You might make your summer seem longer by packing it with activities and writing down its events.
By F.D. Flam / Bloomberg Opinion
Can it really be Labor Day? It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the start of summer, with autumn still months away in our minds. So, why does it feel like time is moving faster than it used to?
Scientists may be getting closer to an answer. A team of researchers recently identified a mechanism within the brain that seems to organize how we perceive and remember the passage of time.
Even those who don't love summer often find themselves struck by how quickly the year has slipped away; echoing the familiar Pink Floyd lyric: "One day you'll find, ten years have got behind you." But this unsettling sense that time is speeding up is mostly in our heads. And that means we can actually do something about it.
Scientists studying the nature of time perception say our brains didn't evolve to track and record time with precision, such as days and weeks, but rather to process it in ways that benefited our ancestors' survival. They've observed that animals also are sensitive to time; showing frustration if they're made to wait too long for a treat. For most, the time between hunger and starvation is short. Time literally is life.
Members of a research group investigating how the brain perceives time had already made a groundbreaking discovery: how lab rats navigate space using "grid cells." That work earned two team members Nobel Prizes. Now, the same researchers have discovered evidence that rats also track time; using a different part of the brain called the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC), located next to the hippocampus, the brain's memory center.
In the LEC, neurons fire in a unique non-repeating pattern. Lead researcher Benjamin Kanter, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, describes this neural activity as "smooth drift." It flows steadily while a rat sleeps or is engaged in routine behavior like foraging. But when a noteworthy event occurs -- such as receiving a cookie from a researcher -- the activity of these neurons briefly ramps up.
This pattern of continuous drift punctuated by pulses of activity might serve as a kind of timestamp; helping the rat remember when significant events happened. The implication is that time, in memory, is experienced through events. And the more experiences we've had over a summer, the longer that time feels looking back. The team's findings were published in Science Advances on June 26 (which, fittingly, feels like yesterday).
In recent studies on humans, UCLA psychologist David Clewett and his colleagues found that we tend to organize memories in clusters; like movie scenes. In one experiment, volunteers were shown images of common objects while tones played in one ear and then switched to the other. The changing sound was enough to create a mental barrier between different groups of items. Participants were usually able to recall the order of images within the same group but struggled when asked to do the same with items from different groups.
Clewett said that novel experiences in everyday life can help create more discrete memories that might make summer feel longer. "Step out of your comfort zone and just keep building more and more memories," he said.
George Mason University neuroscientist Martin Weiner said time often seems to accelerate as we age because our lives fall into steady routines, causing our brains to shift into a sort of autopilot; making weeks blur together in memory. Many people assume that time speeds up simply because each year becomes a smaller fraction of our past, he said, but that can't be the whole story.
People often ask him how to slow down time, but he warns of a paradox: an eventful vacation may feel long in hindsight yet seems to fly by in the moment; while a forgettable hour in a waiting room can feel unbelievably long as it's happening.
In his book, "Your Brain is a Time Machine," neuroscientist Dean Buonomano weaves together the physics, philosophy and neuroscience of time. There's a fundamental tension, he said, between eternalists -- who believe the flow of time is an illusion -- and presentists, who believe only the present is real and the past and future don't exist.
Buonomano contends that the limitations of the human brain may cause us to think of time in spatial terms; looking forward or back, for example. This tendency might bias eternalists toward their view that time is just like another dimension of space. But, he said, it's certainly not behaving that way.
I suggested we could harness this tendency to "spatialize" time. In the days before Google, I used to write down activities on paper planning calendars. Sometimes I'd reflect back on a month; an act that not only reinforced but also shaped my memories, forcing them to better conform to calendar time. It made summers feel longer.
So, I tried writing events from this summer -- one that had mostly evaporated -- on a wall calendar and it began to feel fuller and longer. That seems like a promising avenue for future research. Those scientists better hurry, though. Time's running out.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the "Follow the Science" podcast.