Shadowing Practice: Why Life Seems to Speed Up as We Age - Learn English Speaking with Video

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I remember when I was a kid waiting an hour for my favorite TV show to come on which was Sharon, Lois and Bram, that felt like eternity.
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But as I've gotten older everything seems to have sped up.
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Time is going much faster.
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That's something virtually everyone agrees upon.
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Yeah I feel like I feel like it does.
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Oh man so much.
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HES sort of gets faster and faster.
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But why is this?
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Is it just an illusion or are there good scientific reasons why time appears to go faster as we get older?
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Well, I'm working with the National Geographic Channel's Brain Games, a show that explores the inner workings of the human mind through experiments
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and interactive games to test out some theories about why this actually occurs.
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There is a reasonable sounding argument that says each year goes faster
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because it makes up a smaller fraction of your entire life.
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Let's say I was only 20.
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One year is only 1 20th of my age.
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When I'm 67, one year is 1 67th of my age.
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This graph shows one year as a percentage of your life at each age.
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But what I find weird about this is if you add up the area underneath the curve, you'll find that you've already lived half of the total by age six.
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So I really don't think this is how our brains perceive time.
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You really think that like a day now?
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Of course not.
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I think there are better reasons why time appears to speed up as we get older.
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So I've come to Venice Beach to find two groups of people, the older and younger, to to see if their perceptions of time differ.
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So what I want to do is I want to set my timer going, and without counting, you tell me when you think a minute is up.
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Let's go.
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Start.
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OK.
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Everywhere around the world, when this experiment is performed, older people typically overestimate, while younger people measure it quite accurately.
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All right, please stop.
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Yep.
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Whoa.
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One minute, two seconds.
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A minute and two seconds.
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A minute and five.
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As we get older, the rate at which our neurons fire, or our neuron conduction velocity, it decreases.
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And you can think of this firing rate a little bit like an internal clock.
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And so if our internal clock is slowing down, that would make everything else, external time, seem to be speeding up.
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I'm gonna tell you the time.
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Now?
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Now.
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One minute.
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That's it?
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That was one minute?
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One minute.
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Minute, 17 seconds.
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Not bad, right?
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Not bad.
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I thought I'd be a lot closer actually, but I guess I wasn't.
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Do you want to know what it really was?
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1 minute 47.
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No way, it was almost 2 minutes.
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It was almost...
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It was almost...
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It really is amazing how fast time flies by, it really is.
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Our sense of time, or chronoception, is not like one of the standard five senses.
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It has no specialized receptor cells, and it does not appear to be localized in just one part of the brain.
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Perhaps this suggests that it's not one coherent thing at all.
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But it does seem that our perception of time is very fundamental.
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Studies of rats have shown that even with their neocortex removed, that is the higher-order thinking part of their brains,
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they're still able to learn how to time 40 seconds accurately.
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That's quite remarkable, and it suggests our sense of time evolved early and is one of the fundamental functions of the brain.
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But that doesn't mean our brains always represent time faithfully.
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For example, have you noticed that really good movies seem to go by much faster than they actually are?
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Or do you notice that your vacations fly by?
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There are good reasons for this.
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When we're focused on something we don't notice the time is passing
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and that makes them feel in the moment shorter than they actually are.
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At its best this results in a mental state called flow.
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This can happen when playing sports or video games or artists when they're fully engrossed in their work or people meditating.
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So I would argue another reason time speeds up as we age is
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because we are more often engrossed in what we're doing.
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Another thing that appears to make time speed up is repetition.
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I'm going to show you a series of images
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and I want you to consider how long each one appears on the screen.
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Are you ready?
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Go!
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So which one appeared to last the longest?
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If you're like most people, you'd probably say the dog.
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But all of those images actually appeared on screen for the same length of time.
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The dog seemed longer because it was novel and therefore your brain had to invest more energy in processing it.
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What's remarkable is that our sense of how long something is or subjective duration
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It correlates highly with how much energy we're using in our brains Now
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if you study how much energy people use in their brains over the course of their lifetime You find
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that it peaks around age 5
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If you think about it this kind of makes sense because
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when you're a kid almost everything is novel to you
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And therefore your brain needs to use more energy fully 66%
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of your resting energy intake That's used by the brain
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because of all of the novel experiences and
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that must at least in part explain why time appears to go more slowly
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So what can we do to slow time down?
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Well studies have shown that being afraid
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increases our perception of time when arachnophobes were forced to stare at spiders for 45 seconds Yes,
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this is a real experiment those arachnophobes judged
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that experience as lasting much longer than 45 seconds as you'd kind of expect Plus,
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experiments involving skydivers or people falling show that they judge their experience to last much longer than it actually is.
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Another time when time appears to pass slowly is when you're bored.
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You know, when you're waiting and waiting, that's all you think about, so it seems like time drags forever.
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Since there is so little to focus on, you are acutely aware of just how much time is passing, and so these boring moments drag on and on.
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So if you really want to slow down your experience of time, you could scare yourself, take up extreme sports, get into accidents, and intersperse all of that with periods of boredom.
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But this viewpoint ignores one important fact, which is that we don't experience time as just one thing.
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We think about time as it passes, but also as it has passed before, when we remember it.
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And those two ways of looking at time, they don't align.
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So for example, holidays, they feel like they go by really fast, but when you think back upon them, they last a long time.
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That's because you had a lot of novel experiences and your brain formed a lot of memories, and it judges the duration of that vacation by the number of memories that were formed.
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All that novelty means lots of memories means it feels like it took a long time, but in the moment it felt fast.
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This is the paradox, the great paradox of our perception of time.
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If you want time to go slowly, there are a lot of things you can expose yourself to that will slow time down, but they won't necessarily be pleasant.
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So maybe the happiest life and the longest remembered life is one where time really seems to fly.
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It's like Einstein said, put your hand on a stove for a minute and it'll feel like an hour, but sit next to a pretty girl for an hour and it'll feel like a minute.
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So what would you like your life to feel like?
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I want to thank the National Geographic channel for sponsoring this episode of Veritasium.
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And if you want to introduce more novelty into your life, then you should check out their series Brain Games.
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The new season begins February 14th at 9, 8 central.
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And this season they have an episode about all of your senses, including your sense of time, Chronoception.
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So if you want to find out more, then check out the link to their website in the description.
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And thank you for watching.
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Did that feel like that lasted long?

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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Esta lección de conversación de nivel B2 se basa en el vídeo “Why Life Seems to Speed Up as We Age”. Las palabras que más se repiten: brain, appear, sense, faster, seconds. Este vídeo tiene 118 frases y 1408 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 7:41. El hablante habla rápido, unas 183 palabras por minuto, así que espera sonidos enlazados y reducidos. El 87 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés, por lo que el vocabulario es fácil de seguir.

Vocabulario clave de este vídeo

Las 15 palabras más avanzadas del vídeo, con su pronunciación y significado:

PalabraPronunciaciónSignificado
perception sustantivo/pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/percepción
engross verbo/ɪnˈɡɹəʊs/acaparar, arramblar
neuron sustantivo/ˈn(j)ʊɹɑn/neurona
paradox sustantivo/ˈpæ.ɹəˌdɒks/paradoja
novelty sustantivo/ˈnɑvəlti/novedad
bore verbo/boɹ/aburrir
accurately adverbio/ˈæk.jə.ɹɪt.li/acertadamente, acuradamente
duration sustantivo/dʒʊˈɹeɪ.ʃən/duración
acutely adverbio/əˈkjuːtli/intensamente
boredom sustantivo/ˈbɔɹ.dəm/aburrimiento, tedio
conduction sustantivo/kənˈdʌkʃən/conducción
correlate verbo/ˈkɔɹəleɪt/correlacionar
faithfully adverbio/ˈfeɪθfəli/fielmente
intersperse verbo/ˌɪntəˈspɜːs/interspersar, entreverar
localize verbo/ˈloʊkəlaɪz/localizar

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

PalabraPronunciaciónSignificado
speed up verbo/spiːdˈʌp/acelerar, apurarse
check out verboinvestigar, chequear
slow down verbodesacelerar, decelerar
add up verboadicionar
find out verboaveriguar, anoticiarse
make up verbo/ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/reponer, suplir

Frases que vale la pena repetir

Frases cortas y completas del vídeo que puedes reutilizar en la conversación diaria:

  • You really think that like a day now?
  • I'm gonna tell you the time.
  • Do you want to know what it really was?

Gramática en este vídeo

Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:

EstructuraEn el vídeo
Oraciones condicionales if + oración, will/would + verbo — una condición y su resultadoIf you're like most people, you'd probably
Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahoraI've gotten · you've already lived · I've come
Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo haceis performed · be localized · were forced

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

El hablante usa 30 contracciones y formas reducidas, como don't, I'm, you're. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.

  • Los sonidos de “th”: faithfully /ˈfeɪθfəli/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/
  • Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, chronoception /ˌkɹɑnoʊˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, duration /dʒʊˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, conduction /kənˈdʌkʃən/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/
  • Palabras largas — cuida el acento: chronoception /ˌkɹɑnoʊˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, accurately /ˈæk.jə.ɹɪt.li/, overestimate /ˌəʊvəɹˈɛstɪmeɪt/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/, eternity /əˈtɜɹnəti/

Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:

  • s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: skydiver /ˈskaɪˌdaɪvɚ/, specialize /ˈspɛʃəˌlaɪz/, stove /stoʊv/, stare /stɛɚ/, sponsor /ˈspɒn.səː/
  • /v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: novelty /ˈnɑvəlti/, overestimate /ˌəʊvəɹˈɛstɪmeɪt/, skydiver /ˈskaɪˌdaɪvɚ/, viewpoint /ˈvjuː.pɔɪnt/, stove /stoʊv/
  • /z/ — sonora, no /s/: localize /ˈloʊkəlaɪz/, specialize /ˈspɛʃəˌlaɪz/, expose /ɪkˈspoʊz/

Cómo practicar con este vídeo

  1. Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
  2. Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
  3. Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como perception, engross, neuron.

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.

Técnica de shadowing: lee la guía completa paso a paso →