Self-perception gets blurrier with time: Study
According to a recent study, it’s easy to tell two objects apart when they are close to you but not when they are far from you as they become “compressed”, a basic principle of perception. The concept of self works similarly. The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
If someone asks you, for example, if you think you'll be calmer tomorrow than today, it's easy to compare the two. But if you're asked if you think you'll be calmer in 10 versus 11 days, it becomes much more difficult to discriminate between the two days.
“Our self-concept becomes increasingly blurrier over time, the farther you get from the present,” said senior-author Meghan Meyer, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences.
“As you think about yourself farther out in time, either in the past or in the future, you’re accessing a less distinguishable version of yourself,” added Meyer.
The research was comprised of four studies. In three of the studies, participants either rated their own personality traits or reported on their perception of self at different time points in the past and future.
The study found that relative to their present self, participants compressed their past and future selves. In the fourth study, participants were prompted with a pair of personality traits and had to select which one described them better at a given period of time while undergoing an fMRI scan.
Brain imaging allowed the researchers to determine how the brain organizes representations of the self across time. Each time a participant thought about themselves in the present, past, or future, the researchers could get a stamp of what their brain looked like.
Those stamps became less distinguishable from one another as participants thought about themselves farther out in time.
"Even at the level of brain activity, we see evidence that our past and future selves become less distinctive as we consider ourselves farther out in time," said Meyer. —ANI