How many of you have felt that the whole concept of time seems to have collapsed into itself this past year – things from a year ago feel like a lifetime ago; while the days and weeks are flying by incredibly quickly, even though every day is the same and often ‘boring’, even when we’re busy, because of the repetitive nature of lockdown life. Or has the past year, looking back, felt like a very short time? We came across this fascinating article that attempts to explain why, and also suggests mindfulness could be the key because if we focus on processing a moment, rather than letting it slip by mindlessly, we can better apprehend the uniqueness of every day, every moment.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, Ruth Ogden of Liverpool John Moores University asked 604 participants in the UK about their sense of time’s passage. “As we get older, we “chunk” the experiences we’ve had into broad categories, bundling individual moments into larger, more generic groups in our minds, the author explains, Older people, and those on whom the social isolation was especially hard, so time seems to drag over the course of a day or week. That reflects boredom: When we have nothing to do and feel generally miserable, the hours stretch out interminably— Will this day never end?
That older people in this study experienced time as passing slowly was somewhat surprising, however, since “older people will often make statements which suggest that time passes more quickly as you age—for example, ‘Christmas comes around more quickly each year,’” But because lockdown curtailed socializing and normal day-to-day activities, “it’s possible that the loss of their freedom, coupled with less ability to engage with technology to maintain social relations, left the elderly more vulnerable to experiencing time passing slowly.”
Others in the study felt time fly. “People who were younger, more satisfied with their social interactions, busier, and less stressed were more likely to experience time passing more quickly,” explains the author. “These factors [increase] our level of physiological arousal, [which] makes time pass more quickly.”If, however, we ask people in the winter of 2021 to reflect on time’s passage over the previous 12 months, their retrospective judgment might differ from their in-the-moment perception. “Retrospective judgments are heavily influenced by the amount of memory content from the time in question,” Ogden said. With few distinct memories, “we feel like less time happened. Lockdown has been boring, we haven’t been able to do things, and we may have formed fewer memories than normal. We may therefore look back on this period as feeling ‘short.’”
Similarly, with age we group experiences into broad chunks such as “work” or “family” or “fun outings,” psychologist Mark Landau of the University of Kansas and his colleagues argued in a 2018 study. As a result, to an older person, “fewer things seem to have occurred in a given period, so it seems to have passed faster, in retrospect,” they wrote.
By “chunking” our experiences so when we’re working from home, every day feels the same and the experiences are ‘chunked’ together, we feel we have had fewer of them. The researchers therefore had 107 volunteers either write about how their experiences over the last year were similar to those of other years (which encouraged chunking) or how things could have transpired differently (no chunking). The chunkers felt the previous year lasted less than 12 months, but the non-chunkers did not. “Perceiving a given period as passing faster depends on whether one chunks that period,” the scientists concluded.
Although they encouraged volunteers to chunk, we do it spontaneously, and we do it progressively more with age, because fewer experiences feel new. Looking back at the past year or even decade, we remember just a few categories of experiences (that is, chunks), not a rich smorgasbord of distinct experiences. Time flew by.
If we focus on processing a moment, rather than letting it slip by mindlessly, we can better apprehend its uniqueness.
A remedy for that might be mindfulness, the scientists suggested. If we focus on processing a moment, rather than letting it slip by mindlessly, we can better apprehend its uniqueness and keep it from being obliterated by chunking.
In shorthand, says neuroscientist and mindfulness researcher Amishi Jha, we can understand the relationship between mindful attention and long-term memory storage as: “Better perception—>better encoding—>better working memory—>better long-term memory (for facts and episodes)—>fuller embodied retrieval.” When we get into the habit of paying attention nonjudgmentally—remaining curious about the experiences and people in our lives, no matter how familiar they get—we improve our working memory, which may in turn aid our ability to store and recall long-term memories of events and information.
“The logic is this: Improved attention leads to improved encoding into working memory,” Jha explains. “With higher-integrity working-memory representations for content, the better the chances for successful consolidation into long-term memory and the better the chances of successful learning and retrieval of information,” although, she notes, research that formally connects these dots as relates to mindfulness has yet to be published.
Mindfulness has “the potential to resensitize us to the satisfaction of simple things and, perhaps, counteract life’s quickening pace,” Landau and his colleagues suggested. “When the individual resides more fully in the moment, she or he may also better appreciate the uniqueness of those moments once they have passed.”
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And a more concise shorter article here in Mindful is worth reading
