Jo Marchant

If there's lots of exciting events happening, we will experience time very differently compared to if nothing very much is happening.

If you speak English, you probably think about time as going from left to right if you had to draw a timeline.

Whereas cultures who read from right to left see time as going from right to left.

There are cultures who don't read who see time as flowing uphill or maybe east to west with the sun.

The Aymara people of Chile, they see the future not in front of them like we would walking into the future.

They see the future as unseen, hidden behind them.

Yeah, I think both of those have some merit and probably would lean more towards the second explanation that you just gave, where it's in terms of the relevant events and changes and connections.

And in a young child, their brain is so flexible and they're so attuned and alert to everything that's happening in the world around them.

It's all new and it's all different and it all matters.

And they're just interacting in that in a very, very active way.

And the older we get,

the more efficient our brains get.

We just learn certain patterns of thinking and we're relying on those assumptions and those things that we've learned when we're perceiving the world.

We're not actually paying a whole lot of attention a lot of the time.

We don't need to.

We know where the toothbrush is.

We know how to get to the kitchen.

We know what's in all the cupboards.

We're just sort of going through the motions a lot of the time.

And so we are not experiencing as many events and therefore time...