One Billion Heartbeats

[munty13]

Hi. I had a few thoughts about why it feels that time flies as we grow older.

What becomes of time as we grow older? I remember playing as a child in those long summers away from school and I think of how the time stretched over a day and became almost infinite. It seemed like a lifetime before we were back at school in the autumn. Now in my late thirties I am reflecting on the experience of how time behaves in my everyday life, and I compare it to the way I felt about time as a child. Time has most certainly become more fleeting. There is no more staring at the clock in the classroom, and wishing those minutes away, and if anything now, I am pleading for that second-hand to stop. Hours fly past into a day, days blend into months, and before you know it, it's that bloody time of year again.

With new scientic models de-bunking the Theory of Relativity, and proofs that space-time does not exist, we are beginning to learn new lessons about the experience of time. So why does the experience of time feel so different as we grow older? It could be an illusion drawn from a nostalgia of days past, where life was perhaps more free and weightless, and the days only dragged because we were wishing them to go faster. Or can it be because as we grow older our experience of time accelerates due to biological, and neurological reasons?

In general all amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles have roughly a billion heart beats per lifetime. A tiny mouse has a maximum life of about 3 years while an elephant could live to 70, but they shall both experience a billion heart beats. Now that we have thrown all ideas of time out of the window, it would start to appear that the mouse and the elephant have both the exact same experience of a lifetime. Time is not relevant to the speed of light - time is relevant to each living creatures' own personal experience. Time no longer hangs on the wall of the Universe, it is intertwined with the metabolic rate and every beat of the heart. I found this article of particular interest:
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archiv...iant_ratio.php

So how is the metabolic rate applicable to a child's experience of time, and how does that compare to the experience of a fully grown adult? The average heart rate for a healthy adult at rest is 60-100 beats per minute (bpm), while a child's is around 100-130 bpm. In some cases, this could mean the child's heart rate being twice that of an adult's. This increased metabolic rate leads to a faster rate of perception. Increasing the rate of perception would be a bit like changing your dial-up internet connection to broadband - you would be recieving information at a much greater speed. If this was taking place in the mind, you would have a much greater scope, and far more depth, of what action takes place in one given moment of time, and creates the illusion that reality is being played in slow-motion (but only when reflected upon, and compared to a relatively 'normal' rate of perception).

Infants and growing children have higher metabolic rates than adults because of growth hormones, and also, perhaps more importantly, the growing brain is devouring lots of energy during its development. The brain consumes 20% of the body's energy. At the age of 3, a young child's brain is super-dense with over 1,000 trillion synapses, all competing for nourishment. It's not until children near adolescence, that the 'shedding' of excess brain cells (neurons) moves into high gear, and eventually there is a loss of about 50% of the synapses. Before the shedding takes place though, the neurons all have to be fed. This greater demand for energy has to be supplied by a faster metabolic rate.

As we become adults, the brain becomes increasingly efficient, in a process known as competitive plasticity, and our metabolic rate slows down. With a reduction in the metabolic rate, there is a knock-on effect on how fast we percieve the world. The broadband service has been pulled, and we're back using dial-up, less information is being recieved, a moment contains less depth, and reality takes on the appearance it is moving faster. But there are times in our adult lives where we can re-experience a taste of what a faster rate of perception meant in our childhoods.

One trick of nature is to engage a startle response if an animal suddenly thinks it's in danger. Adrenal hormones get the heart pumping faster, and the brain thinking faster. The startle response is bending the rules of perception, so that a window appears where the animal gets more time to think about its next course of action - fight, take flight or freeze. It's like pressing slow-motion on your video recorder. Time distortion under stress is often reported by war veterans, where everything happens in slow motion. This example is taken from law enforcement:

‘Kim remembers that steamy September night in 1979 as if it were yesterday. She had a split second to react before the gunman blasted her from an open window over her head. ‘When you think you’re going to die’, she says ‘your brain works so fast that everything else seems to be in slow motion.’ (Wozencraft 1990)
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:...lnk&cd=8&gl=uk

There are plenty of stories where people have experienced this stretching of time, at a moment there was imminent danger. If time is an intrapersonal experience that can be manipulated by nature, is it then possible that mankind can harness this ability to enhance our lives? It could be a basis for showing us how to slow down the experience of time by increasing the rate of perception. If this was made possible without the need of increasing the metabolic rate (so that our lifespan does not become as short as the mouse) - are we looking at a real contender for the elixir of life?

[nameless]

When we are one year old, a year is a lifetime.
When we are 10, one year is a tenth of a lifetime and perceived as a smaller part than a lifetime.
At 50, a year is perceived as even smaller/quicker (especially as compared to an entire lifetime), in the context of our day to day lives.
Pretty simple, as i see it.

[melanie]

Children and Animals live and function as their ordinary functional biological senses...(Automatically)
When they are hungry they eat, when they are tired they sleep.
They live in the timelessness of the eternal Now! (oneness with all things)

When the human entity becomes self /conscious (aware of itself as a separate individual (duality)
a sudden tenseness arises...(Contraction)
This tension is who you think you should be, however relaxation is who you are.
Time becomes your master, you are it's slave.

Liberation from this illusion of time is releasing contraction, returning to the child like mind.
One of Innocence, one of Not-Knowing,where we are surfing the mystery of every moment, as the razors edge of creation.
Here time collapses, years are forgotten and we leap into the boundlessness that we are, we make it our eternal home.

mel.

[Cubola Zaruka]

How much time we think has passed is not always dependant on how fast we think. Time perception is affected by dopamine production, which can change as a result of ageing. If people estimate the amount of time which has passed since a given moment as a proportion of their life so far, then the longer they have been alive the shorter a minute is in comparison. The number of things which distract a person from noticing time also has a significant effect.