Scientists have discovered the cause of the change in people's perception of time

 People have always wondered why time seems to run faster with age. Scientists may have found the reason for these changes in subjective perceptions of the passage of time.

I guess everyone at some stage in their life thought that in the past time was not going so fast. It is very possible that this is the result of a subjective perception of the passage of time, which - as it turned out - changes with age. This is because the so-called marginal gyrus neurons in the parietal lobe, which are responsible for assessing the length of the time intervals, "tire" and distort perception.

The marginal gyrus is part of the parietal lobe of the cerebral cortex that actively participates in the perception of oral and written speech, and is also associated with memory, learning, and sensory perception. Moreover, the marginal gyrus contains neurons responsible for assessing the length of the time intervals. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that repeated exposure to a stimulus of a fixed duration causes these neurons to "fatigue", and this distorts our subjective perception of time.

The researchers asked the participants in the experiment to complete the task of comparing the length of the time slots, and during this time they measured their brain activity using functional MRI. The experiment involved healthy adults who were asked to view the gray circle eye adapter for a specified period of time 30 times in a row. After the adaptation period, they were shown a test stimulus and asked to estimate its duration.

If the duration of the adapter demonstration was long, the participants underestimated the duration of the test stimulus, and if the adapter appeared for a short time interval, the duration of the test stimulus was overestimated. The activity of the marginal gyrus neurons decreased when the adapter and test stimulus were of the same duration, indicating neuronal fatigue. The degree of distortion of time perception directly depended on how much the activity of the marginal gyrus neurons decreased.

A work describing this mechanism was published in a scientific journal Journal of Neuroscience.