This is certainly OT, but here's an intriguing theory posed a few years back as to why we experience the feeling that time seems to speed up as we age.
From the article linked below:
"(Harvard) Professor Adrian Bejan presents an argument based on the physics of neural signal processing. He hypothesizes that, over time, the rate at which we process visual information slows down, and this is what makes time ‘speed up’ as we grow older."What he says is that as we age, our bodies process the information we take in from our surroundings at a slower rate, which means we consume fewer images of the world per unit of time than we did when we were younger. This creates the feeling that time is going by faster.
All this happens, he says, because the size and complexity of our brains’ neural networks increase as we continue to age. That is, the older we get, which of course corresponds to the longer we live, then the electrochemical signals in our brains must in our later years traverse greater distances and span more pathways, more and more of which are created over the years, and this slows signal processing, again, per unit of time. This creates the illusion in our minds that time is moving faster.
That would seem to make sense, even as simple an explanation as it seems to be.
But it also makes me wonder. If we should now follow all of those "brain exercises" we have heard about
, which are supposed to improve brain working efficiency, and supposing we did so and it did make all those electrochemical signals "run better" through our brains, then, since our brains are now working more efficiently, would time again seem to move slower for us, as it seemed to do when we were younger?
It would also seem true, if this professor's theory is right, that the longer we live, the faster time should seem to fly by, since all those neural pathways keep getting larger and larger, taking more and more time for signals to get through, as we continue to age, and, again, time will seem to be moving faster as a result.
So if this theory does prove to be correct, the immediate implication here is that the
longer one lives, the
faster time will seem to fly by. And this will happen in direct proportion to how old we are, as those neural networks presumably increase arithmetically over time, as the years go by.
So that, if someone has, say, reached the age of 105, time for that person will just seem to ZIP by?
"No, It’s Not Just You: Why Time “Speeds Up” As We Get Older":
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/no-not-just-time-speeds-get-older/