Thank you for reading, John, and offering your thoughts. I did mention the impact of that on the sense that time speeds up with age. It’s important to recognize that this is still an expression of the incongruence between one’s sense perception of time passing and the objective passage of time.
In other words, our cognition of the proportions of a year as a 5-year-old versus as a 60-year-old is the operative here, not the proportions — because the exterior measure of time is still in “clock” format. The Earth rotates, and circles the sun, at the same rate whether we are 5 or 60.
What has changed is our mind, or more accurately, our brain — a physical, electrical organ that has developed neural pathways and synapses that fire in specific ways. We take in information in a saccade fashion that changes whether we are infants, children, young adults, or older adults.
Those saccades impact how long it takes to process necessary information about experiences. If they are new experiences, it takes longer for inputs to travel along neural pathways, through our short-term memory brain areas and to our hippocampus where they are integrated and associated with any similar long-term memories because the brain has not encountered the information before.
If we have prior knowledge about a stimulus, the most efficient relevant neural pathways are followed and memories are called up much more quickly. We process inputs more quickly because the paths have already been formed.
A young brain is creating new connections at an astounding pace. Older brains are full of complex pathways that do not have to be built — they just have to be fired.
The cognitive process influences how we perceive the passage of time. And yes, 5-year-old passes 20 percent of her life in the course of that year. But she is also experiencing magnitudes of order more new experiences in that year and building neural pathways in her brain over the course of that year that a 60-year-old is not.
It’s worth reflecting on. The human brain is one of the most remarkable things in the universe. It’s one of the most mysterious things in the universe, too, even though we all have one inside our own bodies. And in a sense, we are “inside” those brains. That makes it sometimes harder to differentiate between our perceptions and the external world.
