If you are over 20 years old, it is very likely that this has happened to you many times: you remember an event that you remember vividly and realize that it happened 10 years ago… or even more!

It also happens when you set out to see what time a television series you’ve been following since its inception appeared, or when a film premiered that marked you, or even when you realize that the actor or actress who had a childish role in an audiovisual fiction can no longer be considered too young.

And yet, between 7 and 15 years of age everything seemed to go very slowly . Besides, you probably even wanted to turn one more year old and be closer to “the grown-ups”, and the wait would go on forever.

How time passes! Stepping on the time accelerator

Of course, one thing is clear: time goes just as fast for all people, it doesn’t stop for some and it doesn’t speed up for others (at least if we stay inside this planet). However, the perception of this time does change, and a lot .

This was confirmed in 2005 by Sandra Lenhoff and Marc Wittmann, two researchers from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Their research involved passing a series of surveys to 499 people between the ages of 14 and 94, and asking them to rate how “fast” they thought time was passing over a period.

When the time frame was a few days or weeks, all people felt similarly about the speed with which that season had passed, but when the time frame was longer (of years) they found that people tended to give more speed to the passage of time the older their age .

In particular, people over 40 years old felt that they had felt time pass very slowly during their childhood and accelerate slightly during adolescence to reach high speeds in adulthood.

Why does this psychological effect occur?

It is not clear what triggers this phenomenon, but a very reasonable explanation has been proposed that has to do with the amount of time references that are available in our memory when we evaluate our life trajectory retrospectively.

This explanation is based on a well-documented fact: more memories are accumulated about the first years of life than about a similarly long period of time during adulthood . In other words, the amount of memories about what happened between 8 and 12 years of age tends to be much greater than the amount of memories about what happened between 30 and 35 years of age, for example.

This could be due, on the one hand, to the fact that our brain is more plastic (that is, more sensitive to stimuli) during our childhood and adolescence, which allows us to learn many things quickly and, at the same time, would make what we are experiencing more likely to remain in our memory.

On the other hand, it could also be explained by a very simple fact. A large part of the most important life events accumulate at the beginning of our lives : the entrance to school and to high school, the first time we meet friends we will keep for a long time, the moment we come of age, the first love experiences, etc.

When memory has no hold

So, on the one hand, we know that the brain is very sensitive to the environment, and on the other hand we assume that during the first two decades of life a lot of new and exciting things happen. To this we have to add an important fact: memory seems to retain well the memories related to new and rewarding experiences, and less those that are familiar and do not arouse such a strong emotional reaction.

All of the above means that we have many more time references at the beginning of our lives than in the second half of it , which can make it seem like more time has passed when we look back.

It seems that, if in the last year we do not remember anything particularly remarkable that has happened, we are going down an ice rink faster and faster, because in the absence of time references stored in our memory we tend to think that this period has been much shorter than it has been. In this way, we can dedicate more resources to process the information about the vital stages in which really interesting things happened.

It may be cruel, but in the end our nervous system is not built to give us an objective view of time and space .