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Time Is on Your Side: Lessons from Centenarians
Time is the duration of space. We have internal clocks in our brains that regulate the length of intervals for hunger, thirst, sleep and other biological needs. But beyond this organic spectrum, we also have subjective time passages. The way we learn cultural duration of time. How we are informed from collective beliefs shaped by our cultural editors and our own experiences of perceived time.
How time perception influences longevity is a passion that has inspired my professional life. After investigating healthy centenarians (100 years and older) from five different continents, I discovered these exceptional outliers have a unique way of perceiving the duration of their embodied space. They intuitively know how to functionally elongate time: One of the four factors I found more important than genetics, lifestyle, diets. socioeconomics, ethnicity, and geography.
Obviously, time is a constant only outside the realm of the Special Theory of Relativity, but our biology significantly responds to how we interpret the duration of our experiences. Here is where we can begin to debunk conventional theories of aging. Research has consistently shown that genetics only contributes 20% to our longevity. I propose the elongation of enacted time allows centenarians to live with all the duration they need to experience healthy lifespans.
