Why time feels different

[Teacher]

Psychologist and BBC journalist Claudia Hammond, in her book Time Warped, explores our changing perceptions of time and explains how nostalgia relates to personality building. Several excerpts from Hammond's book.

The passage of time is recreated in our consciousness, and sometimes in its own way tries to align the moments with which we experience difficulties: it slows down the rapidly disappearing years, accelerates when we stand in a tiring line, reminds us of how long ago we last saw our loved ones. Time can be both friend and foe. The perception of time is of great importance because this experience determines our psychological reality. It is not only at the heart of how we organize our lives, but also how we experience it.

Time slows down when we are gripped by the fear of death - the cliche of a car accident in a frozen space is actually a cognitive reality. In one experiment, people with arachnophobia were forced to stare at their fear object - spiders - for 45 seconds. They greatly exaggerated the past tense. The same thing happens with novice skydivers, who perceive other people's jumps as very short and their own as very long.

"Personality and memory are extremely closely related, so we turn to the most vivid, preserved moments to feel who we really are."

As we grow older, it begins to seem to us that the recent decades have passed much faster than the years of our youth. We also tend to draw closer to ourselves in time the events that have occurred in recent years, and significantly distance those of them that occurred more than 10 years ago. The most obvious explanation for this came from psychiatrist Norman Bradbourne in 1987. Realizing that memories are fading, we associate their clarity with the time when they might have occurred. If the memory is erased, it seems to us that the related event happened a long time ago.

Time perception is a very flexible system that is influenced by emotions, abstractions, tasks, and even temperature.

Curiously, we remember ourselves most vividly at the age of 15 to 25. Associated with this is the phenomenon of nostalgia, which psychologists would call "flash of reminiscence." Perhaps it is because of her that we feel how time is accelerating. As a teenager, we experience many things for the first time - sex, work, travel without parental care, life outside the home, independent choice of how to spend our free days. Newness has a tremendous impact on memory even outside of flash - we remember better when we started doing something for the first time.

But in addition, such memories help us build our identity, find our place in the world. Personality and memory are extremely closely related, so we turn to the most vivid, stored moments in order to feel who we really are. It is known that people who have undergone a personality transformation - for example, a sudden career change or come out - tend to experience a second wave of nostalgia associated with their new personality.