The aging of our brain would be involved …
“Already Christmas !,” Already the holidays! “… Let the one who has never pronounced this sentence throws us the first stone! And for good reason, the more we get age, the more our perception of time evolves. While during childhood, we tend to find the time longer, the trend is reversed. But how to explain this change of perception?
At 6 years old, we are impatiently waiting for mothers, Santa Claus, summer holidays … In short, the weeks seem to last for months. Then, the years flow, until the day when one wonders how time could have spinned so quickly. “The more we age, the more we are aware of our finitude and it is precisely this consciousness of our finitude that makes us realize the passing time, Immilined Johanna Rozenblum, clinical psychologist. Children have the privilege of not being aware of finitude and death, as if they had infinite time before them. “ But aging is also a privilege, she said. Each year that passes, every birthday that we celebrate, every Christmas is also a way of awareness and appreciating this passing time.
To take advantage of it, it is necessary to register in the present moment
In other words, everything is a question of perception of life and time that passes. “We can choose to perceive time as a time that is rushed and that brings us closer to the end (pessimistic vision), or we can decide to focus on the privilege of aging and having to spend years, happy experiences, sometimes more delicate, but in the presence of our loved ones, Details Johanna Rozenblum. To benefit more, it is necessary to register in the present moment because what existed no longer exists and what we have to live in the future does not yet exist. “
Brain aging modifies the perception of mental images
Several teams of researchers have looked into the issue. In a study published in 2019 in the European Review, Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University (United States), explains that this feeling would be linked to the aging of our brain. According to him, the time of the clock is not the same as the time collected by the human mind because our brain is designed to record changes. “The speed at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases with age due to several physical characteristics that change with age: the frequency of jerks, body size, degradation of respiratory tract”explains the researcher. As a child, we absorb so much new images that we have the impression that the months and the years are longer. Adult and over the years, the brain receives fewer images than for which it was trained when it was young. So you have the impression that time is going faster.
For Cindy Lustig, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan (United States). The perception of time is also influenced by memory and by what we have experienced. If we get bored, time seems longer to us. In question, the lack of hectic experiences that our brain needs to assess the passing time. “When we get older, we tend to have more structured lives around routines, and fewer major significant events that we use to delimit the different eras of the ‘time of our life'”, She explains in the Earth scientific media. Thus, for an 80 -year -old man who largely does the same thing every day, the year will blend into his mind and he will feel that she has passed quickly. The new and exciting things of a day are what makes the days and months different and distinguish them in our minds. “For a 5 -year -old child, a year is 20% of his life full of experiences to discover the world around him. The same period of time represents only 2% of the life of a 50 -year -old person who probably has fewer new experiences“, Illustrates the expert. The key to” slow down “time?” Never stop learning, discovering and creating new memories …
