Smash Mouth got it right: The years start comin' and they don't stop comin'. What wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey facts has science taught us about aging and our brains?
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00:00Smash Mouth got it right.
00:02The years start coming and they don't stop coming.
00:05What wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey facts has science taught us about aging and our brains?
00:10We are all inherently aware that time is subjective.
00:14You probably first noticed in school that one particular semester felt shorter than
00:18the last one.
00:19You may have shaken it off as a fluke, but then, as time went on, you began to realize
00:23that each and every school year seemed thinner than the last.
00:27In his memoir, Summer of a Dormouse, written at the age of 75, the author John Mortimer
00:33noted,
00:34"...in childhood, the afternoons spread out for years.
00:37For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons.
00:41The playwright Christopher Fry, now 93, told me that after the age of 80 you seem to be
00:47having breakfast every five minutes."
00:49That time speeds up as we get older has been widely observed, but can science tell us why?
00:56Some of the most common explanations are tied to memory, and like memory, such explanations
01:01tend to be frustratingly fuzzy.
01:03As noted by Psychology Today, one theory holds that our perception of time's passing is inherently
01:09linked to the years we have lived.
01:11To a five-year-old child, a single year feels incredibly long, as it represents 20 percent
01:16of their life so far — more if we discount their infancy, which might not be remembered.
01:21To a person in old age, however, a year is a tiny fraction of the life they have lived.
01:26"...How old are you?"
01:28"...Seven.
01:29But I look a lot older."
01:31This proportional explanation is somewhat satisfying, but it still doesn't quite touch
01:36on why.
01:37Thankfully, experts in the fields of physics and biology are increasingly trying to nail
01:41down the phenomenon in scientific terms.
01:44Writing for Psychology Today, Dr. Clifford N. Lazarus explains a common experiment in
01:50which both small children and older adults are asked to estimate the passing of a single
01:55minute.
01:56According to Lazarus, children tend to vastly overestimate the passing of time, often guessing
02:01that a minute has passed within just 40 seconds.
02:04In contrast, adults often perceive a minute has passed at the 70-second mark.
02:09Scientists have postulated that this disparity of time perception may be the result of the
02:14gradual slowing of the neural pacemaker of the brain.
02:18In childhood, the brain processes a greater number of images.
02:22Lazarus makes the comparison to a film camera rolling at a higher frame rate per second,
02:26but like the heart, the beating of which slows as we age, the process of neurovisual memory
02:31making becomes slower-paced, meaning that time appears to pass more quickly.
02:36"...Doctor, what's going on?"
02:38"...It's, uh, timey-wimey thing."
02:41Lazarus pointed to a 2019 paper by Professor Adrien Bajon, published in the European Review
02:48which describes how more time passes between the arrival of each newly created neural image.
02:54Bajon presents a series of scientific models which suggests the difference between how
02:59we perceive time and how much time has actually passed might be reflected in the slowing down
03:04of our neural processes, which might explain why those long summer months seem to become
03:09shorter as the years roll on.
03:11It may sound from the experiment that children and adults tend to misjudge the passage of
03:16time in their own ways, and if the idea that the brain slows down isn't a particularly
03:21attractive one, other research into human time perception suggests that our sense of
03:25time's passing actually becomes more acute as we develop.
03:29As noted by NBC News, neuroscientists conducted temporal bisection tasking, a basic experiment
03:36meant to measure the accuracy of time perception, which had participants compare the length
03:41of tones they were played.
03:43Neuroscientist Patricia Costello explains,
03:45You first hear a short tone that's about a fraction of a second.
03:49Then you hear comparison tones.
03:50You're supposed to respond, and say if the next tone is more like the short or more like
03:55the long one.
03:56In these experiments, it was discovered that the youngest children tested, around the age
04:00of five, had notable discrepancies in their perception of short tones.
04:05In particular, children in that age group tended to perceive short tones as longer than
04:10they were, which coincides with anecdotal evidence that time seems to pass more slowly
04:14in our formative years.
04:16Time may also seem to pass much more quickly when we are fully grown because of how differently
04:21we spend our time as adults in comparison to when we were children.
04:25In our early years, many of our experiences are formative and meaningful.
04:29Often, we are experiencing things for the first time, getting to understand the world
04:33around us, and learning new things all day long.
04:36Without time, we don't exist.
04:40However, a scientific American argues, the older we get, the more familiar with the world
04:45we become.
04:46But as the surprises and spontaneity of childhood are replaced with the monotonous chores and
04:50routines of adult life, we create fewer new memories.
04:54Can you remember what you thought and felt while eating breakfast seven days ago?
04:59How about the last time you did the laundry?
05:01With fewer truly unique moments each day, multiple memories tend to blur into one.