Children Experience Time More Slower Than Adults, Studies Says (image-Meta AI)

The perception of time is completely relative, however, age and memory play a major role. We often catch ourselves saying “time flies,” even when we’re not actually enjoying ourselves.

The flight of the time could be so fast, upon reflection, like our life is passing us by.

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Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology who studies cognitive development at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Irelan studied the correlation of the measurement of time differences between children and adults, such as the presence of an internal clock that functions at different speeds to that of adults, reports BBC.

She in her studies has found that the sense of understanding time in children is much different from adults and unlike, adults, they seem to not follow linear time.

“It takes time for children to actually become completely competent users of temporal language, using terms like before, after, tomorrow and yesterday,” says McCormack.

She added that the adult’s understanding of the passage of time is based on when the people are asked to make those judgments. Citing an example, she said, “The time from when my child was born to when they left home now seems as if it went in the blink of an eye. But during the time when you’re actually engaged in the business of child rearing, a single day lasts an eternity”.

Studies have found that judging the duration and the speed of a passage of time develop separately in humans. Younger children below the age of six seem able to grasp how quickly a lesson passes in a classroom. And research has found that the passage of time depends on how one individual’s brain stores memories and captures memories.

To justify the above statement, the researchers showed a group of children and adults two videos, both one minute long, and asked them which video felt the longest and which left the shortest.

The video shown was of action-packed cops and robber clips and a comparatively uneventful video of people rowing on a river. And the outcome was, a group of four to five-year-olds found the action-packed video longer and the boring one shorter. While for the grown-ups, it was the opposite.

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The experiment concluded that in the absence of a sensory organ to predict time, humans use other approximations.

McCormack, in the article published in the BBC, raised two other additional factors that govern the concept of time in children. One among them is control processes.”They can be more impatient and find it more difficult to wait,” she says. “It can also be related to their attentional processes as well. The more attention that you pay to a period of time passing, the slower it seems to go for you,” she says.

Similarly, in adults, the researchers have found out that a person’s experience of time passages in daily life does not fluctuate with age, but with their emotional state. That is, if you are happy, time passes faster. If you are sad, time drags.

Another interesting factor is that our heart also plays a major role in providing an important interoceptive signal to our brains about the passage of time. Our sense of how long an event takes changes with the rhythm of our heartbeat.

Research has also found that the more time pressure, boredom, and routine in a person’s life while more future-oriented in contrast to living in the moment, the faster time is experienced.

When our mental workload increases, we tend to experience a shortening of time.

So now the question left is, is it possible for the adults to slow down time? Some research has found that physical exercise can slow our perception of time. This works on the principle that being active causes physical fatigue which will help in shortening the time perception.

But there is yet another less assertive idea too. By intentionally trying new experiences and treating yourself to surprises, you can effectively make time feel like it’s slowing down.