Why can't the brain tick as accurately as a normal clock? In other words, why does time pass all at once when we have fun; But when bored, it is like a year.
World clock:
The world's most accurate clock is running at a steady pace, with an error of only 3 second every 1 million years. But the brain has its own sense of time, which lengthens or compresses our perception of objective time. Why can't the brain tick as accurately as a normal clock? In other words, why does time pass all at once when we have fun; But when bored, it is like a year.
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Michael Shadlen, a neuroscientist from Columbia University Medical Center, says the brain perceives time based on its anticipation of events. Conversely, the brain can represent the probability that something that hasn't happened yet is about to happen.
Every event has different boundaries, Shadlen said. For example, at the end of each chapter in a book, the time in the brain changes differently according to its own prediction of the boundary (end) of these events.
How mind grab things:
When you are fully focused on something, your brain has seen the big picture, both seeing the near end and preparing for the end of the event, which makes the thing in your hand a whole in your brain, and time seems to fly by. But when you are bored, you are paying full attention to the end point closest to you, such as the last sentence of this side rather than the ending of the entire novel, so the remaining tasks are cut out by you countless ending points, can only be done little by little, and then lament how it has taken so long for only 5 minutes to pass.
Mechanisms in the brain:
Shadlen says that any area of the brain that causes thinking and consciousness may be involved in our perception of time. "But it is almost certain that there are many timing mechanisms in the brain," adds Joe Paton, a neuroscientist from the Champalimaud Foundation Cancer Research Centre in Portugal, "and these subjective timing mechanisms have nothing to do with the body's circadian rhythm or the connection between our body and the Earth's rotation.
One of the mechanisms lies in the speed at which your brain cells activate each other and form a network when you do an activity. The faster the paths of these networks of neurons are formed, the faster we perceive time. Paton and his research team have already discovered this in rodents.
Another mechanism involves chemicals in the brain. Paton and colleagues also identified a group of neurons in rodents that release the neurotransmitter dopamine. This chemical is associated with reward mechanisms in the brain and affects the brain's perception of time.
When you're happy, these cells become more active and release a lot of dopamine, and your brain will judge the time in less time than the actual clock. But when you're unhappy, these cells don't release as much dopamine.
Life is a series of decisions:
It's not clear why the brain isn't as accurate as the actual clock in the skill of tracking time, but it may have something to do with evolutionary advantage. Paton said: "Life is a series of decisions to go left and go right. "This intrinsic sense of time helps the animal decide what time to stay where."
And when you look back, Dr. David Eagleman, an associate professor of psychology and population sciences at Stanford University, says that the duration of this memory involves the way the brain places the memory.
Concentration differs:
The network of neurons encoding memories of fresh events will be denser than those that are common to everyday events. When you recall, those denser networks make you feel like the memory lasts longer. For example, you'll be impressed by the first time you fly out a long distance, but as you fly more and more, you may lose your impression of the next few flights because your brain doesn't have much memory.
And, "time seems to speed up as we get older," Eagleman said.
Things differs from childhood to adult age:
When you're a child, everything seems novel, and many things are your first encounter, so your brain builds a dense network to remember these events and experiences. But when you, as an adult, have seen a lot of things about a lot of people, so the brain doesn't go out of its way to remember these ordinary routines. So there's also a way to make you feel like time is running slower, and that's to do more things you haven't done. Otherwise, when you look back when you are old, you will think, "Strange, I don't seem to have done anything, why am I suddenly old."
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