Why Time Seems to Go Faster with Age? 25.03.2019

New research aims to explain why days seem to drag on when we’re children, but pass in a flash once we reach adulthood. 

According to Adrian Bejan, a professor at Duke University, children register a higher number of images than adults, a hypothesis based on the number of saccades, the simultaneous involuntary movements of the eye that take place when humans observe objects. It turns out that the number of saccades is much higher in infants (14 saccades per second) than in adults (3-5 saccades per second). Thus, younger brains collect and process a greater amount of stimuli within the same timeframe than adult brains, producing a lot more data in the process. This, in turn, leads to the illusion that time is somehow flowing slower. 

The research also indicates that the growth of neural networks with age also has considerable impact on the experience of the passage of time. Adults register their environments much more slowly, and because their neural networks are much more complex, the recorded image has a longer way to travel. Thus, the brain ultimately receives less information. According to Bejan, the human mind bases its experience of the flow of time on the amount of stimuli it receives, so the less stimuli reach it in a given amount of time, the quicker time itself seems to be passing. 

For more details, see the full report published by European Review HERE.