Why time runs slower for children: scientific explanations and lessons for adults

My family is enthusiastically argued when time is the fastest and most slowest.

“The most slowest in the car!” The son shouts.

"Yes," replies my daughter. "I'm too busy to feel that time is going slow, but perhaps on weekends when we are sitting on the couch and watching movies."

They agree in some ways. The days after Christmas and their birthdays are too long when you realize that you wait 365 days before the next holiday. The year at their age is a huge period of time.

I remember these feelings well: summer holidays from games on the beach, jumping on a fresh lawn, linen that dried on a rope while the sun burns. At such moments, it seemed that time was moving slowly.

The professor of psychology at Belfast Royal University Teresa McCokmak investigates whether there is something like an internal clock that works at different speeds in children and adults.

“We still do not know the answers to the questions, for example, when children begin to distinguish the past from the future, and this is something that structures our whole way of thinking,” says the scientist.

She explains that from a fairly early age, children begin to distinguish routine events, such as food and sleep time. But this is not the same adult sense of linearity.

Unlike children, adults can think about time moments, regardless of when the event occurs, because they use the clock and the calendar.

Words also matter. “Children need time to learn how to use the concepts of“ before ”,“ after ”,“ tomorrow ”and“ yesterday ”,” McCormak says.

Our understanding of time is also based on when you are asked to estimate the speed of time.

One of the most striking examples given by the researcher about the adulthood of your children.

"The time from the birth of my baby to the moment she grew up and left home, seems to be one moment. But you will remember how long the day you look after a young child."

Studies have shown that the ability to estimate the length of time and its speed develop in people separately.

Children under the age of six seem to be able to understand how quickly the lesson in the classroom goes, but their judgments are more related to their emotional state than with actual duration. These two elements are combined at a later stage when children understand the relationship between speed and duration.

There is also a question of memory.

Many studies are focused on how our perception of time depends on how our brain retains memories. This topic has long fascinated Zoltana, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Etwesh Larand in Budapest.

When he studied at the university, he persuaded his classmates to conduct a field study of the perception of time among children and adults.

The experiment was simple. The provisions and his classmates showed two videos of children and adults, both for a minute, and asked which video seems longer and which is shorter.

Three decades later, and his team decided to repeat the experiment.

The dynamic sharp -paired video about police and robbers and a rather monotonous video where people float on a boat with a lake, showed three age groups and asked to estimate the duration of rollers with gestures.

The result was the same. "Four to five-year-old children considered the videos of the video longer, and the boring ones were shorter. For most adults, everything was the opposite."

The participants were asked to evaluate the video with gestures to understand whether they perceive time as a horizontal flow, which was obvious in all three age groups.

According to Nadasdi, the experiment shows that in the absence of a sensory organ to predict time people use other mechanisms.

"We do not have a direct sensory body that would be responsible for the perception of time, so we need something, whether we could compare the flow of time," the researcher says.

So, what do children compare with?

When they go to school, their scale perception is obviously changing, because at school they begin to study the concept of simultaneity and absolute time.

"It does not give us a sense of time but simply replaces this scale. When you go to school, you follow the schedule. Your day is fully controlled."

McCokmak draws attention to two additional points when it comes to a child's idea of ​​time.

“One is that their control processes are not like adults,” the researcher says. “They are more impatient, they are harder to wait.

This is also due to the concentration of attention. The more attention you pay a certain period of time, the slower it is for you. ”

Another study by Sylvy France from France and John Verden from Britain has shown that it also works for adults.

They found that the feeling of time in everyday life changes not with age, but with human emotions. Simply put - if you are happier, time is faster. If you are sad, the time is drawn.

Researchers first paid attention to this during the Lockdow. Slowing of time was associated with more stress, less affairs and older age.

A similar effect can be seen when watching a movie. Scary or disgusting movies seem to extend time. Unpleasant impressions, such as a trip to a crowded train per rush, also seem longer than a quiet trip.

According to Professor from North Carolina Adrian Bedzhan, the deterioration of our physical condition with age also affects the perception of time.

He tried to explain the riddle of our perception of time through the theory of "physics of life", which he developed in 1996.

"The largest source of information for our brain is vision, from the retina to the brain," says Bedzhan.

"Through the optic nerve, the brain receives pictures like frames from the movie. The brain develops in childhood and is accustomed to getting many of these screenshots. In adulthood, the body is larger in size, the distance between the retina and the brain doubles in size, and the pathways have become more complicated," the researcher says.

In addition, degradation begins with age in the body.

This, according to him, means that the speed at which we get "mental pictures" from our senses is decreasing with age.

This creates a feeling of compressed time in our mind, because we get fewer imaginary images in one unit of time than the child.

Studies of neurodegenerative age -related changes show that there may be a link between the optic nerve weakening and slowing down the speed of information processing and the volume of working memory.

What you look at may also be meaningful. The perception of time can be influenced by the properties of the stage, its size, how easily it can be remembered and how strongly it is littered with objects.

Recently, psychologists at George Misson University in Ferfax, Virginia, have found that the first two factors have increased time, while the clutter and the workload of the scene reduce it.

Our hearts also transmit an important signal to our brain about the flow of time - our feeling of how long the event lasts, changes according to the rhythm of our heartbeat.

If it really plays an important role in our sense of time, it is probably no accident that the frequency of our heart contractions tends to decrease with age. The heart rate reaches a peak several months after birth, and then slowly decreases with age.

When we get old, other things happen. Our daily routine becomes less diverse and more inflexible. Studies have found that time is faster if a person lives under a pressure of routine, and is more focused on the future than life at this point.

What you do now is of paramount importance for our understanding of time, regardless of age. For example, when the brain is loaded more, we tend to feel a reduction in time - we underestimate the duration of the task, which is more demanding.

Visit a cheerful two -week summer camp - it can be remembered better than the whole school year.

Nadasdi explains that the memories of a summer camp are more likely to take up a lot more space in the brain tissue because of a huge number of adventures in a short time.

"It is possible that the judgments of people about the length of time partially reflect their memories of the new things that have happened to them," McCokmak says.

"If you are an adult, probably in the last 10 years in your life has not happened many big changes." But if they happen, they will be remembered just like that summer camp.

In view of this, can adults slow down, make it the one he was on the happy days of childhood? This can be done even with exercise. When we move, time is slower.

Bedzhan has other ideas.

“Try to do something new to get away from the routine,” the researcher says. “Do yourself surprises. Do unusual things. You have heard a good joke? Tell! You have a new idea? Do something. Do something else. Tell me something.”