Time Perception: Age's Accelerating Effect, Explained.

(Image credit: VICTOR HABBICK VISIONS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)

Researchers are possibly inching closer to demystifying why the perception of time accelerates as we get older — and brain analyses of individuals observing an old Alfred Hitchcock program aided them in tackling this age-old enigma.

Within a study showcased on Sept. 30 in Communications Biology, scientists extracted information from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN), which is a sustained investigation into the aging brain. In total, 577 individuals had earlier viewed a portion of the vintage TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” — notably, eight minutes of an installment entitled “Bang! You’re Dead.” During the time the study’s participants were viewing the segment, functional MRI (fMRI) assessments were documented; these scans were planned to deliver metrics on the manner in which the participant’s brain function evolved over a duration.

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At the time that the cerebral assessments were acquired, the contributors were anywhere from 18 to 88 years old. The analysts were granted permission to access these pre-existing fMRI records and employed a computer program named Greedy State Boundary Search (GSBS) to scrutinize them.

Corresponding to its designation, this computational algorithm recognizes shifts amongst stable cerebral activity configurations. It executes this function “greedily” — explicitly, it pinpoints these transitions instantaneously, regardless of the overarching arrangement of the plot across an amplified timeframe.

Across the eight-minute duration, senior individuals experienced alterations to novel activity modes at a diminished tempo, and these cerebral conditions had a heightened duration compared to junior participants. This configuration persevered consistently across the total age range of 18 to 88 years.

“This demonstrates that more lengthy [and, thus, less frequent] neural conditions within an equivalent duration could be a contributor to senior individuals perceiving time as passing rapidly,” the analysts noted in their documentation. This corresponds with a conception of time that traces its origins as far back as Aristotle: The higher sum of distinct occurrences within a given period, the longer the subjective impression. The novel outcomes amplify the possibility that if the brains of senior individuals are listing fewer “events” in a given timeframe, it could be the catalyst for the feeling that time is racing.

Although this is, up until now, simply a postulation, “the proposal that this might exert influence on perception and recollection in everyday existence, namely, the feeling that personal time seems to advance more rapidly with age, appears highly credible to me,” declared Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist from the University of Trento located in Italy, who had no affiliation with the recent study.

The authors ascribed their observations that senior individuals demonstrate a lower volume of transitions amidst neural conditions to a circumstance known as age-related neural dedifferentiation. Throughout this occurrence, the function of varied areas of the brain turns out to be comparatively non-specific with the advance of age. As an illustration, in young people, neuron congregations within areas discerning faces react more particularly to faces as a classification, but amongst senior people, these neuron congregations ignite more often for things that are not faces. This generalization — at the level of broader neuron congregations as opposed to isolated neurons — could pertain to the brain in totality, and it may generate complications in recognizing the conclusion of one event and the genesis of another, the study’s authors proposed.

However, neural dedifferentiation might not entirely illuminate why time appears to fly when you’re older.

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The analysts brought up the prospect that senior individuals could potentially still be able to render time feel subjectively richer.

“Picking up new knowledge, traveling, and engaging in novel pursuits may lend support to the impression of time feeling more extensive when reflecting on the past,” stated study co-author Linda Geerligs, a researcher at Radboud University located in the Netherlands, communicating with Live Science via email. “Perhaps of even superior weight, however, are meaningful communal interactions and pursuits that elicit happiness, and these too can provide reinforcement to a heightened perception of time.”

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Slava AmanatskiLive Science Contributor

Slava Amanatski is a freelance science writer with a degree in clinical psychology. He writes about neuroscience, perception, and the science of consciousness.

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