3 ms·
I wonder if it has to do with the snapshot timing resolution being asymptotically high when you have not yet experienced enough passage of time. As you know we
by xeonmc 2y ago
I wonder if it has to do with the snapshot timing resolution being asymptotically high when you have not yet experienced enough passage of time.
As you know we generally experience timescales logarithmically with age, i.e. your incremental experience of time is always compared in reference to dividing by the total passage of time experienced, which is why children tend to get bored much more quickly than adults, because waiting for ten minutes constitutes a much larger percentage of their current experienced life compared to that of an adult's proportion.
Since a baby/toddler has only experienced a tiny amount of time passage thus far, their tiny reference "yardstick" would result in their memory being snapshotted at an untenable timining resolution thanks to division-by-almost-zero. So perhaps the brain does some form of filtering to prevent the entirety of experienced memory being dominated by the super-early ages, or perhaps there is some equivalent of an overflow in their internal counter.
Keep in mind that the above are purely metaphorical as a functional description, and not to be treated as a literal hypothesis on the mechanistic operation of memory.
- roenxi 2y agoAn interesting idea; although I think somewhat unlikely. This is one of those instances where I would assume the brain is doing something carefully calibrated. But it'd be easiest to just not record as many experiences for the first few years rather than do a complete flush. My guess has always been there is some optimal approach to learning that works by developing a really basic schema (what does a person look like, which ones are mine, roughly how does this body thing work, etc) then flushing all the training data and starting again. I vaguely expect the machine learning people develop some sort of similar process where they get a lot of value lightly conditioning a model before sinking compute into doing a full train. Basically, my wild guess is there is a lot to learn in a baby's first few experiences but the risk of mis-encoding the lessons is so high that the brain uses the data to bootstrap but then throws it out as too unreliable and starts again once it orients.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoI disagree. I think the brain compresses experiences. If you had a routine of k activities every day you won't remember every instance of that routine but you may remember what the routine was.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoExactly what I was going to say. Go travel through strange lands for 3 months and compare the feeling of the passage of time to 3 months doing your normal routine.
- alabastervlog 2y agoN of 1, but my experience doesn't fit with this common explanation. Big life changes, travel, having kids... none of it has done a thing to disrupt a steady progression to a point where (around age 40) a year feels about subjectively as long as maybe three months did in high school. Started being noticeable around age 25 IIRC, and time's done nothing but keep getting faster. This doesn't revert, at all, when things get shaken up, not even temporarily. It's still "you know that place we went the other day... oh, shit, that was six weeks ago".
- close04 2y ago> which is why children tend to get bored much more quickly than adults, because waiting for ten minutes constitutes a much larger percentage of their current experienced life compared to that of an adult's proportion I think boredom is the brain's hunger more than its watch. It's about the needs of a developing brain, rather than plain time. Right after the bulk of neurogenesis the brain goes into synaptic pruning where it strengthens some synapses and eliminates others. Developmental pruning is experience dependent and the scale of the process in childhood needs a lot of experiences to fuel it. Those experiences are literal "food for thought". Building the body takes more food, building the brain takes more experiences.