Is Time Speeding Up?

Is time speeding up, or is it just me?

“Wow! This year has gone by so quickly!”
You’ve heard it dozens of times. Maybe you’ve said this, or something similar such as “It seems as if I get busier every year,” or “There’s just not enough time in the day!”

Why is it that as we get older, either we slow down or time literally speeds up?

When we were children, the summer stretched ahead endlessly. We had plenty of time and never felt rushed. Now it’s as if we blink and it’s gone! It’s weird.
As this year winds to a close and we begin thinking about our plans for next year, we decided to check into what seems to be a universal phenomenon and we found some pretty interesting insights that we thought we’d share with you.

There are two major schools of thought on the topic. One puts it all down to the psychological effect of aging, while the other says that time really is speeding up and that this is a scientifically proven fact.

It’s not quite as kooky as it sounds. Einstein calculated that the faster we go, the slower time goes and conversely the slower we go, the faster time goes. When an object’s speed increases toward the speed of light, time moves more slowly. For instance, if we were to be in a space craft moving at the speed of light for just a few days, then returned to earth, we’d find that in our absence, decades had passed.
When it comes to explaining just how time is speeding up for us here on earth, we look to something called ‘Schuman Resonance’ which is a measurement of the resonance, or frequency, of the earth. Without going into too much scientific explanation, all matter has a frequency, or an electro magnetic “pulse.” Schuman Resonance measures that of earth. When this resonance was first measured in the 1950’s, the earth’s frequency was 7.8 hertz. Apparently recently it has been recorded at 12 hertz. This means that a 24 hour day now feels as if it’s just 16 hours.

If the scientific theory for time speeding up sounds a bit too strange, there’s the other theory tied to how we perceive time as we age.

That theory explains how time perception is relative to the length of our lives and to the number of recurring milestones. In other words, when you are doing things for the first time and when you are younger, that experience becomes a big milestone and forms a significant percentage of your life to date.
As you age, your life, of course, becomes longer. Therefore the percentage of your life taken up by an experience becomes smaller. When you do things routinely, you also form a perception that they take less time. For instance, your first Christmases as a child seemed like they took forever to arrive, whereas now, they feel as if they arrive the day after Thanksgiving! Ana Swanson who wrote about this phenomena in the Washington Post puts it like this:
“It means that waiting 24 days for Christmas at age 5 literally feels like waiting a year at age 54.”
To illustrate that point, here’s an interactive perspective on time by Austrian Maximillian Kiener that illustrates how this works
http://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/

However, this explanation doesn’t really feel as if it tells the whole story.

For instance, there have been experiments (you could replicate this yourself if you like) where a twenty year old and a seventy year old were each asked to estimate when a minute had passed. Neither had any means of measuring the time other than what they thought. The twenty year old estimated a minute reasonably accurately, while the seventy year old thought it was over faster than it actually was.
In the 1960’s psychologists Wallace and Green studied this phenomena. They asked younger people to describe time. The younger people used “static” metaphors such as “the time is quiet” and “time is like a motionless ocean” whereas older people used metaphors such as “time is like a speeding train.”
In 2005,  Marc Wittman and Sandra Lehnhoff of Maximilian University in Munich also studied this phenomena. They found a surprising twist. It seems that time “speeds” up as people aged towards 50. People between 20 and 50 felt most pressured by lack of time, specifically not having enough time to do all that they needed to do within a day. Across this entire age span, all felt that time was speeding up.
Interestingly, people between the ages of 50 and 95, did not perceive that time continued to increase in speed. This could very well correspond to the fact that between the ages of 20 and 50 we are most under pressure from our jobs and personal responsibilities causing us to feel “time pressure,” whereas after 50 many people begin to take things a little easier. The other surprising insight coming from the study was that when people of all ages were asked to assess the passage of time retrospectively, they all felt that time was speeding up.

People talk about their biological clocks and sometimes use this as an explanation for the phenomena, but in reality, this “clock” only measures circadian rhythm, it doesn’t measure the passing of time at all. Some scientists feel that the perception of time passing is linked to the levels of dopamine in the brain.

Although we all feel that time is speeding up with each year that passes, it turns out that it’s not all time, but only specific measurements.
Apparently, there is a difference in how fast we feel hours and days go by as opposed to how fast we feel that years go by. Hours and days may seem to go by at a relatively normal speed, or even slowly, depending upon what we’re doing. However as we age, we feel as if the years are flying by faster and faster. Having said that, you’ve probably noticed that when you’re really busy, the hours and days do seem to go by faster than normal.
Claudia Hammond, in a BBC article, says that we assess time in two different ways. We gauge time prospectively and retrospectively. In other words, we look at time right now and assess how quickly it’s passing by at this moment, and we also look back and assess how fast yesterday or last week went by.
In many instances the resultant perceptions are quite similar. But, as we age, the recurring milestones in our lives accumulate. As we look back over these milestones, they seem to arrive more and more quickly. Birthdays are a prime example. “Am I really 50 already? What happened, I was only 25 a few years ago?!”
The psychologists say that this is because as we age there are far fewer “new” experiences in our lives and a lot more “old” experiences. Life becomes a series of recurring milestones with little to differentiate them from their previous occurrences. One birthday seems much like the next and often we can’t remember specifics of a past birthday at all.
The million dollar question for those of us who’d like to slow things down a little is: can we? Is there any way that we can slow the passage of time as we age? Or are we doomed to slide down a slippery slope of “where did the time go” until finally there’s no time left? How awful that sounds!

Psychologists say that there is something you can do if you want to alter your perception of the passage of time.

If you want time to go slower, you need to actively seek new experiences. Savoring new experiences gives you more memories, different memories to those you’ve made before. This means that when you look back you see a time period filled with all these new milestones and your memory is filled with a multitude of details different to anything you’ve experienced before. That, they say, will make it seem as if that period in time went much slower than normal.
Well, we’re not quite sure whether to agree with that advice or not. As the saying goes, “Time flies when you’re having fun,” so conversely, if it’s dragging, chances are you are not enjoying those new experiences all that much!
Whatever your perception of time might be, we want to encourage you to slow down during this holiday season and take time to spend with family and friends, doing the kinds of things you’ll remember for the rest of your life. One thing we can all agree upon is that once time is gone, we can’t bring it back. So use it wisely and live life to the full!
 
You can discover more very interesting time related information in this BBC series by physicist Michio Kaku at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTx6ha6fRwo&list=PL03F2D49431E2A889
More reading on this topic:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/why-does-time-fly-as-we-get-older/
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120709-does-life-speed-up-as-you-age
http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1455706
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/haunting-images-show-why-time-really-does-seem-to-go-faster-as-you-get-older/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201004/why-time-goes-faster-you-get-older
http://blog.idonethis.com/science-of-slowing-down-time/
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=30314
http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=1514
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3325763/Can-t-believe-s-Christmas-Technology-SPEEDING-perception-time-claims-study.html

Thanks to: http://www.cofcogroup.com

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Metaphysical websites misuse a real scientific phenomenon to argue that time is changing.

Time itself is speeding up and we actually perceive a 24-hour day as a 16-hour day.

RATING

False

ORIGIN

Across numerous metaphysical websites, there appears to be a recurring and somewhat befuddling claim that new scientific data has resulted in the discovery that the earth’s “pulse” is speeding up, and along with it time itself. To make this argument, these websites typically invoke something called the “Schumann resonance,” and then misinterpret it in myriad ways.
Here is a representative argument from a July 2016 post from the website named “Esoteric Metaphysical Spiritual Database”:

Time is actually speeding up (or collapsing). For thousands of years the Schumann Resonance or pulse (heartbeat) of Earth has been 7.83 cycles per second, The military have used this as a very reliable reference. However, since 1980 this resonance has been slowly rising. Some scientists believe that it is rising faster than we can measure seeing as it is constantly rising while measuring.
It is due to this increasing pulse rate that we feel as though time is speeding up. Why do we “feel” as though time is moving faster than it used to be? The reason is what we once perceived to be a period of 24 hours now feels like only 16 hours. Our clocks still move in seconds, minutes and hours and still click over a full day in 24 hours but due to the Earth’s increased heartbeat, we perceive it to be only two thirds as long or a perception period of merely 16 hours.

This, however, is a poorly executed attempt to sound credible by adding a real phenomenon into the mix. Schumann resonances are ultra low frequency waves in the upper atmosphere caused, in essence, by Earth’s constant hum of lightning strikes, as described by NASA:

Every second, lightning flashes some 50 times on Earth. Together these discharges coalesce and get stronger, creating electromagnetic waves circling around Earth, to create a beating pulse between the ground and the lower ionosphere, about 60 miles up in the atmosphere. This electromagnetic signature [is] known as Schumann Resonance […]

This constant low frequency wave is popularly thought of as the heartbeat of Earth’s atmosphere, and it is composed of numerous frequency waves, the most prominent being commonly defined as 7.8 Hz.
The notion that this ‘pulse’ is speeding up and appears to originate from new age author Gregg Braden, who was a big advocate of the theory that the magnetic poles would reverse in the year 2012, and who is described on his publisher’s website with these accolades:

For more than 27 years, Gregg has explored high mountain villages, remote monasteries, and forgotten texts to merge their timeless secrets. His discoveries are now shared in 33 countries and 38 languages through such paradigm-inspiring books as: The God Code, The Divine Matrix, Fractal Time, Deep Truth, and his newest, The Turning Point.

Not only does the author fail to explain how the Schumann resonances would affect our perception of time, his claim is factually inaccurate. There are many features that can affect the distribution of different frequencies caused by the Schumann resonance—among them atmospheric temperature and solar activity, but there is no steady or alarming increase over time.
Another point is that the days are technically, but more important literally, getting longer, due to tidal forces from the Moon.

Thanks to: http://www.snopes.com

Stop Life from Passing You By: the Weird Science of How to Slow Down Time


March 13, 2014 by Janet Choi 


One unnerving aspect of getting older is how life seems to start speeding up. Feeling that whoosh as time rushes past you can be disheartening as you wonder where the days, or months, or even years go.
Yet we’re not doomed to march to time’s relentless beat. Your sense of time is weird and pliable — stretching, compressing, coming to a standstill. And you can mold it, to some extent, to move to your own beat. You can slow down time.
When you encounter the familiar, time seems to constrict and when you acquire new knowledge, it expands. Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains:

Time is this rubbery thing…. It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, “Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,” it shrinks up.

That relationship between time’s elasticity and whether your brain is processing new information gets at why time seems to turn up the tempo as we age. As the world starts to become more familiar, we learn less and sometimes even seek information and experiences that fit within what we already know. There’s less adventure, play, exploration, creativity, and wonder to invite and engage with newness.
The way you spend your time influences how you perceive it. So the choices you make about what to do now impacts how you’ll manage your time later. Here are two ways to make your days richer and more memorable so that your sense of time expands and life doesn’t pass you by.

Fill Your Time with New Experiences to Counteract Routines

Time speeding up as we grow older is nothing new. In 1890, William James described this exact experience in his Principles of Psychology:

In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

James identified how the automatic nature of routines means that learning isn’t really taking place over a century before Dinah Avni-Babad and Ilana Ritov tested this phenomenon. In experiments examining perception of time in routine versus nonroutine situations, the researchers found that people remember the duration of familiar circumstances as shorter.
In one study, participants had to count how many times underlined numbers appeared in each row of a list of numbers and then estimate how long the task took. For the “routine” group, the underlined number was always 5 while it varied for the “nonroutine” group. Even in these simple, nearly identical tasks, the slightest novelty provided by a mix of underlined numbers rather than 5’s expanded the nonroutine group’s duration estimate.
Echoing James, Avni-Babad and Ritov summarize how learning and new experiences slow down time:

Unless people experience major changes that break the routine in their lives and provide them with anchors to retrieve from memory, life can become one short, timeless sequence of routine inaction.

To combat the effect of automatic routines, fill your time up with new experiences and knowledge to form accessible memory anchors. Turn your brain resources on with new challenges or projects and learning new skills. Ask questions and exercise your curiosity muscles. Take a trip or change up your environment more often. Embrace your inner child and go exploring, even if it’s just to stretch yourself a little.
You’ll find that life stops passing you by so quickly when you stop underlining the same 5’s every day.

Wait, Why Does Time Crawl When You’re Not Having Fun?

If time is supposed to constrict when you’re doing something routine, then why does time seem to drag so slowly while it’s actually happening?
There’s a difference between how time feels as you’re experiencing it and how you remember it. Avni-Babad and Ritov explain that routine frees up brainpower instead of fully engaging it with new information: “the automatic nature of the routine leaves attentional resources for monitoring time (the watched pot effect).” If you’ve ever worked a routine job, for example, you’re intimately familiar with the watched pot effect, where job-time unfolds at a fraction of the speed of regular time.
In contrast, remembering how long something took is “a constructive process involving recall of change points.” Those memory anchors of new knowledge, experiences, and events are what shape how you perceive the passage of time. And it’s the memory that counts because that’s what you tend to use to make your decisions about how to manage your time going forward.

Slow Down Time by Making Meaningful Progress

Context also makes a difference in how you perceive time by influencing what you remember. So the relevance of events can determine whether time tends more towards squishiness or stretchiness.
A 2006 study led by Gal Zauberman from the Wharton School provides a good example of how this works. In this experiment, participants estimated how many months had passed since the date of certain news events such as the death of Anna Nicole Smith, Barack Obama’s presidential bid announcement, and Britney Spears shaving her head. Participants also had to rate whether these target events triggered subsequent developments. All in all, people underestimated the passage of time by about 3 months.
However, if people felt that certain events triggered a greater number of subsequent events, they felt that more time had passed. Related events act as memory anchors, stretching out your sense of time — while unrelated events don’t have this effect. So if you’d been paying close attention to Obama’s first presidential campaign but didn’t follow the many public trials and tribulations of Britney Spears, you would’ve thought that more time had passed since the bid announcement — even though the two events took place within a week of each other.
Making related memories and building upon knowledge, then, can help expand time. What does that mean for you? To slow down time, fill it with meaningful progress.

The wistfulness and disappointment you feel when life seems to speed past arises because you’re noticing the passage of yet another month or birthday or year — but you haven’t really made any strides on the things you wanted to do. The counterintuitive lesson from Zauberman’s research is that time seems to pass by quicker because you didn’t take action and you can slow it down by making progress on projects and goals.
Making and recognizing progress not only builds up intrinsic motivation, it prevents you from slipping into the hollowness of automatic, forgettable routines. When you think about how you first started out with a skill or working towards a goal like getting fit or learning how to do your job well, it seems like forever ago because you’ve made a lot of progress. There are lots of relevant and remarkable milestones, all along the way.
When you put your intentions into practice and take time to celebrate your progress, you’ll create a succession of memories to look back on when you think about the passage of time. You won’t feel left behind.
Though you might feel like you have less and less time, don’t mourn the fact that life’s passing you by. Instead, get proactive by spending your time thoughtfully and creating new memories.
Fill out the chapters of your journey with new experiences and all sizes of milestones, and you’ll find that you’re marching, ambling, skipping to a slower, richer beat.
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Images: [1] adapted from Herr Kaczmarek/Flickr; [2] ArTeTeTrA/Flickr; [3] Sunova Surfboards/Flickr & Nicolas Risch Photography


Thanks to: http://blog.idonethis.com