[HN Gopher] Why time "speeds up" as we get older (2019)
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Why time "speeds up" as we get older (2019)
Author : motohagiography
Score : 132 points
Date : 2021-11-04 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sitn.hms.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sitn.hms.harvard.edu)
| ur-whale wrote:
| The hypothesis that our brain "slows down" does not really
| require a biological / chemical / physical explanation to be
| proven correct.
|
| All it takes it looking at how fast folks take to [solve problems
| / write an essay / read through a book / grok a new concept /
| learn a new skill] after a certain age.
|
| This is certainly measurable and IMO rather easy to, if only when
| applying it to yourself when you're past your prime (I know I
| am).
|
| And jumping from that rather easy to establish fact to a
| perception of time going faster is not exactly a stretch.
|
| In short ... unless they've invented new ways to measure the
| deterioration of the brain with age and accurately correlate it
| with information processing capabilities, I'm not seeing much of
| an insight from this article.
| shmde wrote:
| There is a good video by Veritasium on this topic titled - "Why
| life seems to speed up as we age"
|
| https://youtu.be/aIx2N-viNwY
| jmugan wrote:
| I think time speeds up as we grow older because we constantly and
| subconsciously make predictions. If we subjectively measure time
| by the flow of unexpected events, as we age, fewer of our
| predictions are wrong, so there are fewer such events, which
| speeds up time. New experiences and places slow it down again.
| jmugan wrote:
| This theory says that encoding the new information is what
| slows time down. That could be it as well, or both. There might
| be experiments one could do to tell the two apart.
| https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2010/02/01/122322542/w...
| nbulka wrote:
| The easiest explanation is that when I am 1 year old, my second
| year is twice as long as I've ever lived. If you feel time in
| relation to _anything_ , like the article suggests, this is an
| easier jump.
| weatherlight wrote:
| I'm curious to know how time passes for those who can't/couldn't
| see..
|
| I always assumed time passing rapidly had to do with novelty,
| when you are a child, everything is novel, as you get older,
| situations become less novel and aren't "remembered".
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > As we age, he argues, the size and complexity of the networks
| of neurons in our brains increases
|
| I thought the number of neural connections decreased throughout
| most of life? They surge in babies and teenagers, but are
| otherwise declining most of the time.
| emreb wrote:
| There is a simpler layman's explanation for this one. As you get
| older every second of your life starts being a smaller percentage
| of your overall experience. When you a 2 years old, 1 hour is
| 1/17520 of your life. When you are 50 years old, 1 hour is
| 1/438000 of your life.
| hello4353 wrote:
| I wonder what Taleb would say about this calculation.
| cornstalks wrote:
| That's a common argument. Veritasium explores this and IMO the
| alternative arguments are more compelling:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY
| guerrilla wrote:
| This doesn't provide an actual mechanism though. You'd need
| evidence that our perception of time is dependent on that ratio
| and then show us a mechanism for it. On the other hand, the
| article gives a possible mechanism for a different theory.
| gowld wrote:
| The proposed mechanism is that all recalled long-term
| memories (older than this week) are weighted independently of
| recency, so as you get older more of your memories are from
| the past years than the latest year, so the latest year seems
| less substantial.
| guerrilla wrote:
| This is just more elaboration of the hypothesis. It doesn't
| actually explain anything neurologically. What's the
| implementation? How do you plan to test for it?
| memco wrote:
| Had this thought when my daughter was born. Saying, "Hold on a
| minute" is asking a lot more of her than for myself.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It's not immediately obvious to me why this would result in the
| perception that time moves more quickly.
|
| The theory in the article did strike me as quite plausible.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| It is kind of horrifying though - it is in your face evidence
| of cognitive decline.
| bwanab wrote:
| Right, and as a long term participant in this realm, I can
| definitely say that the speeding up is far greater than any
| cognitive decline I've had so far. To be sure - since it's
| certainly possible that one wouldn't notice one's own
| decline, I do online courses periodically to 1) learn new
| stuff and 2) assure myself that the decline isn't yet too
| severe.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think a lot depends on what timescales you consider to
| be "speeded up". I don't think the perception that a huge
| amount of stuff happens between the ages of 16 and 18 and
| _seems like it was only last week_ between the ages of 30
| and 35 has much to do with cognitive decline. Feelings of
| _WTF it 's two hours later and I feel like I've only been
| editing for 10 minutes and just need 10 minutes more_,
| likely are linked to cognitive decline, but I'm young
| enough to only have that feeling when I'm really, really
| tired, and I sometimes had it when I was 20 too...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > I can definitely say that the speeding up is far
| greater than any cognitive decline I've had so far.
|
| "Cognitive decline" is probably the wrong way to think
| about it. Your cognition _changes_ as you age.
|
| When you're young, you're inundated with lots of
| information. You can process that information quickly,
| but you don't know which signals are important.
|
| As you age, you learn what information is important, and
| what can be filtered out. So even if you're slower, your
| brain can work more efficiently. It also knows how to
| take shortcuts.
|
| ...at least, that's what I remember reading in my college
| Psychology textbook five years ago, and it jives with the
| current article.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| I don't understand how that explains the sense of speed-up?
|
| E.g. when I read a novel, the last few pages don't fly by any
| faster than the first ones do.
| xahrepap wrote:
| I actually disagree with your novel example. When I read a
| novel, the first half of the book is building up to the
| second half. There's so much uncompressed information that I
| take in. Learning the characters, learning the environment,
| etc. While I read the same WPM, the second half FEELS faster
| to me because now I'm on to the good stuff and the details
| are behind me. I'm over the hump.
| fasteo wrote:
| This is mathematically true, but it does not explain the
| effect. It reminded me of the calories in, calories out thing.
|
| You gain weight because you eat more calories that you burn.
| This is, again, mathematically correct, but it offers no
| explanation of the why
|
| Why do you eat more than you burn ? you move too little ? you
| eat too much ? your brain malfunctions and it is unable to
| detect food intake ?
| razzimatazz wrote:
| I think I'm wired with the potential to eat more than I burn
| because the opposite is dangerous (long-term) and its hard to
| anticipate future burn when I eat. There would need to be a
| lot of food 'abundance' for the negative effects of this to
| ever come to fruition to the point of influencing evolution,
| and fixing the brain malfunction.
|
| (Maybe I misunderstand your angle).
| bmhin wrote:
| To put it a different way: for the 2 year old last week was
| about 1% of their entire existence.
|
| For that 50 year old it was just 0.03%.
| bwanab wrote:
| I agree with your theory much more than that of the article.
| I'm not sure why, but I've always had the same theory so maybe
| it's just confirmation bias.
|
| At any rate, I'm old and I can confirm that the speeding up
| isn't just a myth.
| jmcgough wrote:
| I've heard this on HN before and it seems less likely than an
| actual neuroscientific interpretation - we don't perceive time
| in a fractional sense on a moment-to-moment basis.
| [deleted]
| monster_group wrote:
| IMHO, in middle age there's more to do and worry about. For
| example, I took off today and the morning was over before I knew
| it. That's because I spent an hour trying to make sure that my
| insurance agent is not gouging me by getting other insurance
| quotes and then trying to bring my premium down by increasing
| deductible. Spent some time going over property tax statement and
| HOA notice that rates are going to go up again. I had to none of
| these things when I was younger.
| dang wrote:
| I know there have been multiple threads on this general theme in
| the past, but time has sped up enough that I can't remember what
| they were, and it's not the easiest thing to search for. Anybody?
| felix318 wrote:
| I discovered one thing about my hearing that, I think, implies
| the same thing this article is talking about. When we hear a
| quick sequence of distinct sounds, like a ringing bell for
| instance, depending on how fast one sound follows the other we
| may be aware of each individual sound or perceive everything as a
| blur. Now what I observed is that the threshold between
| "individual sounds" and "blurry" is determined by the brain, not
| by the physics of sound. Our brains have a "clock speed" which
| limits the "sample rate" for our perception of reality.
|
| I suspect that the internal clock slows down as we age. That
| wouldn't affect our perception of the speed of physical events,
| because those are relative to each other, but it would reduce the
| ratio of physical events per "clock cycles", giving us the
| sensation of a shrinking of the time dimension. The past becomes
| more "blurry", so to speak.
| seels wrote:
| I like information entropy as an explanation for this.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
|
| As we get older, life becomes more routine. Fewer unique
| experiences = less space taken up in memory = later years appear
| to have moved faster in retrospect.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| IS there any sort of evidence for what the article says other
| than it being a nice story and plausible?
| new_guy wrote:
| I would have expected better especially from Harvard, it's
| already known why. Subjective time is measured in terms of
| biological impact events.
|
| Basically the more novel experiences you have the slower time
| seems to pass for you, the less novel (interesting) stuff you do
| the faster time passes because there's no markers.
|
| This stuff has been known for literally decades now.
| motohagiography wrote:
| The novel experiences explanation is very interesting but I'd
| wonder whether novel ideas constitute experiences, or are
| experiences something that requires more action or something
| else?
|
| Anecdotally, I've been sitting in the same house for 20 months
| of the pandemic and have a diminished sense of time, and while
| in that time I've taken up music and new instruments, written
| volumes, transformed physically (weight loss), kept up regular
| highly intense physical hobbies, added and removed
| clients/jobs, worked in vastly different fields.
|
| However, I've always pursued novelty, and I'd wonder if this
| accepted explanation would indicate that the brain is now just
| bored of novelty, or if something about these things were not
| sufficiently novel experiences, and where does that sufficiency
| land?
| excalibur wrote:
| > This stuff has been known for literally decades now.
|
| Doesn't seem like that long to me.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| I really don't feel this at all. I am constantly doing new
| things, constantly learning things, and time feels like it
| stretches on forever. I'm over 40, so this isn't the effect of me
| just starting my career.
|
| 10 years ago _feels_ 10 years ago, and this effect of time
| speeding up just doesn 't register with me.
| ImaCake wrote:
| I am at 30 and the last year has felt just as long as 2011 did
| for me. I've been seeing these articles and comments about time
| speeding up since my teens and I am still waiting for it to
| happen to me. I am inclined to think the perception of time is
| tied to routine or behaviour and ageing is merely a confounder.
| This would explain the lack of time dilation for me - my life
| is still somewhat unstable and filled with novelty, so I don't
| really forget large chunks of time doing routine stuff.
| handrous wrote:
| That's crazy. I'm coming up on 40 and I'd say a year feels
| _maybe_ as long as three months did, when I was 18. If that
| long.
|
| Having kids seemed to increase the effect markedly, but it was
| already there.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Our neurons callus just like all our other tissues. The passage
| of time and the impressions and sensations fail to break through.
|
| I'm sure there's a poem there somewhere. Like tears in rain. Or
| something something. It's my birthday in a couple weeks. Hooray.
| rzzzt wrote:
| There is also an invented word for it - zenosyne:
| https://youtu.be/SNgyEmYyQF4
|
| (I highly recommend the channel, its videos capture and evoke
| feelings quite superbly.)
| djmips wrote:
| Another hunch that I have is that as you get older you tend to
| have less unique experiences. I believe our brains compress the
| information and an entire day that was much like the previous day
| can just feel like it sped by quickly. Alternatively, if you go
| on vacation or change your routine then time will slow down as
| you process a lot of new information.
| Darmody wrote:
| And you usually are not excited for the next day but for the
| nexy payday. Zombies until the weekend or until we get paid.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That's my theory too. In your first 20-30 years there are so
| many new things to keep your mind busy. Different schools,
| driver's license, first car, first time seeing a movie, first
| time seeing a concert, first relationships, first break up,
| moving out, travel, first job, children and so on. At some
| point it all becomes a repeat. I feel a lot of movies are just
| a repeat of what I have seen 30 years ago. Same for music. I
| can go to India for the fifth time but it's not the same
| excitement and amount of new experiences as the first time.
|
| I don't know how to get out of this. I can't think of any truly
| new things to do. Maybe I could go to jail or win Wimbledon?
| These would be truly new :-)
| com2kid wrote:
| Learn something completely unfamiliar to you. Something you
| are going to start off terrible at.
|
| Even better, an activity where the community surrounding it
| is also vastly different than your typical friends circle.
| Know a bunch of engineers? Dive into painting or sculpting.
|
| Find a way to twist your brain in a painful new direction.
| deepsun wrote:
| Outdoor sports.
|
| Any of the following can consume your whole time, and have
| huge communities of full-time devotees: *
| Rock Climbing * Mountaineering * Kayaking
| * Paragliding * Kite/Windsurfing * Surfing
| * Snowboarding (if you ski, skiing if you snowboard)
| * Backcountry skiing (aka ski-tour)
| aequitas wrote:
| Regarding vacation or trips in general for me it still feels
| going by fast and less special as I get older. I recon it has
| to do with that in the past vacations and trips would be
| planned for me (by my parents) so everything was a surprise and
| a discovery. Nowadays I have to plan everything for my family,
| so I do a lot of research regarding where to go, what to do,
| what will be most fun. So there is less of a surprise for me in
| case things do go as planned (like an attraction being closed
| or not as fun as it would seem). But this also means there is
| less room for me to be surprised and discover.
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| Truly gives a whole nother meaning to "wasting your life away
| at a job."
| another_why wrote:
| A very simple example which i can replicate at any time, with
| the same result: I have serious problems with memorizing places
| and can easily get lost anywhere where I haven't been yet. So,
| sometimes(knowing that i have a phone with gps in my pocket) I
| look at the map beforehand and try to go to some unknown place,
| on my own, in a limited time, like to a doctor appointment. And
| everytime it feels like it takes A LOT of time, like if I
| walked for 30 minutes when it was just 10. If I try it at the
| same place again, it will feel faster. Eventually, when I stop
| looking around and just go thinking about smth, like I usually
| do, it will feel like I walked for 5 minutes, when it actually
| was 20.
|
| It will not work in the same way if the time won't be limited -
| I will be more relaxed.
|
| People can spend years solving _one_ problem in their mind and
| there are not many experiences in your mind until it
| _generates_ smth you haven 't thought about, and this doesn't
| happen often.
| tylerscott wrote:
| That makes a ton of sense. The process of dissimulation that we
| go through as children just to be able to map language to our
| environment sounds like this. Once an experience is categorized
| we likely don't have the CPU spin up on the next similar
| experience. Business as usual. No need to make a note in memory
| about it.
| com2kid wrote:
| This is the typical explanation, and it meshes very well with
| everyone's day to day experiences.
|
| Vacations to unique places last forever. Never been? Spend 2
| weeks in Japan and you'll remember it just as vividly as the
| best summer from your childhood. Every moment of every day will
| be long and filled with memories.
|
| Debugging code every day? Yeah of course that's not memorable.
| Your brain is just tossing away repetitive data.
|
| Feeling like life is going by way too quick? Have a kid. Every
| day with a baby is unique.
|
| People with large families will have lived 200 subjective years
| by the time they are 70!
|
| Other advice: Stop doing stuff you are good at. Every few years
| try to take a new job that you are specifically not good at.
| Companies that hire people who have succeeded at a lot of
| different things but not necessarily the thing they are hiring
| for are likely to be _very_ good places to work. (FWIW my
| current workplace doesn 't hire based on language or tools or
| background, we hire good people and assume they can pick up
| what we are doing).
| [deleted]
| fasteo wrote:
| This is it
| someelephant wrote:
| Indeed. Our brains are good at 'compressing' similar
| experiences.
| xnx wrote:
| Exactly. Often on vacation something I did in the morning will
| feel like a week ago.
| esja wrote:
| I have long believed the same. I also experience this when
| taking a long drive to a new destination - it seems to take
| longer to get there than it does to return home.
| [deleted]
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| This is why I was enjoying living overseas in different
| countries because there were so many new experiences some
| frustrating some good but it did feel like time was moving
| slower.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I agree completely!
|
| Time seeming to speed up isn't a visual phenomena! I don't see
| people walking faster. People are not talking faster.
|
| It is in recall of recent times, not in the moment, that we
| feel like time is going by faster.
|
| And your point explains that.
|
| We tend to have fewer memories of recent time, because we had
| fewer unique experiences relative to when we were young and
| almost every day was full of new experiences and new things to
| learn.
| rkp8000 wrote:
| I also think this is a quite reasonable. For some work on this
| beyond anecdotal evidence, see
| https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
| . The authors' main finding (in rats and humans) is that the
| perception of the intensity of a stimulus relates to the
| perception of its duration, i.e. more intense stimuli are
| perceived as longer lasting. A speculation beyond the specific
| study would be that more intense experience generally (perhaps
| due to the saliency of more unique life events) could lead to a
| slowed down perception of time.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'll definitely agree with this, I'd advise anyone who's not
| tied down to routinely go on vacations, and even consider
| moving.
|
| Staying in old routines is comfortable, but to use myself as an
| example if I just stayed in la complaining about how horrible
| the city is, I'm robbing myself of a fuller life.
|
| My plan right now is to move abroad for at least a few months
| or so. I really need to change up things
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've always felt that traveling to somewhere new
| feels like a longer experience than coming back from that
| place, unless the return trip has an emotional component to it
| (boredom, urgency, anxious to return). I tend to notice the
| details of the unfamiliar road more. On the way back, my mind
| has already cached that path.
| WA9ACE wrote:
| It's all anecdotal, but having been full time RVing for several
| months now after selling our house time has slowed to a crawl.
| Before we sold our house the days flew past at 100mph. It's
| amazing how little control we can exert on our own perception
| of the flow of time.
| frogpelt wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've seen this happen on a very small scale.
|
| The first time I drive down a road it seems longer than
| subsequent times. Once parts of the road become familiar the
| time it takes to get down the road seems shorter.
| [deleted]
| carlmr wrote:
| I think this is true as well, it's easier to remember special
| days, than average days.
|
| Another issue is that kids are exposed to more varied
| experience at school. Jobs often expose us to similar
| experiences over and over again.
|
| The only problem is how to get paid to have a varied life.
| darkwater wrote:
| It's totally unscientific but in my opinion it's like when you
| are hiking a path you never did and when you reach your
| destination, you hike back. Going back always feels faster even
| if the pace is exactly the same, but you already know the path,
| you remember some rock, or that view, or those oaks. And your
| brain works less. We have routines when we are small children
| just like we have when we are adults so it might be that as we
| grow older the brain is in power saving mode and that feels
| like going back through a path you already know.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| This is a much more compelling argument than the article's.
| belltaco wrote:
| Both can be true in their own way though.
| itsdsmurrell wrote:
| Yes, I agree, the article is very bad and I don't know how it
| got upvoted so highly here.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| This is my impression as well. Old people who have settled in
| a routine can tell what year and month it is, but probably
| have a harder time telling the day or weekday. For them, all
| days are weekends.
|
| You don't even need to be old to feel this. I've had
| vacations where I mostly played JRPGs, and those vacations
| certainly felt considerably shorter.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| JRPGs, as well as the Civ games, are time compressors. You
| blink and 5 hours have passed.
| lsaferite wrote:
| Games like factorio must be 'super compressors'.
| tuatoru wrote:
| And Kerbal Space Program.
|
| Why are those birds cheeping? Oh, it's the dawn chorus.
| Again.
| contingencies wrote:
| Commuting / driving.
| eafkuor wrote:
| God, really? I can't take those for more than 1h at a
| time usually. Except Chrono Trigger I guess. Any
| recommendations?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Chrono Trigger is an excellent game! Maybe Chrono Cross
| (PS1) if you want to play a sequel.
|
| Other classics are Dragon Warrior IV for the NES, and
| Phantasy star IV for the Sega Genesis. No need to play
| the previous ones.
|
| My other recommendation is using an emulator to give you
| unlimited money and experience. The gameplay is ruined,
| but the storytelling is more fluid, and you'll save many
| hours.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| JRPGs? The Persona series is quite interesting, good
| story telling; Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 are both very
| good; NieR Automata is a great action RPG set in a
| dystopic future; the old school Zeldas, the original
| Phantasy Star...
|
| I admit, they're all an acquired taste in many ways but
| once you get into it and stop minding the complexity in
| some of them, they can suck you in and move you out of
| time.
| pugworthy wrote:
| You might correct that to "people who don't work" instead
| of "old people".
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Not necessarily. People who don't work aren't necessarily
| living boring lives.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Just pointing out a bit of inadvertent ageism.
|
| And I definitely wasn't implying they live boring lives.
| My spouse for example doesn't work, and in fact is quite
| busy with an impressive garden landscape. She doesn't
| always know what day it is, because it doesn't usually
| matter.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I think I was unintentionally ageist, sorry. I'm fifty
| myself, it wasn't deliberate.
|
| Also, a routine doesn't necessarily gets boring, you're
| right. I was thinking of a university friend of mine. He
| didn't work, only studied for finals, and had a very
| interesting life with little money. Somehow he didn't
| flunk.
| seoulmetro wrote:
| It's not ageism to recognise the negatives of age...
| jesus christ.
| d23 wrote:
| This is more intuitive, but I don't know that it makes it
| more compelling for me. I find the article's hypothesis a bit
| more interesting, since it's not exactly what one would
| expect.
| tralarpa wrote:
| > Another hunch that I have is that as you get older you tend
| to have less unique experiences
|
| I have read that explanation several times on different
| websites, but I don't agree. Had a lot of new and unique things
| happening to me in the past decade (kids, moving, new job, new
| country,...). Times still flew. I have talked to friends about
| this and they have noticed the same thing.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| How old are you? These were new but now a new job or a new
| country is also a repeat. It gets harder and harder to find
| truly new things.
| handrous wrote:
| I don't buy the "novelty" thing, either. Between high school
| and an evening job, about three of those years were the most
| regimented of my life, and high school definitely wasn't
| providing enough novelty, in any way, to make up for it. Yet
| those years felt _extremely_ slow compared to now. I feel
| like I blink and a season 's gone. Fall or Summer used to
| feel _so_ long back then. And Winter, practically eternal.
| Now it 's like, "wait, didn't Summer just start? Why are the
| leaves all turning?"
|
| Some time around IIRC 25, the effect really started to take
| off, and it's never gotten better, no matter how much my life
| is shaken up.
|
| [EDIT] and on shorter time scales, back then, tell me I've
| got an hour? Fuck yeah! Enough time to do several things! Now
| it's like... ugh, barely enough to even start something.
| Guess I'll putter and tidy the house until it's up, which'll
| feel like about ten minutes from now.
| spc476 wrote:
| Another way to look at it: by the time you graduate high
| school, you will have spent 1/4 of your life there. By the
| time you are 40, 10 years is 1/4 of your life. By the time
| you are 80, 20 years is 1/4 of your life.
|
| The relative portions of your life get longer the longer
| you live.
| handrous wrote:
| That's another way to _look_ at it, sure, but it still
| doesn 't seem to explain anything about why perception of
| time speeds up with age. That's true, but why does it
| matter?
| [deleted]
| ww520 wrote:
| Our brains also filters lots of uninterested stuff
| automatically. When we're young, many things are interesting.
| We spend lots of time processing them and it feels like time
| goes slowly as we have to "experience" these things fully. As
| we grew older, lots of things have been experienced and known.
| The brains recognize the known patterns and just filter them
| out. The brains are probably micro sleep all time while idling
| saving energy, and the time keeping is off.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The original article is inaccessible for me but it depends on
| the experimental protocol.
|
| What "speeds up"? Looking at a clock ticking doing nothing?
| Eating breakfast? Waiting in line? Watching a movie? An
| international flight? Memories of a typical work/school day?
| Memories of a two week vacation? And relative to what? You
| can't say something "speeds up" without a reference.
|
| For example you can ask : "What feels the longest, a day at
| Disneyland, or the 8h drive to get there?". And you will
| probably get different answers based on the context.
|
| Our body doesn't have a single clock, and BTW, neither do
| computers, so the transmission delay between neurons and the
| amount of new experiences can each explain a different kind of
| "speed up".
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Alternatively, if you go on vacation or change your routine
| then time will slow down as you process a lot of new
| information.
|
| Yeah...the first week of a new job feels like a month of the
| previous job. Four months into it now, and the weeks fly by.
|
| While on vacation, the days feel long. Though once I get back,
| the week felt short. :-\
|
| I worry about what retirement will be like. On one hand, all my
| time is free time. On the other, 10 years will probably fly by
| and I'll have no idea where it went.
| sva_ wrote:
| If in the first year of life, you have 100% new experiences,
| 2nd year, 50% new experiences, etc, and reach an age of around
| 80, you'll have made half your life's experiences by the age of
| 20.
|
| I think in retrospect we perceive time through our memories,
| less so by our momentary experience. If your memories have
| little variance, you'll feel like time has passed quickly. So
| if you work some factory job for 40 years, you may feel like
| life passed by in a blink of a moment.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Just like people can have variations in inner voice or mental
| imagery, I wonder if different people perceive the flow of time
| differently. For me, I feel like I have a weak long term memory.
| Things from my childhood are pretty much gone and and it takes
| quite a lot of effort to recall things from even a few months
| ago. I also have no problem slowing down and having a fresh
| experience of a familiar thing. A few minutes sometimes can
| stretch out and feel like much longer. And when I do some very
| new, like go to a new country, I can have a childlike experience
| of each day stretching on and on and a month seeming like a year.
| boringg wrote:
| I like to think of it kind of like how time machine saves to hard
| disk. If there aren't any changes than there isn't a lot of disk
| space used (in our case as adults there isn't much long term
| memory put down, therefore time feels faster).
| datadawg wrote:
| If our perception of events are in relation to our past
| experiences, that could also explain this phenomenon. For example
| let's say you think back to that carefree, fun summer when you
| were five years old and marvel at how long that seemed to last,
| compared to the summer at age thirty that you barely remember.
| Well that 3-month summer made up 3 / (5 x 12) or 5% of your life
| at age five but only 3 / ( 30 x 12) or 0.8% of your life at age
| thirty, so the memory from age five would be 6x more salient
| (ignoring other factors like uniqueness of experience, how
| "present" you are, visual information processing, etc). Or maybe
| you were just on a real bender that summer you turned 30.
|
| edit: just realized emreb has a similar comment after reading
| further down the thread!
| xahrepap wrote:
| I've always assumed part of it is more relative. Meaning: When
| I'm 5, 10 years old seems like a lifetime away... because it is.
| Going from 5 to 6 is, relatively speaking, the same as going from
| 50 to 60. I assume my brain has so much to look back on as I'm
| older to compare against that 1 year just "feels" like less now.
|
| With that said, I'm sure there's a million explanations. And all
| of them are probably, at least somewhat, true.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Does the rate of speed up at least level off at some point or
| does it just keep accelerating? I'd hate to think the last few
| years of my life go by in what I currently perceive as a few
| months.
| pengaru wrote:
| What I've speculated is that perception of time is relative to
| how much you've experienced, i.e. how long you've been alive.
|
| When you're a child, a week seems like a long time, because you
| haven't lived very many weeks. A year seems like an eternity,
| because relatively few have passed.
|
| As more of these increasingly large time units get behind you,
| years, then decades... you have a firsthand understanding of what
| living their respective durations feels like.
|
| It's like by living you're calibrating your ability to measure
| time properly, and then you die.
| planb wrote:
| If "longer signal processing ways" are the cause for the
| perceived speed up of time, then every minute, every hour would
| feel shorter, wouldn't it? This isn't what most people are
| experiencing as they age though - single days pass just as fast
| (or slow) as they did back in the days. But it's the months and
| years that feel like on fast forward.
| yosito wrote:
| This is a completely vapid article. The headline implies an
| answer. This short article starts with "nobody knows" and ends
| with "one guy's random idea is...".
| dang wrote:
| Normally we downweight articles like that off the front page,
| but the thread is surprisingly better.
| motohagiography wrote:
| OP here. The co-ordinates for why I posted it were, I was
| wondering whether time perception change is a thing,
| searched, recognized the author's name from some of his other
| work, coupled with the harvard source, and am interested in
| what others think about the topic.
|
| The perception is pretty plausibly an information processing
| phenomenon, and there are mechanisms for that, so pro
| thinkers addressing it seemed interesting enough to share. If
| it brings down the level of discussion, I would of course
| apologize.
| endisneigh wrote:
| If true, how do you fight this without actually going on more
| unique experiences?
|
| I like to think there are some weird swirly images or static
| noise I can watch/listen to while going about my life that will
| "novelize" everything. hah.
| c22 wrote:
| Have you tried LSD?
| handrous wrote:
| I haven't tried it (yet), but know people who use it largely
| for that exact effect.
|
| [EDIT] the effect of making an hour hour or an afternoon feel
| as long as they did when you were, like, 6 years old, I mean.
| Jensson wrote:
| Does it really? To me time speeds up when I am not doing new
| things. When I do new things time goes as slow now as it did 20
| years ago. Just pull up your life by its roots and time slows
| down to a crawl, then as you get used to your new life it
| gradually speeds up towards infinity, so you just repeat this
| process to perceptually live longer.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| If I told you had 48 hours to study for your Organic Chemistry
| final, would time slow down or speed up?
| obloid wrote:
| I've thought about this phenomenon a good bit as I get older. My
| hypothesis is that the older you get periods of time take up
| smaller and smaller fractions of your life span, and therefore
| seem to pass more quickly.
|
| When you are 10 years old a year is a large fraction of the total
| time you have been alive so it feels much longer than when you
| are 60 and that same year is only 1/60 of your life.
|
| edit: reading further down I see I'm not the only one who had
| this same idea :)
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| Interesting view, I thought it happens as with computers, that
| your memory gets saturated with wast amount of things and
| emotions, so your CPU with age starts getting slower, and as it
| slows down as your brain does not work as fast as when we were
| young, we perceive time as it appear to pass faster.
|
| But it seems according article my perception was wrong ...
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I'm just losing myself in the waves of time... Wish it would all
| slow down.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| I see, I'm prescribing you a lunchtime trip to the DMV on a
| Monday of your choice.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Honestly I think my work and job seriously compounds this effect.
| Theres just no way to have so many unique experiences staring at
| a computer all day.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| The paper referenced in the article seems to be at [1]. Its not
| in a scientific journal and had only has one author, who is a
| professor of mechanical engineering [2]. I'm not a neurologist or
| a professor of anything, but this all seems more like a pet a
| theory than something based on scientific evidence.
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000741
|
| [2] https://mems.duke.edu/faculty/adrian-bejan
| ghastmaster wrote:
| Age might result in neural complexities, but this can apparently
| be tampered with to some extent.
|
| When you watch a movie for the first time, it seems to last
| longer than when you watch it a second time. It seems to me that
| as our brain is processing new information our perception of time
| is dilated.
|
| As we grow older, we have to learn less about the world and
| consequently time is perceived as quicker. I suspect this is why
| during a drug induced euphoria the experience seems like it can
| last an eternity and time ceases to exist. Our brain is
| processing and adapting to the stimuli much as we were doing in
| our youth.
|
| There are of course two different perceptions of time. Current
| and retrospective. Some days can seem to last forever, but by the
| end of the week you end up feeling like the week went by very
| fast. The opposite is true, as well as a mix of both.
| peter_retief wrote:
| I thought it was faster because every time unit was a smaller
| percentage of the total time we had been alive. I learnt
| something new.
| thedigitalone wrote:
| https://archive.md/664b8
| [deleted]
| rolivercoffee wrote:
| I remember watching a episode of Numberphile about Webber's law:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHG8io5qIU8
|
| TL;DW: We percieve things logarithmically. Thought it was an
| interesting idea.
| daledavies wrote:
| I always just thought it was down to a unit of time relative to
| your age. So as a 1 year old a year represent your entire life,
| so seems really long. As a 40 year old a year is just a fraction
| of your life, so seems much less significant.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Dunno about that. I'm a bit over 30 and feel like I'm 80 mentally
| (physically I'm as fit as I was in my 20's and still as
| energetic). I was always told that time perception would speed up
| but it really hasn't.
| itsdsmurrell wrote:
| This explanation misses a lot. When I watch an advert a second
| time, it seems to pass a lot faster than the first watch. My
| brain however has not changed at all. It seems that novelty is
| the main factor causing the perceived slowdown of time and that
| lack of novelty (less things surprise me as I age) makes time
| seem to pass more quickly. This also explains why staycations
| pass a lot faster than a trip somewhere new.
| eslaught wrote:
| I don't see anyone in this thread discussing sleep.
|
| At least anecdotally, I know a lot of people who get worse sleep
| as they get older. Sleep quality is, if I'm not mistaken, at
| least indirectly correlated with memory. So it seems reasonable
| to believe, in addition to everything else people are saying
| here, that one possible reason time flies by is that we don't get
| the sleep to make those memories stick.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I have an alternative (although unproven) theory.
|
| I have been practicing meditation for 15 years, sometimes in
| batch of 100 hours.
|
| The more I practice, the more the time slows down. Not just while
| meditating, but after the fact as well. Although it fluctuates
| and I'm not back to my kid self, it feels that I have
| tremendously more time now than a few years ago.
|
| I suspect that it's tied to how much present you manage to be.
|
| When you are a kid, you are deeply immersed in whatever you are
| doing, and less and less so after that, especially in our age of
| distractions, multitasking, and intellectual work loads.
|
| I think that the more you are immersed in the daily boring stuff,
| like just walking, doing chores, or taking your shower, the more
| you register the time you spend doing said activity, and the time
| seems to pass slowly.
|
| In fact, I am sometimes under the impression my minutes, not just
| feel longer, but actually contain more, because I do so many
| things and then looking at the clock, it hasn't moved much. This
| sensation increases when I meditate a lot.
| joe__f wrote:
| I've been pracitising meditation for nearly 10 years, and I
| also experience this effect.
|
| I think the more you meditate, the more you unlearn precious
| patterns, memories, etc. that were clogging up your brain. Then
| you have more time to experience the present moment, and your
| brain has more capacity to process what's going on now rather
| than what happened to you previously.
| joe__f wrote:
| I meant 'previous' not 'precious'. How can I edit a post I
| made? I've seen what I think was other people editing their
| posts
| pbrb wrote:
| Where would you start right now if you were starting to
| meditate with no prior experience, knowing what you know now
| with 15yrs of experience?
|
| I'm going to take what you recommend and run with it.
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