A two-year-old boy watches, mesmerized, as ants march in a line across the sand. He pokes at them with a stick; some climb up his arm. He feels the tingling sensation, then blows on them and watches the ants disappear. He continues observing.
A few feet away, his parents watch him from their hammocks while they chat, snack from their picnic baskets, listen to the radio and send text messages.
What’s happening in the child’s brain? And what’s happening in his parents’ brains?
“They’re functioning in radically different ways,” replies Charo Rueda, a professor of psychology specializing in neurocognitive development, who has written books and papers on improving children’s attention spans.
“The child is in a state of full attention, focusing on a specific stimulus; he’s able to prioritize it over many other things that surround him, such as the sound of the sea, the wind, the temperature, or his father’s radio,” explains Rueda. The parents, on the other hand, are in a much more superficial state of divided attention. Adults develop this capacity in order to navigate multiple everyday contexts with ease. However, according to neuroscience, this comes at a cost.
“For the child, this way of looking at the world activates intense communication between different brain networks,” Rueda explains. This won’t just allow the boy to recognize the ants when he sees them again, but also to relate them to other insects and to new elements he discovers. “It’s a marvelous and tremendously enriching system for learning capacity, consciousness and memory.”
During that trip to the beach, chronological time will pass… however, the way each person experiences it will be very different. And so will the way they remember that day at the beach years later. “The child will likely retain the memory of having discovered the ants. On another day, he’ll remember some frogs, or a fish jumping out of the water,” says Juan Antonio Madrid, professor of Physiology and an expert in chronobiology.
Thus, little by little, the child will build a map of rich, varied, and meaningful memories. The most interesting thing is that “the richer a memory is, the greater the feeling of time lived,” the expert summarizes. “That’s why, when summer ends, and he looks back on it, the child will have the impression of having lived a great deal.”
The art of cultivating a sense of novelty
Something different happens with parents. “That day probably didn’t produce any new learning or have a special emotional impact for them. So, it’s very possible that their brains will end up discarding that memory,” Madrid explains. They’ll remember fewer distinct episodes and perceive those same days as a much shorter period.
One of the reasons why time seems to expand during childhood is because children live surrounded by novelty and pay intense attention to anything that sparks their curiosity. Weeks seem incredibly long; summers, almost endless. But in adulthood, the opposite happens: much of daily life becomes predictable. The brain stops registering many events as being relevant experiences. When we look back, memories appear much more compressed.
“Life satisfaction depends a lot on your memories and how you’ve lived your time,” says Juan Antonio Madrid, who believes that the feeling of a “fulfilling life” doesn’t necessarily require constant travel or chasing extraordinary experiences. “Sometimes, it’s enough to completely immerse yourself in an activity,” he points out.
Painting, playing an instrument, teaching a class, or tending a garden can profoundly alter your perception of time. This deep attention also leaves a mark on your memory. And, according to the researcher, this sense of novelty can continue to be cultivated throughout your life. “If I’ve seen a lavender field a hundred times, I can still linger over the scent, the texture of the flowers, or details that I previously overlooked,” he says.
This renewed perspective, like contemplation or meditation, allows us to recapture some of the intensity with which children discover the world. Each day, the brain decides what deserves to be remembered and what doesn’t. “Attention and emotion are two fundamental ingredients for building lasting memories,” explains Ignacio Morgado, a professor of psychobiology and a memory expert.
According to him, novelty plays an essential role in memory, because the brain interprets this information as potentially useful in the future and prioritizes it. Furthermore, discovering something for the first time usually triggers an emotional response, however subtle.
“Emotion is the glue that makes the things we experience stick in our brains,” says Morgado. That’s why many people remember, with remarkable precision, their first day of high school, their first kiss, their first job, or their first paycheck. The first time leaves a particularly strong impression; the second, somewhat less so. And, the researcher adds: “The 50th time, probably not at all.”
How does technology affect our perception of time?
In an age dominated by screens, all of this raises an inevitable question: what happens when the brain receives an almost uninterrupted flow of brief, rapid, and constantly changing stimuli?
“Today, children are subjected to a very different pace of stimulation than they were 30 or 40 years ago,” Charo Rueda notes. Cartoons, videos and apps present images, sounds and scene changes at a speed far exceeding that of everyday interactions. Some research shows that, immediately after consuming highly accelerated content, performance in executive functions related to attention span decreases. “We’re training the brain to process information at an increasingly fast pace,” she explains.
As a result, natural stimuli can seem comparatively slow or unappealing. The researcher believes that this change could also affect how children experience the passage of time. However, she acknowledges that further studies are needed to prove this.
The hypothesis is that a life marked by overstimulation and a constant jump between stimuli could hinder the sustained attention span required to build our deepest memories. Juan Antonio Madrid shares this concern. “Many hours in front of screens fly by; we like it because it captivates us, but then they fade from our memory. It’s as if we never lived those hours.”
The real risk, he argues, isn’t just losing the ability to concentrate, but impoverishing the memories we use, years later, to reconstruct our own life stories. Experts wonder how this transformation will affect children who are growing up surrounded by increasingly rapid stimuli. “I wonder what their memories and attention spans will be like when they’re 50-years-old,” Madrid sighs. “We have to learn to protect them, because information overload also impoverishes us.”
The answer, according to experts, does not lie in giving up technology, but in preserving spaces for connection. “Looking each other in the eye, conversing without interruptions, observing our surroundings with curiosity…” Charo Rueda lists. Ultimately, it’s about recovering that uniquely human way of discovering the world with the excitement and curiosity of a child.
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