The Spring Festival flies. Why do we feel that time flies faster?

There has been a popular saying for a long time: when you are happy, time is fast; And when you are sad, time passes slowly. If you need to deal with "seven aunts and eight aunts" during the Spring Festival, you need to answer questions about marriage or salary carefully, and even face conflicts of etiquette, etiquette or values, time will slowly pass. However, no matter what kind of Spring Festival you are experiencing, you may be reluctant to part with it when it is over. Therefore, you will feel that every day of the Spring Festival passes slowly, but the whole Spring Festival passes quickly, and seven days pass quickly.

One of the reasons is that for many people, the Spring Festival provides a space: let go of burdens, pressure, desire, depression and temporarily. After the Spring Festival, when you leave home and continue to run around the society, you have to accept another set of more complicated rules of life competition. Even students have to pick up their textbooks again.

Let's talk about the time experience in daily life today. Speaking of "experience", it naturally transcends the unified timetable and is endowed with time significance by individual experience and social background. So, the so-called happy time in the experience is fast, and the sad time is slow. Is this really the case? Claudia Hammond, a British psychologist, reviewed and sorted out the existing research and gave a positive answer, but another conclusion she sorted out was somewhat sad: if you feel that time is getting faster and faster, you are probably old.

I feel that time is passing faster and faster —— I am old

When you are 1 1 years old, a leisure week in summer vacation is particularly long; As an adult, you ask the company for a week off to redecorate your home. The wall hasn't been painted halfway, and the week is almost over. Anyone over 30 will tell you that time is accelerating. Whether it is a landmark moment like Sunday night or Christmas, I feel that the next one will always come earlier than the last one.

When the news broadcast of 200 1 killed a 2-year-old baby Jamie Bourg, the two boys who were only 10 at that time had grown up and were ready to lead an adult life, many people were shocked. People were not surprised that they were free so soon, but were surprised to find that the little boy at that time had grown up now. When bulger Jr.' s life is forever fixed at 2 years old, the growing age gap between the murderer and the victim makes people feel more and more uneasy. Part of the reason is our aversion to criminals, but it also reminds us that time will never stop whether we like it or not.

"Some studies ask people to count in their minds and judge when three minutes have passed. It is found that young people's judgment accuracy is higher, with an average of only 3 minutes and 3 seconds; Middle-aged people exceed 16 seconds on average; On average, people aged 60-70 think it is 3 minutes after 40 seconds, and the error is not small. It seems that the clock in the elderly has slowed down, so the actual past time is more than they judge, which makes them feel that time is getting faster. "

-Claudia Hammond "Illusion is or is not, time is there".

It is common for adults to think that time is getting faster and faster with age, but children do not have this experience. The first explanation given by many people is directly related to mathematics. At the age of 40, it feels like a year passes quickly, because your life is only 1/40, while at the age of 8, a year accounts for a much higher proportion of your total time. This theory, called the proportion theory, has been supported by many people for many years, including the writer Vladimir Nabokov. This should be attributed to the French philosopher Paul Jia in the19th century, who wrote: "Everyone should remember the last 8 to 10 years of campus time, which lasted for a century. In contrast, the last 8 to 10 years of life is only one hour. "

In 1884, william james, a philosopher and psychologist, pointed out that this proportional theory is more like a description of phenomena than an explanation, and I agree with him. "The older you get, the shorter you feel the same length of time-1 day, 1 month, 1 year, but not necessarily 1 hour, and so do the lengths of 1 minute and1second. The problem with proportional theory is that its laws will fail in a short time. We will not put the experience of 1 day in the context of our whole life.

Assuming this, a 40-year-old person will feel that every day flies, because the length of a day accounts for less than114000 in their life. It doesn't matter if you have nothing to do or wait for boarding at the airport, even if you are 40 years old, you will still feel that this is a boring and long day, which is obviously much longer than a happy day for a child at the seaside.

Time has attracted researchers from different fields. The picture shows the cover of Time (version: Huaxia Publishing House, June 5438+ 10, 2006), which collects the time views of nine researchers, whose fields include art, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.

Proportional theory lacks sufficient evidence to support it. If the proportional theory holds, then a person who lives 80 years old will subjectively live only half his life at the age of 20. This result is calculated according to Formula 58 proposed by Robert Lemley in 1975. He asked people of different ages how fast they thought time passed, and he found that the answers given by people were consistent with the results predicted by the formula derived from the proportional theory. However, subsequent research found that his formula was not so effective. According to Lyme Ritchie's theory, a 60-year-old person will feel that time is twice as fast as that of 65 years old, 438+05. However, according to the actual survey, the 60-year-old people feel that the speed of time passing is 1.58 times that of/kloc-0 at the age of 5.

You should have noticed the problem: it's all based on a person's subjective experience of time, which is always difficult to measure. Although people say that the older you get, the faster time passes, but it is more difficult to express this feeling intuitively than you think. If people are asked to recall their past lives, they will agree that time flies faster now than when they were young, but this feeling should come from their memories of time experiences many years ago.

Today, when 75-year-old people are 25 years old, no one asks them how fast a year passes, which means that we can only compare today's old people with today's young people. This may mean that with the growth of age, the feeling that time is getting faster is because their overall pace of life has changed, rather than their personal perception of time has changed. Today, both young people and old people claim that time passes quickly.

Maybe children will feel that time passes slowly, because it is difficult for them to control their time and do what they want. And once an adult, almost everyone will feel that time is getting faster. However, there is still a problem worth discussing, which is to emphasize the relationship between age change and the speed of the past 10 years. The older a person is, the faster the past 10 years will pass. Then maybe for adults, a few days, months or years will not feel any change, but 10 years may be special.

Stephen william hawking (1942 1.8) was born in Oxford, England, and is regarded as one of the greatest physicists in modern times. His A Brief History of Time explores the core secret stories of time and space. Since the publication of 1988, it has been translated into more than 40 languages, attracting ordinary readers all over the world to think and discuss "time" with natural science thinking.

Do you really want time to pass slowly?

But do you really want time to pass slowly? If you recall the research on judging the passage of time, you will find that time is distorted and becomes longer in many cases: when Mrs. Hoagland is lying in bed with a fever; Michelle Siffre was lying on a damp folding bed in an underground ice cave, surrounded by rotten food. He was very eager to find a pair of dry socks, and he slowly developed symptoms of color blindness. People in extreme despair and suicidal thoughts feel that 1 hour is as long as 3 hours; Alan Johnston spent every long night in his imprisoned cabin, worrying about his uncertain fate. For all these people, time passed slowly (although Seaver later found that time actually passed faster than he thought). Do we really want similar feelings?

Boredom, anxiety and unhappiness will all slow down time, but these are not ideal mental states. If you feel that time passes quickly in your life, it means that your life is full, you won't feel empty, and you are more likely to feel happy. The slowly passing time may not be what you want, unless of course you can find a way to isolate pleasant experiences from time and make them last longer.

Someone has deliberately tried to prolong the feeling of time through hypnosis. As early as the 1940s, two American psychiatrists, Linn Cooper and Milton Erickson, conducted hypnosis experiments on some volunteers. During hypnosis, the doctor asked them to imagine that they had completed a walk of 10 minutes, but only gave them 10 seconds to imagine the whole process. Only completely hypnotized volunteers can describe every detail of the 10 minute walk. The question is, is this because they distort their perception of time and slow down 10 seconds to 10 minutes, or is it just because they have excellent imagination?

Decades later, psychologist philip zimbardo also conducted an experiment to distort time through hypnosis. Zimbardo knew that his concept of time had a strong future tendency and refused to enjoy the present life, so he arranged for his colleagues to hypnotize him and urged him to allow the present to expand in his brain until he completely occupied all his brain and body. Zimbardo thought this method was effective, and he began to notice the smell around him and the gorgeous colors in the oil paintings hanging on the wall.

The movie "Party A and Party B" (1997) ends with: "1997 has passed, and I miss it very much."

"Holiday Paradox"-Breaking the old rules and living an unforgettable life

So what should you do if you don't want to be hypnotized, don't want to endure the pain caused by a long time, and just want to ease the anxiety that "this week passes faster than last week" or "Christmas is coming soon"?

There is a way to make a year feel less fast: learn to control the "holiday paradox" (that is, the contradictory feeling that time flies when you are on vacation, but later you feel that the holiday has lasted for a long time).

Some people simply move their whole lives to resort hotels in order to find the feeling of vacation again. Keren O'Reilly, a sociologist, found in the ethnography of British immigrant communities in Spain that for many people, the attraction of living abroad is that they prefer to live in the present. O 'Reilly, after interviewing British people in Costa Delsol, Spain, found that people like it very much that new friends here know nothing about their past, and people seldom mention the future in conversation. People told her that they only knew one thing about the future, that is, they never wanted to live in England again.

Besides, O 'Reilly also found that people rarely make plans beyond tomorrow. People there have successfully entered a state of being completely immersed in the present life, and even brought many challenges to O 'Reilly's research. When she arrived at the planned interview place on time at the appointed time, she found the interviewee coming slowly from the road, with a towel on his shoulder, ready to go swimming. She was surprised that O 'Reilly said he could not go with them. Once she got lost and found a couple to interview an hour and a half later than planned. The couple didn't notice her lateness at all and were surprised by her apology. There is something special about the Englishman who lives on the Sunshine Coast. The purpose of their initiative to move here is to slow down the pace of life and spend more energy enjoying the present life. They want to make better use of the holiday paradox and create long-lasting holiday memories.

"Matt is a heavy computer gamer who plays from morning till night every day, but he says he doesn't remember the whole game. When he waited for other 12 players from all over the world to play the next shooting game in the virtual corridor of the game, the waiting time passed slowly, but once the game started, he devoted himself to the game and time passed quickly. After the game, people underestimated the duration of the game. "

-Claudia Hammond "Illusion is or is not, time is there".

I'm not saying that you shouldn't watch TV, play games or do nothing on weekends. But if you really want to stop the acceleration of time, the answer is to design a dynamic schedule and watch a TV program as long as you know it will bring you a deep memory. When you master this knowledge, you can decide what is more important to you. You can choose to spend less time in front of the screen and more time on unforgettable activities. This will generate a lot of memories and make you feel that this process has taken a long time and the time will slow down.

But you may not want to try so many new activities. Perhaps one of the benefits of getting old is that you can decide to do what you like best instead of seeking new experiences. If you hate any water sports you have done, why learn to surf? If there is a restaurant you like very much 2 minutes away from home, why keep looking for a new restaurant? You have the initiative to choose.

Once you know why you think time is getting faster, it may not be as important as you think. Or you think that since feeling that time passes quickly is a sign of busy and happy life, there is no need to sacrifice time for rest or watching TV programs. As Pliny Jr. (lawyer, writer and member of the Roman Empire Parliament, many of his letters have been handed down as historical research materials) wrote in A.D. 105: "The happier you live, the shorter your time seems to be."

Illusion is or is not, time is. Author: Claudia Hammond, translator: Gui Jiangcheng, version: Shell Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2065438+June 2007.

Author: Claudia Hammond Integration: Xixi

Editor: Xu Yuedong