The time-aging hack: implement new and diverse experiences that feed into the brain’s thirst for a variety of images which it triggers its conflation of the pictures with increments of time.
Today is my birthday so it won’t be a surprise that I’ve focused this post on aging and time. I feel anxiety about the years hurdling by so I”m compensating by compartmentalizing my experience of my birthdays’ ever increasing corresponding numbers. I do this by thinking the topic into submission. Here’s what it’s looking like this year.
For me, over the decades time has seemed to be speeding up and around my 45th birthday I thought I’d found the underlying explanation. It was lofty and erudite, a powerful combination for my denial mechanism. I found the way physicists explain the acceleration of time, heavens, they use math a= (v-u) / t, so I felt safe in the ephemeral realm of such a straightforward combination of vaguely algebraic reasoning. Never mind I was a geometry girl in high school, algebra was annoying.
However, this year, I’m a step closer to the abyss and I feel my alertness growing to the concept of death. I don’t want to bum you out. I don’t want to turn toward the dark side about dying either. But what I do want to do, it’s a birthday gift I give myself today, is that I want to understand the illusion that I’m seeing spread across the reality of my body no matter how healthy I eat or how much exercise or vitamins I consume, is to embrace time as a partner on this continuum of days and month and years, the program that I’m running here on Planet Earth along with billions of others.
So, here’s what bumps up against my clear and clean affinity for science and time. Bumping isn’t the accurate verb. It’s more like today’s research discovery is sidling up to my fear and anxiety and giving me the opportunity to add to cold hard algebra.
Additionally, the importance of time isn’t just a singular project it’s a national one. In December 2, 1971, “the United States Conference on Aging recommended a separate National Institute on Aging at the National Institute for Health“, according to the NIH website. It took three years but they finally got the governmental cogs turning and the NIA was founded. It’s hard to imagine there being a time when this organization didn’t exist because the concept of dying is right up there after public speaking when it comes to what humans fear most.
So, I found some neuroscience about time that’s incredibly applicable as an Aging Life Hack.
- First off, Time isn’t just an illusion of the physical world; it’s simultaneously data produced by our spongiest organ, the brain, that is easily programmable if we choose to give it some new input.
- Time is fodder that we produce as we metabolize our relationship to experiences that are the same old routine and those that are anomalies. The latter is the secret to slowing down our perception of time.
- Here’s where age feeds into the practice of time perception: An 8 year old has a more compact lifeline, they have less years so each unit of time, say, a week, is a much higher percentage of their overall experience of time. An 80 year old sees weeks as brief increments making up many decades that sprawl across their experience of the time continuum.
- The hack: implement new and diverse experiences that feed into the brain’s thirst for a variety of images which it triggers its conflation of the pictures with increments of time. When the brain does a retrospective search it sees the records of unique experiences as blocks built on one another, as space savers that keep the mind from conflating time into one unit of experience that doesn’t have enough data to build a landscape of expanse and plentiful time.
- Here’s where age feeds into the practice of time perception: An 8 year old has a more compact lifeline, they have less years so each unit of time, say, a week, is a much higher percentage of their overall experience of time. An 80 year old sees weeks as brief increments making up many decades that sprawl across their experience of the time continuum.
My takeaway from the neurological perspective of aging’s effect on memory and time is that:
- Variety is Very Important to a healthy brain’s relationship to time.
- Activities like traveling to a new spot on the map no matter how exotic or even down the street is beneficial to the mental well being of an aging adult.
- An excursion to a gallery or the unexplored wing of a museum where there is a lot to entrain the eye and engage the cerebral impulses helps us feel like we’re actually living the adage, “variety is the spice of life” in a productive way to neurologically lengthen the flow of life.
Reading the physics explanation of time acceleration not only a theory but a practice, I find the minutiae of neurological time to be helpful because it gives me actions I can take to alter my experience of aging. I actually love most of the parts of getting older that I’m feeling so far. I don’t mind wrinkles so much or the increasing “freckles” on my skin, especially my hands, and I appreciate my body’s flexibility and strength and ability to balance more than ever because I see it incorporating the years to the best of its ability. I feel awe the way the many organs like my heart and lungs and liver and intestines, and all the many I haven’t listed coexist to make it possible for me to do the things I love like walking among trees and hugging their trunks when I feel my heart wanting to be snug with their tall bodies and hidden roots.
And, today I can walk down to the surf because my leg which was damaged for seven years had the grace to heal, also allowing me to hike all the way up the Santa Monica ridge smelling the sage oils emitted by the California sun. Those are just a few aspects of my day that the years have helped me appreciate. Since we turn over our cells every seven years we’re always birthing a new us, birthdays are virtually constant, and that’s something we have in common whether you’re two or 52 today: Happy Birthday!
Auguste Hill 