Thread by @JonelleCapri

The biggest reason why childhood feels like it lasts forever while adulthood flies by is because society has created an adulthood that's, frankly, a slog with too little to look forward to.

This matters because dopamine, which is anti-slog, controls our sense of time.

A thread.

"Time flies when having fun", yep, bc of dopamine. It's neural trickery, speeding your sense of time so you'll spend more of it in high-reward environments doing high reward activities.

But time also flies when you stagnate! This is due to a different dopaminergic mechanism->

->NOT REMEMBERING SHIT.

Catecholamine neurotransmitters are integral to functioning memory. Functioning memory is integral to a function sense of time and reality.

Dopamine is the main catecholamine that determines if you get to enjoy a firm sense of reality.

Brains want to know and remember details about two things: reward and danger.

Neurotransmitters and their dedicated neurons in various brain regions make that happen. Simplified:

Glutamate+Dopamine = reward memory

Glutamate+Noradrenaline = danger/trauma memory

GABA = amnesia

Brains are negativity biased, meaning they pay A LOT more attention to the bad than the good.

BUT even though we pay more attention to the bad, our memory systems function more cohesively with the good.

I will do a separate thread on how and why bad experiences and trauma screw with memory, but nutshell: the brain prioritizes negative details during bad experiences in a way that fragments memory and often messes with our ability to remember things in order.

With dopamine and rewarding experiences, however, your sense of normal life exists.

Episodic memory, your ability to put the events of your life in order and experience reality is dependent on your reward system.

Episodic memory works by stacking events one atop the other. Our sense of reality is dependent on our ability to process and understand the moments that came just before the one we're in now.

But what our brains are really tracking is the time until our next reward.

Our reward and timing systems not only work in tandem, they share many of the same pathways. Even our circadian rhythms are impacted by what time of day the dopamine neurons in our limbic systems anticipate reward.

And anticipation is one of dopamine's most important functions.

You see, Dopamine is a *nag*. It's a constant reminder, a running alarm clock. It's main role in your head isn't to make you feel good, but to make you WANT to feel good, and to MOTIVATE you to go get the shit that makes you feel good.

And it does this by managing memories.

Cravings, desire, and anticipation are all types of memories that dopamine controls. Reminders of what felt good, how you got it, where you got it. (What is a craving if not beta-endorphins persevering?)

It's within this dopaminergic memory system that our sense of time forms.

We track time from moment to moment, but each moment is not weighted equally. Dopamine weighs novel or rewarding moments far more heavily than any other moment.

Moments that are banal or minimally rewarding get thrown in the unimportant pile to get swept out of memory.

When we crave something, anticipate a rewarding experience, or when we discover a new joy, dopamine spikes in our limbic system and in the substantia nigra.

This spike causes us to pay more attention AND retain more memories. The effect of this is that TIME SLOWS DOWN.

And this totally makes sense. Your sense of time is slowing so that you can catch more environmental cues, make note of important details, and outline the circumstances explicitly in your memory so that you don't miss getting the reward and also find new ways to get new rewards.

Childhood is very rewarding! It's meant to be full of novelty, anticipation, play, and room for joy. Kid's brains are engaged and enthusiastically stacking memories. *They're living in their time*, and that's why they have so much of it.

Adulthood is... well... not that.

Much of modern adult life is on autopilot. Your brain loves this. It gets to sit in your skull, eat glucose, and put out minimal effort.

But autopilot also means bare minimum memory retention, base level dopamine hits to keep you addicted to social media, and SENSORY TIME LOSS.

Do you remember what you ate for breakfast yesterday? Can you retrace your steps to last week? Are you surprised it's June already? Do the weeks feel like they're flying by?

If memories of your day to day life are hazy and life feels like it's passing you by, it could be because you're in a low-dopamine time collapse.

If everyday is banal with little novelty and not much to look forward to, your brain simply won't track, and you'll lose time.

People with low-dopamine disorders like ADHD and Parkinson's can experience something called time-blindness where they don't perceive passing time or lose large chunks of it.

But whether you have disordered dopamine pathways or not, there are methods to improve time collapse.

Yes, there are methods to improve time collapse...that I'll thread separately later today because twitter caps threads at 25 tweets and when it comes to behavior modification, I talk too much

https://twitter.com/JonelleCapri/status/1402479463267553280?s=19