![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/time-passing-300x234.jpg\")
<\/a>I was thinking the other day about how quickly time seems to be passing<\/strong>.\u00a0 \u00a0My brother (the real Jack Sparrow) turned 80 last week and next week we will celebrate our youngest grandson’s high school graduation.\u00a0 Where did that time go?\u00a0 Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were at Tahoe celebrating Jack’s 50th birthday?\u00a0 Wasn’t our grandson just asking me for tickles and a grape popsicle?\u00a0 Time really does seem to be flying by and almost everyone I speak with observes the same phenomenon.\u00a0 So I decided to find out why time seems to go so quickly as we age<\/strong>.\u00a0 The answer is way above my pay grade and my hair hurt trying to understand all the scientific research about it, but here goes.<\/p>\nThe second reason for the difference how we sense time as we age seems intuitively backwards<\/strong> to me, but then again, I majored in English, not Physics.\u00a0 \u00a0Adrian Bejan, a researcher at Duke University, believes the discrepancy in how old and young perceive time can be blamed on the ever-slowing speed at which images are obtained and processed<\/strong> by the human brain as the body ages.\u00a0 He explains that the experience of time is always a backward-looking process, reliant on memory and, more importantly, reliant on visual<\/em> memory.<\/p>\n After all the reading I did I still don’t quite understand it<\/strong>.\u00a0 It seems to me that the slow-motion camera would capture fewer frames.\u00a0 But again, I can barely remember what happened yesterday so maybe my brain is in super-slow mode.\u00a0 And you probably hoping by now that you can forget you ever started reading this post<\/strong>.\u00a0 Don’t worry – if you’re old enough, you’ll have forgotten all about this by tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Suzanne Sparrow Watson I was thinking the other day about how quickly time seems to be passing.\u00a0 \u00a0My brother (the real Jack Sparrow) turned 80 last week and next week we will celebrate our youngest grandson’s high school … read more![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/kids-having-fun-300x216.jpg\")
<\/a>First, the feeling of time going faster as we age is a universal one.\u00a0 The studies on this syndrome conclude that almost all older people<\/strong> perceive time to pass more quickly than younger people.\u00a0 But why?\u00a0 There are a couple of theories.\u00a0 One has to do with memory as a percentage of our age.\u00a0 For example, one year in a ten-year-old’s life represents 10-15% of their conscious memory, which is a pretty significant amount.\u00a0 But one year for a 50 year-old is only 2% of their recallable life<\/strong>.\u00a0 And for the very old, say 80-90 year-olds, it obviously represents far less.\u00a0 This explains why children think of summer as endless, while adults perceive a summer as going quickly.\u00a0 Unless you’re in Arizona and then the summer drags on and on.\u00a0 But that’s a subject for another day.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/movie-reel-300x169.jpg\")
<\/a>Like frames in a movie, the more frames one sees in a second<\/strong>, the slower the image appears to pass. The fewer frames one sees per second the faster the image seems to move. In other words, slow motion reveals many more frames-per-second than normal motion or fast motion. Bejan asserts that as we age our brain\u2019s neurovisual memory formation equipment slows and lays down fewer \u201cframes-per-second.\u201d That is, more actual time passes<\/strong> between the perception of each new mental image. Children perceive and lay down more memory frames or mental images per unit of time than adults, so when they remember events\u2014that is, the passage of time\u2014they recall more visual data.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/young-and-old-300x243.jpg\")
<\/a>This is what causes the perception of time passing more rapidly<\/strong> as we age. When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images relative to our older selves.\u00a0 Children’s brains are like a slow-motion camera<\/strong> that captures many more frames per second than a regular speed one, and time appears to pass more slowly when the film is played.<\/p>\n