4 ms·

I always assumed it was because your frame of reference gets longer and longer. For a 5 year old, a day is 1/1825 of their entire life, whereas for a 50-year-ol

by larrik 8y ago

I always assumed it was because your frame of reference gets longer and longer. For a 5 year old, a day is 1/1825 of their entire life, whereas for a 50-year-old it's a smaller piece of your life by a factor of 10.

GuB-42 8y ago
I thought about it too, and it is not an uncommon theory. The issue I have with it is that you are essentially plotting an inverse function and it breaks down at age zero. You can use tricks like quantization (a common one: you only consider whole years), add some constant, etc... but then, it stops being an simple and elegant idea. Now I think the passage of time is complex and messy subject. We have things our body can use as time bases: heartbeat, brain waves, the laws of motion, day/night cycle, winter/summer cycle, music / rhythmic sounds, the amount of data we have as we recall past events, etc... It can't be simple. The paper points out one factor: the fact that our body functions slow down as we age, but it can't be the only reason.
dguo 8y ago
My first exposure to this idea came from this website: https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/ https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/
- benrussert 8y ago
  I feel like it will take 50% of my life to scroll to the end of that site.
a-dub 8y ago
ding
Tenoke 8y ago
I honestly don't understand why some people believe this. I dont think about my whole life history every day (and even less from moment to moment). I also dont have perfect recall but even if I did, at any one moment I am only referencing memories from the same amount of past moments (or at most slightly more). I really wonder how much more differently than me do you process everything, think, and perceive for this to ring true rather than a pretty but obviously false story.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Agreed. My guess has always been it is because of lack of variety, not an intrinsic property of getting older. Take a summer off and travel to unknown lands, and when you get back tell me that didn't feel just as long or even longer than summer break did in grade school. Spend that same summer in the office or in your normal routine and it will fly by.
cgriswald 8y ago
We are really comparing "50-year-old's current experience" against "50-year-old's memory of 5-year-old's experience". So I've never been sure frame of reference mattered. Instead, I've always suspected it is novelty and memory. To a 5-year-old almost everything is new and novel, and his memory is absorbing absurd amounts of information each day. If he finds, say, a bottle opener and has never seen one before, it might fascinate him. He might spend 30 minutes just playing with it, turning it in his hand, pondering what it is for, etc. Then he'll remember all the little lessons he learned from it. (He might even think more about it later.) You, on the other hand, have seen so many bottle openers that you've got a sort of platonic ideal of it inside your mind. You see it and don't even have to consciously think about it. You might not even remember later that you saw it, where you saw it, what color it was, or anything about it. So my take has always been along the lines that a 5-year-old's experience is filled with brand new interactions with the world, so each day in memory is 'bigger'. We older folks have been there, done that, so the list of things we find important enough to remember is a lot smaller. Most of our "time" is just gone.
- QuantumGood 8y ago
  Novelty is definitely a factor. Improv training increases the novelty people find in interactions, and not coincidentally, people comment that it makes them feel younger.
- zaphirplane 8y ago
  What you are describing is opposite to the expression time flies when you are having fun. You are saying Time slows when you are having fun, I suspect your conclusion is incorrect
  - cgriswald 8y ago
    I don't think those two ideas are in conflict. First, fun and novelty are not always the same thing. I can have fun playing my 5000th hour of Civ VI and it can indeed fly by, but it doesn't mean something particularly novel happened. Second, the experiencing self and the remembering self can have very different perceptions.
tbabb 8y ago
I think it is more than that. I think the perception of time is the rate of change of your brain state. Intuitively, this makes sense-- if I double the rate of your neurological activity, the world will seem to move half as fast. Similarly, if I freeze the activity of your brain and resume it some time later, you'd perceive no time to have passed. But I think it also applies on longer timescales, too, and to variations in the rate and degree the brain transforms itself-- If you repeat the same thing every day, your brain changes little, and those identical, indistinguishable experiences collapse onto each other in your brain's compressed representation. That is to say, if each week of your life is the same, the situation approaches one where I took your beginning-of-the-week brain state and transplanted to the end of the week without any changes. I should predict that under that circumstance you would not experience the passage of time. On the other hand, learning and experiencing dramatically new things forces your brain to change substantially, and the kind of cognitive delta that would normally occur over weeks or months of experiential stasis can happen in days or hours. Once people leave school, many years of routine can go by without many clear perceptual markers. I am noticing this in myself, and it's become a nontrivial motivator for making substantial life changes. Compounding this is the fact that neurology slows down as we age. I recall seeing a chart that suggested that a 60 or 70 year old will have roughly half (? maybe worse) the reaction time of a 20 year old. That suggests that 8 hours for a 20 year old would feel like 4 hours to a 70 year old. The study did not examine children under 18, but extrapolating the trend would suggest that children's brains are substantially faster still. Perhaps an hour for a young child is neurologically equivalent to 4 or 5 hours for a middle aged adult.

by larrik 8y ago

GuB-42 8y ago

I thought about it too, and it is not an uncommon theory. The issue I have with it is that you are essentially plotting an inverse function and it breaks down at age zero. You can use tricks like quantization (a common one: you only consider whole years), add some constant, etc... but then, it stops being an simple and elegant idea. Now I think the passage of time is complex and messy subject. We have things our body can use as time bases: heartbeat, brain waves, the laws of motion, day/night cycle, winter/summer cycle, music / rhythmic sounds, the amount of data we have as we recall past events, etc... It can't be simple. The paper points out one factor: the fact that our body functions slow down as we age, but it can't be the only reason.

dguo 8y ago

My first exposure to this idea came from this website: https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/ https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/

benrussert 8y ago
I feel like it will take 50% of my life to scroll to the end of that site.

a-dub 8y ago

ding

Tenoke 8y ago

I honestly don't understand why some people believe this. I dont think about my whole life history every day (and even less from moment to moment). I also dont have perfect recall but even if I did, at any one moment I am only referencing memories from the same amount of past moments (or at most slightly more). I really wonder how much more differently than me do you process everything, think, and perceive for this to ring true rather than a pretty but obviously false story.

oh_sigh 8y ago
Agreed. My guess has always been it is because of lack of variety, not an intrinsic property of getting older. Take a summer off and travel to unknown lands, and when you get back tell me that didn't feel just as long or even longer than summer break did in grade school. Spend that same summer in the office or in your normal routine and it will fly by.

cgriswald 8y ago

We are really comparing "50-year-old's current experience" against "50-year-old's memory of 5-year-old's experience". So I've never been sure frame of reference mattered. Instead, I've always suspected it is novelty and memory. To a 5-year-old almost everything is new and novel, and his memory is absorbing absurd amounts of information each day. If he finds, say, a bottle opener and has never seen one before, it might fascinate him. He might spend 30 minutes just playing with it, turning it in his hand, pondering what it is for, etc. Then he'll remember all the little lessons he learned from it. (He might even think more about it later.) You, on the other hand, have seen so many bottle openers that you've got a sort of platonic ideal of it inside your mind. You see it and don't even have to consciously think about it. You might not even remember later that you saw it, where you saw it, what color it was, or anything about it. So my take has always been along the lines that a 5-year-old's experience is filled with brand new interactions with the world, so each day in memory is 'bigger'. We older folks have been there, done that, so the list of things we find important enough to remember is a lot smaller. Most of our "time" is just gone.

QuantumGood 8y ago
Novelty is definitely a factor. Improv training increases the novelty people find in interactions, and not coincidentally, people comment that it makes them feel younger.
zaphirplane 8y ago
What you are describing is opposite to the expression time flies when you are having fun. You are saying Time slows when you are having fun, I suspect your conclusion is incorrect
- cgriswald 8y ago
  I don't think those two ideas are in conflict. First, fun and novelty are not always the same thing. I can have fun playing my 5000th hour of Civ VI and it can indeed fly by, but it doesn't mean something particularly novel happened. Second, the experiencing self and the remembering self can have very different perceptions.

tbabb 8y ago

I think it is more than that. I think the perception of time is the rate of change of your brain state. Intuitively, this makes sense-- if I double the rate of your neurological activity, the world will seem to move half as fast. Similarly, if I freeze the activity of your brain and resume it some time later, you'd perceive no time to have passed. But I think it also applies on longer timescales, too, and to variations in the rate and degree the brain transforms itself-- If you repeat the same thing every day, your brain changes little, and those identical, indistinguishable experiences collapse onto each other in your brain's compressed representation. That is to say, if each week of your life is the same, the situation approaches one where I took your beginning-of-the-week brain state and transplanted to the end of the week without any changes. I should predict that under that circumstance you would not experience the passage of time. On the other hand, learning and experiencing dramatically new things forces your brain to change substantially, and the kind of cognitive delta that would normally occur over weeks or months of experiential stasis can happen in days or hours. Once people leave school, many years of routine can go by without many clear perceptual markers. I am noticing this in myself, and it's become a nontrivial motivator for making substantial life changes. Compounding this is the fact that neurology slows down as we age. I recall seeing a chart that suggested that a 60 or 70 year old will have roughly half (? maybe worse) the reaction time of a 20 year old. That suggests that 8 hours for a 20 year old would feel like 4 hours to a 70 year old. The study did not examine children under 18, but extrapolating the trend would suggest that children's brains are substantially faster still. Perhaps an hour for a young child is neurologically equivalent to 4 or 5 hours for a middle aged adult.