Pondering the perception of time

I haven't been feeling too good the last few days. Head in a bucket feeling of allergies turning my brain into mush. Hard to do some serious thinking, so I usually pass the time performing mundane tasks, like making the bed. It also gives me the excuse to put on the big head cans & chill out to some music. Where does my mind drift off towards? Things of time and place. What would the world be like if we walk on Mars? Then the topic of this post, the perception of time changing as we age.

One thing I always hear is how the days are passing by faster and faster. That the past was slower & the present is quick. I look at my own take on the passage of time, how as a 5 year old the day felt long and my birthday was always slow to arrive. But now many more years older, the days pass by at an ever increasing rate. Perception is the day is shorter, but the clock says it is the same as it ever was.

The theory is that each day you live becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total days of your existence. The brain perceives in ratios, a day for a 5 year old a much larger part than a day of someone 95. This may point to why kids are impatient & elderly much more patient. At least in broad strokes.

My great grand mother lived to around 95 (she wouldn't tell us her exact age). Listening to her discuss her day & what she did (a very active lady), she would say that the days are short, but that means they come back around that much quicker. She would wait for letters in the mail, patient that they would eventually come. Maybe what I'm rambling about is gaining calm through age.

Look at a kid waiting for something in the mail. As my sister would say, like a ferret on crystal meth. Each day drags, each night feels long, even if the monsters under the bed stay quiet. I remember my days playing after school, younger than the age of 10. Watch the clock for 3pm & then off to home. The time from home to dinner seemed long enough to conduct numerous adventures. Mom would limit play time to an hour outside. Such a length of time, though. Sixty minutes didn't seem short at all.

Contrast that to today, an hour doesn't feel all that long. I may move a bit slower than I did at 5, but I'm calmer. Waiting in line doesn't seem as frustrating. Maturity? Nah, the perception of time as I experience it.

The brain is a wondrous device. It filters all of our senses to create a sense of reality. But it isn't a true reality. We see within our mind - the eyes give a lot more information than is used, tossing away details or merging diverse images to make a composite. Being severely near-sighted, I can tell this every day. Even with my contacts out, I can still perceive faces, motion, and the objects in my house pretty well. But it is a construction as the brain adjusts for the fact the eyes now need more correction.

Being that our reality is a complex melding of sensory data to build a perception of the world, it seems that time should fit in there too. Our brains need a reference for time, usually using the position of the sun as a guide. Which gets back to ratios - measurement of absolute time into quanta is a relatively recent technology for humans. The brain "feels" time, giving the child the perception the day is long & the adult the day is short.

At the end of this stumbling prose, what of it then? The point is that each day you wake to sunshine is another great day to create new experiences. To better appreciate the frustration of the child who thinks their parents are slow. To better appreciate the wisdom of the elders for patients. Somewhere in the middle is happiness.

Or so my fuzzy brain perceives. :)

-Mike M.