Time flies at different speeds?

When we are young, time passes more slowly than when we are adults. Similarly, when bored, time seems to go on forever. Can time change depending on the perception and state of each person?

Ratio theory

Humans perceive the speed of time as dependent on age.

Most people feel that time goes by very slowly when we are kids and that time picks up speed as we get older. Surveys of psychologists show that adults feel time goes by 1/2 or 1/4 times faster than when they were children.

The feeling that time is suddenly going faster is the cause of the teleportation phenomenon, when people think that past events happened closer than they actually are. For example, the fact that an 18-year-old child entered kindergarten seems to have happened yesterday.

Rate theory is a popular answer when people encounter a situation where time accelerates. Researched by scientist Paul Janet in 1877, this theory describes that the apparent thickness of a period of time at a given time in a person's life is proportional to the total length of the life.

In a word, as people get older, each time period becomes a small part of their whole life. For example, a 10-year-old child feels a year is 1/10 of his entire life while a 50-year-old man only sees a year as 1/50, even though the length of a year remains the same.

There are also biological theories about the acceleration of time. It is suggested that the time of rapid rise is related to the metabolism in the body that gradually slows down as people mature because children's hearts beat faster than adults' hearts.

Also from a biological perspective, there is a theory that humans perceive the speed of time based on body temperature. In the 1930s, psychologist Hudson Hoagland conducted many experiments showing that body temperature causes different perceptions of time.

This idea originated from one time his wife got sick with the flu. When he left home for a while, she complained that he had gone too long without taking care of his wife. Hoagland then tested his wife's perception of time at different temperatures and found that the higher the temperature, the more people felt that time was moving slowly.

These results suggest that raising a person's body temperature can slow down the sense of time by up to 20%. In particular, children have a higher body temperature than adults, so it means they feel longer than adults.

Theory of perception

Children often notice time passing more quickly than adults.

Dr. Steve Taylor, a lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University, said that the perception of time is related to the theory of perception. The increase and decrease in time depends on human perception and experience of the surrounding world.

The speed of time is largely determined by the amount of information the human mind absorbs and processes. The more information people absorb, the slower time passes. This connection was also demonstrated by psychologist Robert Ornstein in the 1960s.

Mr. Ornstein had a group of volunteers listen to an audio tape with varying levels of information and asked the group to estimate how long it would take to listen to the tape. Clicking sounds contain a small amount of information while indoor noise sounds dense with information. People who listened to tapes with more noises estimated longer listening times even though the tapes were the same length.

This is also consistent with the complexity of the information. When viewing the pictures, the volunteers estimated the time to look at the more detailed picture longer than the less detailed one, even though the time allowed was the same. Therefore, time passes more slowly for children due to their limited ability to receive information.

In contrast, as people age, people lose the same high cognitive intensity as when they were young, so the world becomes a boring, familiar place. When encountering a beautiful scene, adults are no longer surprised because they have heard and seen it.

They gradually stop paying attention to their surroundings, and the experiences are no longer new. As a result, adults receive less information, so time passes faster.

Once we become adults, there is a gradual process of acquaintance that continues throughout life. The longer people live, the more familiar the world becomes. So the amount of perceptual information we absorb decreases with each year, and time seems to pass faster each year.

Another law is 'time passes quickly in absorption states'. When in a state of absorption, human attention narrows to a small focal point and blocks information from the surrounding environment. At the same time, our minds also receive very little information because we are so focused on some specific areas.

On the other hand, time slows down in a state of boredom and discomfort because in these situations people are letting loose their attention, giving thought streams a chance to pass through the mind, carrying vast amounts of information. awareness. This makes people feel uncomfortable.

However, not everyone who gets older feels time flies. The perception of time depends to a large extent on how people live their lives and how we relate to the experiences we perceive.