Synapses

Do you remember when you were a kid and the summer holidays seemed to last forever?

Not only were we discovering new places, seeing new things and meeting new people, but we were discovering how it worked to be a person in the world.

How to get to different places and what the area around us looked like. How to play different games and use your body in new ways. How to talk to people and interact with friends, developing the first semblance of what would later become our personality.

I believe it is the volume of novel experiences that made those periods of time stretch out. There was no rhythm, no routine. Each day was fresh and exciting and filled with new experiences.

Fast forward through life and we can see that novelty start to wear out. As an adult it feels like years pass by quicker than those summers used to.

We are starved of novel experiences in our adult life. The majority of peoples' working patterns are routine and the time before and after work probably is too.

By this point we know what we like to do, so in our free time we do that. We know what we like to eat, so we eat that. We know what games we like, what people we like, how to talk to those people and how the world works.

It gets to the point where weeks blur together, months start to pass by quickly and then, all of a sudden, years do too.

A former boss of mine had a concept to describe this phenomenon. Synapses.

The idea was that new experiences forge new pathways in your brain and fire off new synapses. Repeating routines means that the well worn pathways in your brain are traversed and the same synapses fire off time and time again.

It is the firing of the new synapses that defines unique experiences and, in turn, slows the perception of the passage of time.

I have no idea if that theory is biologically sound or not, and it doesn't really matter either way. It's a convenient metaphor for describing why time feels like it is racing past and why novel experiences are the only thing that stop this effect.

Returning to normal life after holidaying in a new place feels like you have been away for months. The volume of new experiences stretches the perception of the time spent away and each day of the trip can be picked out clearly in your mind.

Weeks spent without deviating from the routine pass quickly and when looking back its hard to pick out what happened on any particular day. But a single deviation, a single new pathway, and a single synapse fired, gives a memorable point of reference and in turn slows the passage of time.

It is only by pursuing the new experiences that the perception of time slows down, so that is what I think we should make every effort to do.

There are still plenty of opportunities for new synapses as an adult, but the difference to when we were growing up is that they have to be actively seeked out. When you were young you were discovering lots of things for the first time, but without conscious thought it is the routine options that we will most likely pick now.

Familiar options help us deal with the vast number of decisions we are faced with in everyday life. Why should I add a decision about what I will have for breakfast or which route I will take to work when I have no reason to?

But in forfeiting these variations we also ensure that each day will pass exactly the same as the one before it.

Now all this might sound like a long winded way of saying "Try new things". And in essence it is, but what I find helpful about this way of thinking is that it provides motivation and a framework for that goal.

Rather than trying new things for the sake of it we can be motivated by the dissatisfaction of the fact that life is passing us by too quickly. Take a different way to work, cook something new for dinner, give a new hobby a try. Do it for the synapses.