Remember when we were young? It took forever for Christmas to come, for us to be a year older or for the school year to end. I think you get my drift. Now that we are older it seems that birthdays come quite often, they’re playing Christmas music again and events that happened years ago seem like they happened yesterday. Why is this? What can we do to slow it down?
Our brains contain thousands upon thousands of neurons. Every time we encounter something new, thousands of these neurons are stimulated to code and store as much information as possible about this event. This causes you to feel and notice a lot about this new experience. As time passes, these ‘new experiences’ become old and your brain uses less energy to code information because you already know it. Here’s an example of this. The first few times we drove the 14 miles from the bridge to our place, the neurons in the ‘old noodle’ were really stimulated to code and store things we saw. Now, with every trip in/out our brains are not stimulated as much as we know where every pothole and low hanging branch is located.
We experienced most of our ‘firsts’ in the earlier parts of our lives. This causes us to feel that much more happened when we were young. Our first encounter with the opposite sex, our first car or our first ‘party’, the likelihood of new experiences is much greater at a young age. Add this likelihood of new experiences at a young age to the declining proportion of time that one year represents in our lives and the feeling is compounded. To a 1-year-old, this is 100% of their life. A 2-year-old, one year is 50% of their lives while to a 50-year-old, one year is 2% of their lives. Every year represents a smaller proportion of your life as a whole, and it seems like time went by faster. As my Dad always said, “Getting older sure beats the alternative!”
What can we do about this feeling? If we continue to find new things to do that stimulate different parts of our brains, time may slow down again. Learn a new language, travel, take a class or do an activity you’ve never done before to escape the monotony that everyday life brings. By doing these new things, you’ll get the feeling that time is once again passing slowly.
Keep your fork
Life on the Massanutten 