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Why time “speeds up” as we get older (2019)
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoOur 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.
- weatherlight 5y agoI'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".
- emreb 5y agoThere 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.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoIt’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 5y agoIt is kind of horrifying though - it is in your face evidence of cognitive decline.
- bwanab 5y agoRight, 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 5y agoI 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 5y ago> 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.
- bmhin 5y agoTo 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 5y agoI 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.
- gmfawcett 5y agoI 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 5y agoI 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.
- jmcgough 5y agoI'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.
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- guerrilla 5y agoThis 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 5y agoThe 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 5y agoThis 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?
- refurb 5y agoThe article doesn’t explain it neurologically either other than saying “more brain connections means long time to traverse the brain” which is just a bunch of handwaving.
- cornstalks 5y agoThat's a common argument. Veritasium explores this and IMO the alternative arguments are more compelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY
- memco 5y agoHad this thought when my daughter was born. Saying, "Hold on a minute" is asking a lot more of her than for myself.
- fasteo 5y agoThis 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 5y agoI 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).
- hello4353 5y agoI wonder what Taleb would say about this calculation.
- necrotic_comp 5y agoI 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.
- handrous 5y agoThat'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.
- ImaCake 5y agoI 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.
- djmips 5y agoAnother 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.
- WA9ACE 5y agoIt'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.
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- gmfawcett 5y agoThis is a much more compelling argument than the article's.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoThis 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 5y agoJRPGs, as well as the Civ games, are time compressors. You blink and 5 hours have passed.
- xahrepap 5y agoI'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.
- karmelapple 5y agoBig agreement here. Every minute as you age is a smaller fraction of your overall life than before.
- yosito 5y agoThis 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 5y agoNormally we downweight articles like that off the front page, but the thread is surprisingly better.
- motohagiography 5y agoOP 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 5y agoIf 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.
- Jensson 5y agoDoes 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 5y agoIf I told you had 48 hours to study for your Organic Chemistry final, would time slow down or speed up?
- emptyparadise 5y agoI'm just losing myself in the waves of time... Wish it would all slow down.
- hh3k0 5y agoI see, I'm prescribing you a lunchtime trip to the DMV on a Monday of your choice.
- Ancalagon 5y agoHonestly 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.
- shmde 5y agoThere is a good video by Veritasium on this topic titled - "Why life seems to speed up as we age" https://youtu.be/aIx2N-viNwY https://youtu.be/aIx2N-viNwY
- jmugan 5y agoI 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 5y agoThis 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/why-does-time-fly-by-as-you-get-older https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2010/02/01/122322542/w...
- boringg 5y agoI 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).
- Xcelerate 5y agoDoes 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.
- seels 5y agoI like information entropy as an explanation for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) 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.
- new_guy 5y agoI 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.
- excalibur 5y ago> This stuff has been known for literally decades now. Doesn't seem like that long to me.
- motohagiography 5y agoThe 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?
- planb 5y agoIf "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.
- ghastmaster 5y agoAge 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 5y agoI 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 5y agohttps://archive.md/664b8 https://archive.md/664b8
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- Mikeb85 5y agoDunno 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.
- eslaught 5y agoI 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.
- ur-whale 5y agoThe 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.
- dang 5y agoI 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 5y agoI 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.
- itsdsmurrell 5y agoThis 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.
- dougmwne 5y agoJust 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.
- andyjohnson0 5y agoThe 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 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000741 [2] https://mems.duke.edu/faculty/adrian-bejan https://mems.duke.edu/faculty/adrian-bejan
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoInteresting 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 ...
- daledavies 5y agoI 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.
- monster_group 5y agoIMHO, 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.
- rolivercoffee 5y agoI remember watching a episode of Numberphile about Webber's law: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHG8io5qIU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHG8io5qIU8 TL;DW: We percieve things logarithmically. Thought it was an interesting idea.
- nbulka 5y agoThe 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.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoI 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 5y agoI'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 5y agoI meant 'previous' not 'precious'. How can I edit a post I made? I've seen what I think was other people editing their posts
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoThere is an "edit" link, but it disappears if your comment is too old.
- pbrb 5y agoWhere 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.
- ChicagoBoy11 5y agoIS there any sort of evidence for what the article says other than it being a nice story and plausible?
- rzzzt 5y agoThere is also an invented word for it - zenosyne: https://youtu.be/SNgyEmYyQF4 https://youtu.be/SNgyEmYyQF4 (I highly recommend the channel, its videos capture and evoke feelings quite superbly.)
- pengaru 5y agoWhat 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.
- obloid 5y agoI'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 :)
- Buttons840 5y ago> 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.
- datadawg 5y agoIf 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!
- hairofadog 5y agoThere is a wonderful short animated film on this topic called "The Eagleman Stag": https://vimeo.com/41756240 https://vimeo.com/41756240
- Olumde 5y agoI think its because we are busier. Let's see. I am a dad to two kids, a husband, with a day job as a software engineer, but working on my side project when the wife and kids have gone to bed. (yes I'm on HN now but I'm going to fire up gedit soon -- trust me.) I don't even know what free time means any more. Back when I was a seven years old I had not a care in the world, was often bored. Time passed slooowly. I was sure my eighth birthday would never arrive. I turned 50 in June.
- beaugunderson 5y agoI am reminded of Logtime: http://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html http://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html
- sneak 5y agoIt's also possible that time just speeds up for everyone at a constant rate. It's not like there's anyone who isn't getting older.
- hidden-spyder 5y agoI want to know how to counter this effect.
- Reflecticon 5y ago[Unfortunately I can't find the sources anymore] The reason why we imagine time pass faster when we get older is related to how we experience and remember events during life. As events excite us, the perception of that particular Time-Event is short but since we were fully engaged at that time, we remember it more in detail and thus taking longer. Vis versa, time spend in boredom is perceived as passing slowly but since nothing out of the ordinary is happening, we remember it as a quick period with nit much detail. Couple that with the exciting youth and dreadful routine as an adult, your life in your older ages becomes repetitive plus, depending on how much knowledge you like to consume,feels easier to predict and thus by default less exciting. Experience kills the novelty and partially the excitement, resulting in the opinion that when you wake up one morning feeling like the past 5 years have passt with a blink of an eye, that time flies by. I think that hobbies besides your daily routine can help you battle that feeling of lost years. On the other hand I found something else helpful: you gotta figure out your calibration of your routine:novelty ratio. If you are a person that likes 60% novelty and 40% routine but you are stuck in a job that is very repetitive or doesn't leave you with enough energy after work, you'll end up earlier in that "life is passing too quickly category". But if you somewhat can adjust your life to that calibration then you experience the right amount of novelty that makes you feel that life takes exactly as long as needed.
- rcarmo 5y agoAnd yet, meetings still take forever, so I would take this with a grain of salt.