Many of us think of our past as a kind of a video library where we can look at records of our lives. If memories were fixed like videotapes, you would find it difficult to imagine a new situation.
It is our past memories that help us imagine a future, and to preview future events. This skill of using the past to predict the future helps us try out different hypothetical scenarios before we commit.
It turns out, Hollywood got it half right. In the film Arrival, Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks who is trying to decipher an alien language. She discovers the way the aliens talk about time gives them the power to see into the future - so as Banks learns their language, she also begins to see through time.
Different cultures have different perceptions about time. The Mandarin language, for example, places time in a vertical axis, with next week becoming down week, and last week becoming up week.
These differences in language have a psycho-physical effect in bilinguals and change the way the same person experiences the passage of time, depending on which language the brain is operating in.
As I moved from my twenties to thirties I noticed a certain psychological miscalculation happening more often: a day that feels like it was three or four months ago was actually a year ago. Or I would think back to what I was doing this time last year, then realize that what I'm remembering happened two years ago.
As we become adults, we tend to take on more time commitments. As our work and domestic lives stabilize, the years increasingly resemble each other. This creates the sense that less “living” happens each year.
Children usually have no time commitments; they're told what to do. They also form higher-quality memories (sharper and more lasting), making early years seem so full.
Everything that has happened to us good or bad all are in the past, we travel to our past on several occasions through memories inside our mind about the moments and experiences, for some people they believe it’s a circle they can never come out from, but why do we think about the past when…