Why does time pass faster with age?

A strange psychological effect that many people have noticed.

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 recall vividly and realize that it happened 10 years ago... or even more! or even more!

It also happens when you set out to see when a TV series that you have been following since its inception appeared, or when a movie that marked you was released, or even when you realize that the actor or actress who played a child role in an audiovisual fiction can no longer even be considered too young.

And yet, between the ages of 7 and 15, everything seemed to go very slowly.. Moreover, it is even likely that you were looking forward to turning one more year and being closer and closer to "the grown-ups", and that the wait seemed to take forever.

How time flies! Stepping on the temporary accelerator

Of course, one thing 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 very much so..

This was proven in 2005 by Sandra Lenhoff and Marc Wittmann, two researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Their research consisted of passing a series of surveys to 499 people between the ages of 14 and 94 and asking them to rate how "fast" they thought time passed over a period of time.

When the time span was a few days or weeks, everyone had a similar opinion about how fast that season had passed, but when the time frame was longer (years) they found that people tended to rate the passage of time more quickly the older they got, but when the time frame was longer (years) they found that people tended to rate the passage of time more quickly the older they got..

Specifically, people over the age of 40 felt that they felt that time passed very slowly during their childhood and that 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 amount of temporal references that are available in our memory when we evaluate our life trajectory retrospectively.

This explanation is based on a well-documented fact: more memories are accumulated about the first years of life than about a similar period of time during adulthood.. That is, the amount 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 (i.e., 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 experience 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 relevant life events are accumulated at the beginning of our livesThe first time we meet friends we will keep for a long time, the moment we come of age, our first love experiences, etc.

When memory has nothing to hold on to

So, on the one hand, we know that the brain is very sensitive to the environment, and on the other hand 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 well the memories related to new and rewarding experiences, and less 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 our lives.This can make it seem as if more time has passed when we look back.

It seems that, if in the last year we do not remember anything particularly remarkable happening, we go down an ice rink faster and faster, because in the absence of time references stored in our memory we tend to think that this period has been much shorter than it was. In this way, we can devote more resources to processing information about life stages in which really interesting things did happen.

It may seem cruel, but in the end after all, our nervous system is not built to give us an objective view of time and space..