, the details are still being debated.[36][37][38] In an experimental study involving a group of subjects aged between 19 and 24 and a group between 60 and 80, the participants' abilities to estimate 3 minutes of time were compared. The study found that an average of 3 minutes and 3 seconds passed when participants in the younger group estimated that 3 minutes had passed, whereas the older group's estimate for when 3 minutes had passed came after an average of 3 minutes and 40 seconds.[39][40]
Very young children literally "live in time" before gaining an awareness of its passing. A child will first experience the passing of time when he or she can subjectively perceive and reflect on the unfolding of a collection of events. A child's awareness of time develops during childhood when the child's attention and short-term memory capacities form—this developmental process is thought to be dependent on the slow maturation of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.[3] [41]
One day to an eleven-year-old would be approximately 1/4,000 of their life, while one day to a 55-year-old would be approximately 1/20,000 of their life. This helps to explain why a random day may therefore appear longer for a young child than for an adult.[42] The common explanation is that most external and internal experiences are new for young children while most experiences are repetitive for adults. Children have to be extremely engaged (i.e., dedicate many neural resources or much brain power) in the present moment because they must constantly reconfigure their mental models of the world to assimilate it and properly behave within it. On the contrary, adults may fall into mental habits and external routines that they rarely step outside of. When an adult frequently experiences this overstimulation of the same stimuli, their brain renders it "invisible" because the brain has already sufficiently and effectively mapped those stimuli; this phenomenon is known as neural adaptation. Thus, the brain will record less densely rich memories during these frequent periods of disengagement from the present moment.[43] Consequently, the subjective perception of time often passes by at a faster rate with age.