Time Pass

 

Diwali is the time of the year when many of us sit back and ruminate on the past and make a new wish list for the time span till next Diwali. Traditions of Diwali along with Family fun, outings, fashion, and food help us create new memories. Each Diwali gets etched on our memory. Life seems to be a combination of events between two Diwali celebrations. It feels like just yesterday that we celebrated the last Diwali. Time zips past faster each Diwali.  

It was just a year ago around Oct last year that the Indian team lost the WC opening match vs Pakistan. The team got flak for a timid display. Hardik was blamed for lack of fitness. Virat received flak for lack of form.  Both protagonists have turned around the clock. What a victory we celebrated versus Pakistan in 22 WC. It seems a long road from WC 21. And yet it seems only just yesterday.  

Last year during Diwali we had a different Government in Maharashtra. We have seen a series of events leading to regime change in Maharashtra. From the fractured People’s verdict in 19, we have seen turmoil of events,  political opportunism, unnatural alliances, yellow journalism, vendetta politics. Hopefully, the regime change really delivers the promise to the people. Things have changed drastically in politics during this year but yet it seems only yesterday.  

Internationally, the world seems to come out of the pandemic but still, there is a scare of new variants. Trade and real wars have threatened world peace and economic hardships. The world is entering another recession. Inflation is at its peak. The rupee like all other world currencies is falling against the dollar. A rate hike by the US feds has impacted economies worldwide.  India apparently is holding its fort on the world stage as well as the internal front. Lots of things have happened in world Politics. Boris Johnson resigned, Truss resigned and Rishi Sunak has been sworn in as British PM, much to the celebration all over the Indian diaspora. The most dreaded is Climate change. The rate at which we are damaging our planet is the most concerning issue. We really need to turn the clock on that front. We have seen many climate disasters during this year. A lot many things have happened on the world stage during this year and yet it seems only yesterday.  

 

Why as an Individual do we feel that time passes more quickly every passing year?  There is a reason for that as claimed in the research done by a few scientists on this subject.   

Scientists claim that mind time and clock time are two totally different things. They flow at different speeds. The chronological passage of the hours, days and years on clocks and calendars is an absolute measurable phenomenon. Yet our perception of time shifts constantly, depending on the activities we’re engaged in, our age, and even how much rest we get. They say that time as we experience it; depends upon the perceived changes in mental stimuli. It’s related to what we see. As physical mental-image processing time and the rapidity of images we take change, so does our perception of time. And in some sense, each of us has our own “mind time” unrelated to the passing of hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars, which is affected by the amount of rest we get and other factors.  The present is different from the past because the mental view has changed, not because somebody’s clock rings. The “clock time” that unites all the live flow systems, animate and inanimate, is measurable. The day-night period lasts 24 hours on all watches, wall clocks, and bell towers. Yet, physical time is not the 'mind' time. The time that you perceive is not the same as the time perceived by another.  

Scientists further claim that Time is happening in the Individual mind’s eye. It is related to the number of mental images the brain encounters and organizes and the state of our brains as we age. When we get older, the rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases because of several transforming physical features, including vision, brain complexity, and later in life, degradation of the pathways that transmit information. And this shift in image processing leads to the sense of speeding up of time. There’s an inversely proportional relationship between stimuli processing and the sense of time speeding by. So, when you are young and experiencing lots of new stimuli—everything is new—time actually seems to be passing more slowly. As you get older, the production of mental images slows, giving the sense that time passes more rapidly.   

Fatigue also influences saccades, creating overlaps and pauses in these eye movements that lead to crossed signals. The tired brain can’t transfer information effectively when it’s simultaneously trying to see and make sense of the visual information. It’s designed to do these things separately. If we sleep regularly and well, and live clean we can alter our perceptions. This, in some sense, slows down mind time  

Another factor in time’s perceived passage is how the brain develops. As the brain and body grow more complex and there are more neural connections, the pathways that information travels are increasingly complicated. They branch like a tree and this change in processing influences our experience of time,    

We experience how “mind time” changes over the much longer span of our whole life. Many Seniors must feel as they grow old, that they noticed how their time is slipping away, faster and faster, and how they complain that they have less and less time. It’s a sentiment we hear echoed by many around us. The clocks will continue to tick strictly, days will go by on the calendar, and the years will seem to fly by ever faster. Still, we’re not entirely prisoners of time. We can still turn the clock as we would like to with a proper lifestyle and attitude.