7 ms·

Why time appears to speed up with age

250 points by rlander 14y ago

ashray 14y ago
I had come across this concept about a year and a half ago. Read some article about how our brain works to store new experiences and therefore time slows down. That's around the time that I left my full time job to travel full time! I even wrote an article on our travel blog about it: http://bkpk.me/were-getting-younger-time-dilation-is-real/ http://bkpk.me/were-getting-younger-time-dilation-is-real/ This guy has definitely done a very quantitative analysis of my qualitative hunch. Subjecting myself to new experiences, new places and new environments everyday has definitely made time slow down. My last birthday actually feels like it was a LOOONG while ago. That's because I threw in a bunch of interesting and new experiences over the last year. I think the real way to feel like your 'real age' is to subject yourselves to new experiences as much as possible. Take a new route home, go to restaurants or parts of your city that you've never been to, learn a foreign language or salsa, learn a new sport, or if possible, travel! :)
- danso 14y ago
  > This guy has definitely done a very quantitative analysis of my qualitative hunch. Subjecting myself to new experiences, new places and new environments everyday has definitely made time slow down. That's interesting, because most people would say that time seems to go faster when subjected to intense learning/experiences. For example, from another article on HN's front page right now: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/ > The next day, I arrived at the meeting location. I faced four YC partners and a barrage of questions about how my business worked and why it would succeed. We talked for almost an hour, but it felt like just a few minutes. I answered questions non-stop. Perhaps when looking back, time seems to have stretched out during those learning-intensive experiences? But at the moment of the experience, time sped by?
  - ashray 14y ago
    I suppose it depends on the experience. Time does fly by when you're having fun but I suppose it has to do with the richness of experience as well. If you're subjecting all your senses to new experiences (say.. eating a new dish in a strange place - sensory overload for smell, taste, sight and sound), maybe your perception of time is slower. It's hard to put a number on how we perceive real time I guess, but boring tasks do tend to stretch out into infinity. I think the article is however discussing the way you remember time. It all has to do with our brain processing and storing memories. That ability can only be jogged by having new ones I suppose. These topics could make for an interesting study, not much is yet understood about our perception of time.
    - j_lou888 14y ago
      Interesting, this reminds me of a quote from Josh Foer's book about memory: "Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next-and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives."
ashleyblackmore 14y ago
whoosh
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Probably not the article I needed to see after coming home from moving my oldest into his dorm. Guess I might as well go get a rocking chair on the lawn. Actually, I think this article is wrong in one important way. It doesn't take into account the effect of laying down new memories. The more, new experiences you have, the slower time appears to have passed [past tense, how it's remembered], while, paradoxically, making it pass [present tense, while experiencing] go faster. So, spend all your time on the couch, watch time pass slow but evaporate. Go do something new and different, watch it fly by while having had more there. Memories play weirdly with verb tenses...
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  Good observation on the memories. During intense periods of memory-forming activity, you feel like time passes quickly, because more things are packed into less time and you move on from one thing to the next (think camps in your childhood when everything was exciting, there was a competition to prepare for, etc.). Once it's actually over, you felt like it just zoomed by so quick, but was packed full of stuff. It's the same with the grade/primary-school years: each year feels so full of experiences, but before you know it you're in primary/grade 6 and at the start of a new phase, wondering how you got there so quickly. I used to be almost scared by how quickly I moved through the school years, thinking I'd be an adult in no time. I think young people just tend to have much more packed into their time, which makes it feel longer. You literally live more when you have more different experiences in the same time. That's why I regret it when I think back and realise I haven't been doing anything much different over the past week. I'm going to have to schedule better and make some time for salsa/whatever classes. So yes, I strongly agree with your conclusion: > Go do something new and different, watch it fly by while having had more there. Wring life out of every day.
  - AznHisoka 14y ago
    I also agree. When we get older, we establish a routine: get up, go to work, do errands, etc. When we're young, yes, we might have some routines but we're constantly meeting new people, learning new things, and facing fresh, new situations. For me, ever since I graduated, the past 6 years have been one HUGE blur...
rdtsc 14y ago
Subjectively a good way is to remember how long summers felt when you were a kid. A summer felt like forever in the first couple of grades. Now think how long summers feel now, they just sort of fly by. It is kind of scary. Remember my grandma sometimes got confused what day or week it was and as a kid I could never understand that. How can you miss such a long period of time like a week and not notice, but now I start to sort of understand.
- zinssmeister 14y ago
  I wonder this exact thing. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of boredom plays a role. As a kid you feel bored a lot more.
- dbrannan 14y ago
  To be fair summer vacation is shorter in most areas than it used to be due to an extended school year. The standard used to be 180 instructional days for kids, per year but it keeps creeping up there every year teachers renegotiate their contract for a raise.
  - rdtsc 14y ago
    It is more than that. Summer felt as long as a year feels now, it is not just a couple of days of difference.
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ced 14y ago
The answer to "Why time appears to speed up with age" is to be found in the messy details of neurology, genetics and evolution, not in an aesthetically pleasing mathematical formula.
- deleted 14y ago
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- LaGrange 14y ago
  I'll just pick this one: it's almost as if this article was partly whimsical, and the idea was to inspire, not prove anything. And the aesthetics of both the formula and the argument are actually the point here. It's a kind of entertainment, not really science, and that's how it's supposed to be. Also, this is Everything2, the article is from 2001, when there still was 3 people who knew what Everything2 is.
danso 14y ago
This article and concept reminds me of thhe beautiful "game" by Jason Rohrer, "Passage" http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/ http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/
joshsegall 14y ago
This is math describing the effect not the cause, so the title is inaccurate and misleading.
keyle 14y ago
I would argue that the effective age of people vary with their behaviors and environment. For example, I've seen 60 year old in australian outback on horses doing heavy work, as if they're 40. And I've seen 60 year olds in australian capitals barely doing anything of their day. Which do you think will go extinct first? I'm going to argue that simply "we are what we repeatedly do". Some people act old at 50, some people act young at 70. For example, my uncle in Europe has acres of property, works in it every day, goes dancing with the local "brotherhood" and would drink you under the table any day of the week. And he's close to 75. Trying to explain people with mathematics is similar to trying to explain women with science. It may work, barely. (no pun intended, just a cheeky joke)
Udo 14y ago
This makes sense; for instance when you are 10 years of age, a year represents 10% of your life, and seems like a very long time. However, when you are 50 years old, one year has reduced to only 2% of your life, and hence seems only one-fifth as long. Interesting hypothesis, and he makes it look very scientific with the formulae and all, but it's still a wild crazy guess that delivers no actual falsifiable prediction. I think for claims of such magnitude, there should be a modicum of neurological or information-theoretical basis involved - instead we get to read repeated statements about how groundbreaking the idea is. The article makes claims that at 30 life is essentially 3/4ths over which to me, while holding no subjective truth as far as I can tell, at least exhibit some self reference in the way that after three lines of statements the article's content seemed 75% over yet the actual text went on for much longer. Subjectively time seems to go by faster the older we get, but that doesn't mean these bold claims are necessarily anywhere close to the truth. Personally, my relationship with time has certainly changed over the years, including the perception of a speed-up, but I also notice that some activities or states seem to last just as long (if not longer) subjectively as they did when I was 16. My pet hypothesis is there are multiple factors involved in "the speedup", and that a large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well. This would mean as we get more experienced, an increasingly bigger amount of the average day consists of things we already did many times before so we don't store those moments in memory. That would result in increasingly large memory holes over time, which our brains then glance over as they piece together our past - thus resulting in an apparent speed up. This would also explain why days with unusual content seem to last much much longer than others (at least that's my experience).
- schiffern 14y ago
  While we're on pet hypotheses, what about the fact that the brain simply gets bigger? If neural signals–maxing out at ~100 m/s–took longer to traverse the average distance through the brain, one's perception of time would seem to slow down. Anecdotally, when I was 8 or so I once sat there for an hour or so memorizing the rate of the clock (so I could later mentally estimate intervals of time without a stopwatch). At the age of 23, I noticed and then calculated that a second in my "internal" clock was about 1.3 seconds. Since then I have used VLC to re-watch movies I saw as a child at ~80% speed. The musical rhythms seemed closer to what I remember. Obviously this is insufficient support by itself, but I's love to see this phenomenon studied more rigorously.
fungi 14y ago
off topic: why is equation rendering still broken on the web? http://everything2.com http://everything2.com uses pre tags, wikipedia uses rendered png images. is this just another ie work around or have we really not implemented a standard yet. googled it myself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML edit: thanks mbell! mathjax looks great project to get mathjax working on wikipedia ~> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax breakdown of mathml support ~> http://caniuse.com/mathml http://caniuse.com/mathml (only firefox and safari)
- mbell 14y ago
  Also see http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/tex.html http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/tex.html Used on the most math heavy site I frequent: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/ http://electronics.stackexchange.com/
- deleted 14y ago
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- thebooktocome 14y ago
  Mathjax does not work great. It is slow, bothersome, and easily broken. LaTeX and the web are in essence incommensurable.
michaelochurch 14y ago
No real evidence beyond this theory. More likely, as peoples' lives get more complex, and as they get older and more able to separate life into compartments, the individual compartments get less time and therefore time seems to go faster. Children have one "life thread". Adults have a ton of them for various relationships, interests, and aspirations. For one example, since most people only get to spend about 2 weeks per year in the "travel thread", time from that perspective seems to go 26 times faster. If you have a summer house and show up in June and it feels like the last time you were there (September last year) was yesterday, that's what's at play. In that thread, it was yesterday. Minute to minute, time seems to be going at the same rate. It's when you step back and take a macro perspective that there's a difference, because our lives accumulate complexity that we couldn't have imagined when we were children. Because our lives are a lot more complex, there are contexts in which 5 years isn't an eternity in the way it would be for a child, so from a macro perspective, long time durations aren't nearly as long.
commieneko 14y ago
As someone who's in his fifties, I can say that while this is an entertaining concept, it doesn't really map correctly. At least not for me. The passing of time has always seemed to me to be more of a function of memory. When I was younger, my memory was _much_ better. And much more vivid. It was in HD. I noticed by the time I was in high school that not only was my memory worse, but that it was of much lower quality. Interestingly enough, though, I noticed that early memories, while less vivid than I remembered them, were often still more vivid than more recent memories. By the time I was in my 30s, things were much worse. My doctor assured me that this was normal, and by the way, expect it to get worse still. My father, who is now 96, can remember things vividly from 80 years ago and more, but can't remember what town he is living in at the moment. He can remember chemistry and physics he learned long ago, but now he has trouble working the new flat panel TV we bought him. (This is only partly the fault of age, the UI experience on the TV is worse than abominable. Steve Jobs would puke.) This is interesting, because he _built_ the first radio that he ever owned, back in the 1920s. The most heart breaking thing recently, is that my mother passed away a few months ago. She'd been with him constantly for the last 65 years or so. And he keeps looking around for her, and then after a moment remembers she's gone. He often doesn't remember the event, but it is still fresh as a state of being, even after several months. So for my father time's passage seems instantaneous and never changing. Duration is yet another issue. Current time, you know, right now, passes for me at more or less the same rate. It's much more effected by things like boredom and engagement than anything else. If I'm waiting on something, things can take forever. If I'm doing something, it can go by in a flash.
- rokhayakebe 14y ago
  I believe the reason is whenever you remember something specific, the neurological pathway to that piece of information gets stronger. For example I was taught parts of the Quran between the ages of 8-14. I still know the verses because I use them daily (22-16 years later). The pathways are strong. It may also simply be that your brain learned to simply retain what seems important at one stage and disregard everything that looks alike. Example: in your eighties you can easily remember the time you had your first kiss if you only kissed 3 guys/gals in your lifetime, but if you kissed every last person at the party every Saturday night, then you probably will forget.
otneusnocuh 14y ago
Less new/memorable experiences. Not memorable like, "I'm going to this grocery store they have good prices", memorable like, "camping? what's camping?". If you ask me the reason is: Monotony consumes memory.
Groxx 14y ago
Groundbreaking? Maybe in that someone actually worked out the math for it (which seems trivial enough) and submitted it somewhere. A very large number of people I've chatted with from 10 years old an on have come up with this same theory, relatively independently, they just never worked out the full numbers because they realize that it's a gross oversimplification. More specifically, this seems to ignore a small thing called 'nostalgia'. How long were the blissful summers of our youth without this rose tint?
- nostrademons 14y ago
  Yeah, I remember hearing the "Time moves faster when you're older because it's a smaller fraction of your lifetime" theory from my 3rd grade teacher, and then in college I made the "And then if you integrate that rate over time, you get a logarithmic progression, which matches with experimentally observed fetal & childhood development, and OH MY GOD I'M BRILLIANT!" connection. Then my friends thought I was weird.
- taude 14y ago
  Ditto. I've had this exact conversation with multiple groups of friends over the past several years. Interesting to see this form of the conversation's analytical deconstruction, though.
feefie 14y ago
The key to slowing down life is variety. As a child every year was distinctly different: even today I can remember each school year because I had a different teacher, a different homeroom, etc. As an adult each of my jobs has been on average 4-6 years. Each job is a bit of a blur; the years at the same job are difficult to distinguish from each other. To slow down time, make sure you do different things each year: trips, projects, roles at work, etc. The more your mind can distinguish the years, the slower time seems to move. Try it - it works!
mechanical_fish 14y ago
Is anyone here but me old enough to know what J. Irr. Res. is? [1] This comment thread makes me wonder. According to the chart in the article, I have precious little time left. Please try not to suck all the joy out of my remaining few minutes. --- [1] Or maybe I'm the last one on Earth who still reads the footnotes? [2] This is the famous recursive footnote. [2] Please enjoy your trip through the stack. [3] This tail-recursive footnote should really be optimized into a loop. [3]
- stephencanon 14y ago
  You needn't be old to know what J. Irr. Res. is; you only need to be paying attention.
  - grepmo 14y ago
    Journal of Irresponsible Research?
jonnytran 14y ago
I wonder what the formula would look like if it took into account the fact that life expectancy is increasing. According to people like Ray Kurzweil, it's increasing exponentially.
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daviddaviddavid 14y ago
For anyone interested in how humans conceptualize time and what effects this has on language, I highly recommend "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Truly one of the most interesting books I've ever read. For a brief overview of the approach they take to the problem, the Wikipedia entry for conceptual metaphor is a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
alokm 14y ago
Here is my take. When you experience something new, your brain works overtime to learn new things. Thats why in a familiar setting time flies by. I guess thats why some people are adventure seeker and travelers. At old age most of the things become routine. Here it is argued that the whole life of a person is counted. I simply think, life is divided in various threads. You do something new and a new thread is created. Its along a single thread that you may measure your perception of longevity. If you do something routine then it seems to be fast to you as it becomes routine. Also I remember a link on HN that explained how time virtually stopped for Near Death Experiences.
Detrus 14y ago
The brain changes with age and perceives the passage of time differently. Just like your face changes with age and perceives touch differently. The pop science is here: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-time-feel-like-it-goes-faster-as-we-get-older/answer/Vilan-Natanzon http://www.quora.com/Why-does-time-feel-like-it-goes-faster-... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcjvfBsz_4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcjvfBsz_4 Not as lazy as the article's speculation. There is an experiment! The experiment is people of various ages are asked to estimate a minute with their mind. Older people overestimate, children underestimate. Your brain has a clock, a set of neurons that fire at a relatively consistent interval and help synchronize the rest of the brain. As you age this brain clock's interval gets longer. Forming fewer new memories because of lifestyle changes is speculation. Without widespread changes in the brain making new memories more difficult to form, you'd still form a lot of new memories, even with your boring adult lifestyle.
Dn_Ab 14y ago
What about simple time lapse? With images and video the larger the time lapse the faster things appear to be moving especially with blur. What if something similar held for memory? The key memories that are remembered will typically have longer lapses for the older than for the younger. Cognitive expectations might then correct this gap by fudging a perception or sense of elapsed time, creating a quickened time lapse like effect for experiences, which strengthens as you get older. It would be interesting to ask people with autobiographical memories how they perceive time - according to my analogy it wouldn't change since they maintain most 'frames'.
rehack 14y ago
From an experience: Difficult time passes more difficultly, i.e feels longer. Example on a day if you are fasting, time always seems earlier than what you expect. For example on days I may think 'Gosh its still 12 PM, still 7 hours to go before the fast breaking time!' Only yesterday, the fast breaking time was 6:54 PM. And my wife called at me from down stairs to come down for it at 6:53 or so (I work from my SOHO on the upper level), I thought gosh 1 more minute, how can I wait! So it could mean that the perceived time (that has passed) is also a function of how frequently we sample it. Or if differently said, how much we 'live in the moment'. Edit: minor rephrase for clarity.
DanI-S 14y ago
I always liked to think that our perception stays the same - it's just that time is speeding up.
cookingrobot 14y ago
This reminds of of a similar calculation I did in college when thinking about big computing problems.. I called it "hurry up and wait". Assuming Moore's law continues (computing power/$ doubles every 18 months), and you have a big computation to do, should you start now or should you wait? If you have $1000 to spend on a computer and a problem that's going to take 3 years for it to compute, you can actually wait 1.5 years before you start. The computer you buy then will be twice as fast, and you'll finish at the same time. On any problem that takes more than 1.5 years, the fastest thing to do is just wait until you can afford a computer that can complete it in 1.5 years.
begriffs 14y ago
Marcel Proust wrote a profound series of books that investigates memory, personal change, and the subjective feeling of time called, "In Search of Lost Time." He had an exceptional memory and recalls his own perceptive and idiosyncratic feelings starting from early childhood. Some of his observations are universal though, and you'll be delighted when he helps you remember them for yourself.
jimmytucson 14y ago
Brian Skinner, physicist and basketball analytics extraordinaire, wrote a really nice blog post about this 3.5 years ago [1]. Mining the comments from that post shows it's been banged around numerous times before that [2][3]. [1] https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/parenting-and-the-feeling-of-time-my-eight-lifetimes/ https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/parenting-... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21qna.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21qna.html?_r=1 [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20071116094344/http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jmkenney/ http://web.archive.org/web/20071116094344/http://ourworld.co...
benologist 14y ago
What is this SEO spam garbage? Every single link including the reference goes to junk pages and the article itself is cut & pasted all over the internet. https://www.google.com/search?q=T.+L.+Freeman+discusses+the+relationship+between+actual+age+and+effective+age https://www.google.com/search?q=T.+L.+Freeman+discusses+the+...
- jewbacca 14y ago
  everything2 is most definitely not SEO garbage. I'm pretty sure it predates the concept of SEO. It has a very genuine community, and its content is pretty close to 100% voluntarily user-generated. It's kind of like a proto-wikipedia, without the requirement for maintaining a neutral point of view, supplemented by freeform creative content. Maybe more like the collective journal of a certain type of young geek from the first half of the last decade. Lots of essays and painfully earnest poetry. It was initially associated with Slashdot. As for the content being spammed all over the internet, I would guess that E2 is a reliable and extensive source of high-quality, human-generated text, with a dense network of contextually valid links included. Why not just scrape wikipedia? I'm not sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2 http://www.everything2.com/title/Everything2%20is%20not%20Wikipedia http://www.everything2.com/title/Everything2%20is%20not%20Wi...
dotcoma 14y ago
Because you get slower.
eliajf 14y ago
My grandfather, who died last year at 93, used to say that when you were 2 going on 3, that was 33% of your life. At 49 going on 50, though, that's 2% of your life. 33% goes a lot farther than 2%.
natecavanaugh 14y ago
About 15 years ago (that long already? ;)) I saw a documentary state that scientists had done studies showing that time perception could be manipulated by changing their temperature. The warmer it was, the more slowly time seemed to pass. The colder it was, the faster it seemed to pass. They hypothesized that since people's core body temperature dropped as they age, that it could be a factor in why time seemed to pass faster as we age. For some reason I've always favored this solution.
stretchwithme 14y ago
Don't worry. Its probably going to get get excruciatingly long at the end. Seriously, its the thinking too much about the past and the future that lead to this perception. You probably just thought about it a lot less when you were young.
goggles99 14y ago
Here is my take on the question... 1. Kids are bored too often so time seems to take forever. 2. Career life and building a family is so busy that time flies by. 3. Retirement and empty nesting seems to go by fast because you think more about your pending demise and also have nothing to show for your life day after day (career goals ETC.)
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
My theory is different. Our brains work like film cameras, the faster the camera is rolling the slower time in the film seems to be going during playback. Because less time has passed since the last frame was captured. The slower the camera is rolling the faster the film seems to get when you play it back. Our perception of time is based on comparing what we last remember while we were conscious with where we are in time currently. This is why daydreaming while driving makes your trip seem a lot shorter. I call this "Brain Idling". When we're young our brains have a lot of grey matter and we're addicted to information accumulation, talking, chatting, and being mentally stimulated. As we age we stop learning (no school, no collage, nothing new going on in life), have less grey matter and start going on auto-pilot. When we drive to the store, when we shop for groceries, at work, at home. We've memorized our lives so well we no longer think about what we do, we just naturally do it on auto-pilot and our minds start to "idle" a lot more that usual. The film in our camera-like brains is snapping images at a much slower pace. A lot of time is passing between mental snap-shots. So when we look back (playback) the events of the day (all the things we remembered) it feels like time has flown by at light speed. I freaked out over how fast time has flown by after I hit 21 and tried out an experiment. I installed "talking clock" for windows on my pc and made it announce the time every 5 minutes. Yes. For the whole day. Every day. After the 2nd day of using this technique time slowed down by massive amounts. A day felt like a week. A week felt like a month. It was insane. I felt like I was young again and the world was moving at a glacial pace. There are downsides of course, it's unsustainable. You have to take breaks every other day or so otherwise you get used to hearing the time and ignore it. It can also get exhausting when your brain can't take a break and daydream or idle and think about nothing. But it does work. I wanted to write a nice big article on it but I'm so swamped by work on projects and new clients needing UI/UX consulting that I just keep putting it off. On the plus side I've discovered a way to slow down time (at least for me).
- mistermann 14y ago
  This is interesting, I hope you write the article some day, I hope you can find the time.
- itmag 14y ago
  Could you please email me? I was unable to find contact info on your web site. Thanks! :)
yason 14y ago
I've always held the opinion that time is the number of events, realizations, ideas, and new experiences. When you're kid, everything is new from what happens on the sandbox to school to friends to foods to afternoons alone to crossing over your old boundaries in general, in both physical and emotional sense. So much happens in a month that it equals five years for an adult. When you're an adult, much of everything is something you know. The fraction of new things in your life depends on your own activity. Even if you wanted to be on the bleeding edge of life, you generally still have a job and a lot of routines in life—routines that might not be set by you but will still affect you. And routines and repetition doesn't count. The key to adult time is to realize that the mundane things aren't the same, ever, even though they seem like it. You never know what will happen: there is newness every day, in everything you do, if only you can unlearn to dismiss it. The other path—the path that isn't sustainable—is to start reaching for experiences intentionally: after you've climbed all the mountains and dived to the deepest caverns of the waters, done the craziest roller coasters and raced the fastest races, you're still not much more ahead of where you started. Those things can be done for fun but what I'm referring to is the trend of experience-hunting which is a reaction to the pace of finding new things in life that has slowed down since childhood.
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aquarin 14y ago
Because you heart rate decreases. Other internal clocks also seems to be reflected with the age.
agumonkey 14y ago
Not sure but according to Von Bertalanffy, brain "frequency" tends to slow down with age anyway. The same amount of perceptive events are spread onto longer periods of time thus appearing speeding up.
caf 14y ago
Another thing this would neatly explain is why it seems harder to make new friends when you get older. With someone I meet at 15, when I'm 20 i'll have known them for 5 effective years. If I meet someone new at 30, on the other hand, I won't have known them for 5 effective years until I'm 40.
novaleaf 14y ago
my own subjective data: in my childhood, a day seems to go pretty slow, probably because of just "messing around" tends to get boring. However I never felt the years as passing at a different rate than they do now (in my mid 30's). I'm the type of person who "looks to the future" however so maybe if I was past-oriented I'd feel different.
kator 14y ago
My father always says life is like a roll of toilet paper. The further you get on the roll the faster it spins and the less of it you have left the more you cherish it. Time is clearly a solid and measurable component of our physical world but our perception of it is warped by our own personal experience. My wife can sit next to me for 8 hours and futz around the house etc while I sit with my headphones on and code 'in the zone'. I come out of the zone feeling as if I had just experienced only maybe an hour of zone time and she will laugh and point out the window at the dark night. :-) I have six children, a daughter-in-law, a grandson and two cats. My life is clearly not moving any faster then my children but I do keep reminding them that as they get older they keep making me older! I would argue that actually life goes slower the older you get. You have more context against the rest of your life and the OP might be using that as the reason we perceive life going quicker. But to me it's more like the "weight" of my life to date allows me a lot more perspective, I often measure an event against the birth of a child, a marriage, a house I used to live in etc. Less about the MM/DD/YYYY and more about the "Around this event this happened". When time seems to have moved quickly is when you're talking to your mom and dad about your grandson and the day your baby girl was born and how they're going through all the same things you did when you were having children. It's the reference points that stun you. That somehow 25 years just vanished in a flash of light. But the reality is this is the same as this group talking about TRS-80 Model I's with 4k of memory. A lot has happened since then even though it was sort of like yesterday for those of us who lived through 300 baud modems and 16k memory upgrades.
mnl 14y ago
He claims so, but he is not removing any parameter... And why such a (rather trivial) linear model is considered as a proved theory?
FreshCode 14y ago
This is why I love HN. The comments are better than the article.
itmag 14y ago
Has anyone here managed to defeat this effect somehow? How did you do it? Meditation?
j_lou888 14y ago
Time seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable and less surprising. When you're growing up, life is filled with novel and surprising experiences that are used to anchor our memory because of those aforementioned qualities. Psychological time is directly related to the formation of new memories. As we grow up, everything gets into a routine that we barely notice at all. Just think of how much you remember of your daily 9 to 5 for example. This phenomenon has been studied several times. In 1890, William James wrote the following in his 'Principle of Psychology': "In youth, we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn out…But each passage year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse."
sanj 14y ago
Note that this is a joke paper written for the Journal of Irreproducible Results: http://www.jir.com/ http://www.jir.com/
- Groxx 14y ago
  I can't find any evidence for this on either site.
  - Jorian 14y ago
    You did not look very well. The article by T.L. Freeman exists. It is in: http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Journal-Irreproducible-Results/dp/0894805959 http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Journal-Irreproducible-Result...
    - Groxx 14y ago
      You're not looking very well either. The author / pen-name / anything sounding anything like the article isn't in any of the information on the Amazon page, nor is it anywhere in JIR's list of 'selected pseudonyms'. Google searches of www.jir.com find nothing, nor does going through a large portion of the site that I could find. To be clear, I admit it's possible, maybe even likely. But nobody has shown any evidence that it's true, just a claim and a link to a page that does nothing to support it.
      - Jorian 14y ago
        It is not on the internet, so it doesn't exist? I happen to have that bundle somewhere in my basement but won't bother to dig it up. I remember that joke-publication quite well. Even if it's not to be found on the web, it's at least referenced by others. That's an easy find. http://acacia.atspace.eu/papers/FeelOlder.pdf http://acacia.atspace.eu/papers/FeelOlder.pdf Note that that one was published in '91, so before the article by Professor Pi.
        Groxx 14y ago
zerostar07 14y ago
With it being published in the Journal of irreproducible results i assume this is a joke, right? Still, I think the hypothesis is not correct. Time seems to run faster when you are occupied. People get more busy after their 20s so i guess that's why time seems to fly. If i can judge from myself, time seemed to run pretty fast on a 9-6 job (i was there 20-26). Working independently (26- ) has definitely made my days longer, much longer, sometimes irritably so.
Tichy 14y ago
The premise is completely wrong. If you are young, you don't know what percentage of your life one year is. More likely explanation is the compression of memories: if you experience things that are similar to things you have experienced before, they won't use up as much memory. Think about your daily commute to work: can you remember every single day you commuted? Or did all the commutes blur into one?
erlkonig 14y ago
The fluff in Freeman's article (Journal of Irreproducible Results, I think) is the same cheerful fluff students were subjected to in the non-honors physics class at my high school in the 1980s, where the point of using physics predictively went out the window (leaving only untestable descriptive math, which isn't a waste of time, but could be applied to something testable), and with the same fundamental failure of simply not caring whether there might be an underlying mechanism related to the impression of remembered time versus the subjective speed of time currently. A change in behavior can also have a huge impact on how fast current time is flowing. A simple hypothesis that the subjective rate of time passing is related to the intervals between encounters with the unfamiliar easily leads to a more fruitful set of thought experiments than Freeman's weak exercise. And potentially one that could be rephrased in biological terms. I've noticed that when I take trips to elsewhere in the world, the more different the place, the more time dilates, both while I'm there and in memory afterwards. Doing only the familiar is the recipe to time slipping by, unmarked and unnoticed, like driving to work and realizing upon arrival that one has no memory of the trip. So the question is: What should you do to extend your subjective time?

250 points by rlander 14y ago

I had come across this concept about a year and a half ago. Read some article about how our brain works to store new experiences and therefore time slows down. That's around the time that I left my full time job to travel full time! I even wrote an article on our travel blog about it: http://bkpk.me/were-getting-younger-time-dilation-is-real/ http://bkpk.me/were-getting-younger-time-dilation-is-real/ This guy has definitely done a very quantitative analysis of my qualitative hunch. Subjecting myself to new experiences, new places and new environments everyday has definitely made time slow down. My last birthday actually feels like it was a LOOONG while ago. That's because I threw in a bunch of interesting and new experiences over the last year. I think the real way to feel like your 'real age' is to subject yourselves to new experiences as much as possible. Take a new route home, go to restaurants or parts of your city that you've never been to, learn a foreign language or salsa, learn a new sport, or if possible, travel! :)

danso 14y ago
> This guy has definitely done a very quantitative analysis of my qualitative hunch. Subjecting myself to new experiences, new places and new environments everyday has definitely made time slow down. That's interesting, because most people would say that time seems to go faster when subjected to intense learning/experiences. For example, from another article on HN's front page right now: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/ > The next day, I arrived at the meeting location. I faced four YC partners and a barrage of questions about how my business worked and why it would succeed. We talked for almost an hour, but it felt like just a few minutes. I answered questions non-stop. Perhaps when looking back, time seems to have stretched out during those learning-intensive experiences? But at the moment of the experience, time sped by?
- ashray 14y ago
  I suppose it depends on the experience. Time does fly by when you're having fun but I suppose it has to do with the richness of experience as well. If you're subjecting all your senses to new experiences (say.. eating a new dish in a strange place - sensory overload for smell, taste, sight and sound), maybe your perception of time is slower. It's hard to put a number on how we perceive real time I guess, but boring tasks do tend to stretch out into infinity. I think the article is however discussing the way you remember time. It all has to do with our brain processing and storing memories. That ability can only be jogged by having new ones I suppose. These topics could make for an interesting study, not much is yet understood about our perception of time.
  - j_lou888 14y ago
    Interesting, this reminds me of a quote from Josh Foer's book about memory: "Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next-and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives."

ashleyblackmore 14y ago

whoosh

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

Probably not the article I needed to see after coming home from moving my oldest into his dorm. Guess I might as well go get a rocking chair on the lawn. Actually, I think this article is wrong in one important way. It doesn't take into account the effect of laying down new memories. The more, new experiences you have, the slower time appears to have passed [past tense, how it's remembered], while, paradoxically, making it pass [present tense, while experiencing] go faster. So, spend all your time on the couch, watch time pass slow but evaporate. Go do something new and different, watch it fly by while having had more there. Memories play weirdly with verb tenses...

creamyhorror 14y ago
Good observation on the memories. During intense periods of memory-forming activity, you feel like time passes quickly, because more things are packed into less time and you move on from one thing to the next (think camps in your childhood when everything was exciting, there was a competition to prepare for, etc.). Once it's actually over, you felt like it just zoomed by so quick, but was packed full of stuff. It's the same with the grade/primary-school years: each year feels so full of experiences, but before you know it you're in primary/grade 6 and at the start of a new phase, wondering how you got there so quickly. I used to be almost scared by how quickly I moved through the school years, thinking I'd be an adult in no time. I think young people just tend to have much more packed into their time, which makes it feel longer. You literally live more when you have more different experiences in the same time. That's why I regret it when I think back and realise I haven't been doing anything much different over the past week. I'm going to have to schedule better and make some time for salsa/whatever classes. So yes, I strongly agree with your conclusion: > Go do something new and different, watch it fly by while having had more there. Wring life out of every day.
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  I also agree. When we get older, we establish a routine: get up, go to work, do errands, etc. When we're young, yes, we might have some routines but we're constantly meeting new people, learning new things, and facing fresh, new situations. For me, ever since I graduated, the past 6 years have been one HUGE blur...

rdtsc 14y ago

Subjectively a good way is to remember how long summers felt when you were a kid. A summer felt like forever in the first couple of grades. Now think how long summers feel now, they just sort of fly by. It is kind of scary. Remember my grandma sometimes got confused what day or week it was and as a kid I could never understand that. How can you miss such a long period of time like a week and not notice, but now I start to sort of understand.

zinssmeister 14y ago
I wonder this exact thing. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of boredom plays a role. As a kid you feel bored a lot more.
dbrannan 14y ago
To be fair summer vacation is shorter in most areas than it used to be due to an extended school year. The standard used to be 180 instructional days for kids, per year but it keeps creeping up there every year teachers renegotiate their contract for a raise.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  It is more than that. Summer felt as long as a year feels now, it is not just a couple of days of difference.

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ced 14y ago

The answer to "Why time appears to speed up with age" is to be found in the messy details of neurology, genetics and evolution, not in an aesthetically pleasing mathematical formula.

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LaGrange 14y ago
I'll just pick this one: it's almost as if this article was partly whimsical, and the idea was to inspire, not prove anything. And the aesthetics of both the formula and the argument are actually the point here. It's a kind of entertainment, not really science, and that's how it's supposed to be. Also, this is Everything2, the article is from 2001, when there still was 3 people who knew what Everything2 is.

danso 14y ago

This article and concept reminds me of thhe beautiful "game" by Jason Rohrer, "Passage" http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/ http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/

joshsegall 14y ago

This is math describing the effect not the cause, so the title is inaccurate and misleading.

keyle 14y ago

I would argue that the effective age of people vary with their behaviors and environment. For example, I've seen 60 year old in australian outback on horses doing heavy work, as if they're 40. And I've seen 60 year olds in australian capitals barely doing anything of their day. Which do you think will go extinct first? I'm going to argue that simply "we are what we repeatedly do". Some people act old at 50, some people act young at 70. For example, my uncle in Europe has acres of property, works in it every day, goes dancing with the local "brotherhood" and would drink you under the table any day of the week. And he's close to 75. Trying to explain people with mathematics is similar to trying to explain women with science. It may work, barely. (no pun intended, just a cheeky joke)

Udo 14y ago

This makes sense; for instance when you are 10 years of age, a year represents 10% of your life, and seems like a very long time. However, when you are 50 years old, one year has reduced to only 2% of your life, and hence seems only one-fifth as long. Interesting hypothesis, and he makes it look very scientific with the formulae and all, but it's still a wild crazy guess that delivers no actual falsifiable prediction. I think for claims of such magnitude, there should be a modicum of neurological or information-theoretical basis involved - instead we get to read repeated statements about how groundbreaking the idea is. The article makes claims that at 30 life is essentially 3/4ths over which to me, while holding no subjective truth as far as I can tell, at least exhibit some self reference in the way that after three lines of statements the article's content seemed 75% over yet the actual text went on for much longer. Subjectively time seems to go by faster the older we get, but that doesn't mean these bold claims are necessarily anywhere close to the truth. Personally, my relationship with time has certainly changed over the years, including the perception of a speed-up, but I also notice that some activities or states seem to last just as long (if not longer) subjectively as they did when I was 16. My pet hypothesis is there are multiple factors involved in "the speedup", and that a large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well. This would mean as we get more experienced, an increasingly bigger amount of the average day consists of things we already did many times before so we don't store those moments in memory. That would result in increasingly large memory holes over time, which our brains then glance over as they piece together our past - thus resulting in an apparent speed up. This would also explain why days with unusual content seem to last much much longer than others (at least that's my experience).

schiffern 14y ago
While we're on pet hypotheses, what about the fact that the brain simply gets bigger? If neural signals–maxing out at ~100 m/s–took longer to traverse the average distance through the brain, one's perception of time would seem to slow down. Anecdotally, when I was 8 or so I once sat there for an hour or so memorizing the rate of the clock (so I could later mentally estimate intervals of time without a stopwatch). At the age of 23, I noticed and then calculated that a second in my "internal" clock was about 1.3 seconds. Since then I have used VLC to re-watch movies I saw as a child at ~80% speed. The musical rhythms seemed closer to what I remember. Obviously this is insufficient support by itself, but I's love to see this phenomenon studied more rigorously.

fungi 14y ago

off topic: why is equation rendering still broken on the web? http://everything2.com http://everything2.com uses pre tags, wikipedia uses rendered png images. is this just another ie work around or have we really not implemented a standard yet. googled it myself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML edit: thanks mbell! mathjax looks great project to get mathjax working on wikipedia ~> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax breakdown of mathml support ~> http://caniuse.com/mathml http://caniuse.com/mathml (only firefox and safari)

mbell 14y ago
Also see http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/tex.html http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/tex.html Used on the most math heavy site I frequent: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/ http://electronics.stackexchange.com/
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thebooktocome 14y ago
Mathjax does not work great. It is slow, bothersome, and easily broken. LaTeX and the web are in essence incommensurable.

michaelochurch 14y ago

No real evidence beyond this theory. More likely, as peoples' lives get more complex, and as they get older and more able to separate life into compartments, the individual compartments get less time and therefore time seems to go faster. Children have one "life thread". Adults have a ton of them for various relationships, interests, and aspirations. For one example, since most people only get to spend about 2 weeks per year in the "travel thread", time from that perspective seems to go 26 times faster. If you have a summer house and show up in June and it feels like the last time you were there (September last year) was yesterday, that's what's at play. In that thread, it was yesterday. Minute to minute, time seems to be going at the same rate. It's when you step back and take a macro perspective that there's a difference, because our lives accumulate complexity that we couldn't have imagined when we were children. Because our lives are a lot more complex, there are contexts in which 5 years isn't an eternity in the way it would be for a child, so from a macro perspective, long time durations aren't nearly as long.

commieneko 14y ago

As someone who's in his fifties, I can say that while this is an entertaining concept, it doesn't really map correctly. At least not for me. The passing of time has always seemed to me to be more of a function of memory. When I was younger, my memory was _much_ better. And much more vivid. It was in HD. I noticed by the time I was in high school that not only was my memory worse, but that it was of much lower quality. Interestingly enough, though, I noticed that early memories, while less vivid than I remembered them, were often still more vivid than more recent memories. By the time I was in my 30s, things were much worse. My doctor assured me that this was normal, and by the way, expect it to get worse still. My father, who is now 96, can remember things vividly from 80 years ago and more, but can't remember what town he is living in at the moment. He can remember chemistry and physics he learned long ago, but now he has trouble working the new flat panel TV we bought him. (This is only partly the fault of age, the UI experience on the TV is worse than abominable. Steve Jobs would puke.) This is interesting, because he _built_ the first radio that he ever owned, back in the 1920s. The most heart breaking thing recently, is that my mother passed away a few months ago. She'd been with him constantly for the last 65 years or so. And he keeps looking around for her, and then after a moment remembers she's gone. He often doesn't remember the event, but it is still fresh as a state of being, even after several months. So for my father time's passage seems instantaneous and never changing. Duration is yet another issue. Current time, you know, right now, passes for me at more or less the same rate. It's much more effected by things like boredom and engagement than anything else. If I'm waiting on something, things can take forever. If I'm doing something, it can go by in a flash.

rokhayakebe 14y ago
I believe the reason is whenever you remember something specific, the neurological pathway to that piece of information gets stronger. For example I was taught parts of the Quran between the ages of 8-14. I still know the verses because I use them daily (22-16 years later). The pathways are strong. It may also simply be that your brain learned to simply retain what seems important at one stage and disregard everything that looks alike. Example: in your eighties you can easily remember the time you had your first kiss if you only kissed 3 guys/gals in your lifetime, but if you kissed every last person at the party every Saturday night, then you probably will forget.

otneusnocuh 14y ago

Less new/memorable experiences. Not memorable like, "I'm going to this grocery store they have good prices", memorable like, "camping? what's camping?". If you ask me the reason is: Monotony consumes memory.

Groxx 14y ago

Groundbreaking? Maybe in that someone actually worked out the math for it (which seems trivial enough) and submitted it somewhere. A very large number of people I've chatted with from 10 years old an on have come up with this same theory, relatively independently, they just never worked out the full numbers because they realize that it's a gross oversimplification. More specifically, this seems to ignore a small thing called 'nostalgia'. How long were the blissful summers of our youth without this rose tint?

nostrademons 14y ago
Yeah, I remember hearing the "Time moves faster when you're older because it's a smaller fraction of your lifetime" theory from my 3rd grade teacher, and then in college I made the "And then if you integrate that rate over time, you get a logarithmic progression, which matches with experimentally observed fetal & childhood development, and OH MY GOD I'M BRILLIANT!" connection. Then my friends thought I was weird.
taude 14y ago
Ditto. I've had this exact conversation with multiple groups of friends over the past several years. Interesting to see this form of the conversation's analytical deconstruction, though.

feefie 14y ago

The key to slowing down life is variety. As a child every year was distinctly different: even today I can remember each school year because I had a different teacher, a different homeroom, etc. As an adult each of my jobs has been on average 4-6 years. Each job is a bit of a blur; the years at the same job are difficult to distinguish from each other. To slow down time, make sure you do different things each year: trips, projects, roles at work, etc. The more your mind can distinguish the years, the slower time seems to move. Try it - it works!

mechanical_fish 14y ago

Is anyone here but me old enough to know what J. Irr. Res. is? [1] This comment thread makes me wonder. According to the chart in the article, I have precious little time left. Please try not to suck all the joy out of my remaining few minutes. --- [1] Or maybe I'm the last one on Earth who still reads the footnotes? [2] This is the famous recursive footnote. [2] Please enjoy your trip through the stack. [3] This tail-recursive footnote should really be optimized into a loop. [3]

stephencanon 14y ago
You needn't be old to know what J. Irr. Res. is; you only need to be paying attention.
- grepmo 14y ago
  Journal of Irresponsible Research?

jonnytran 14y ago

I wonder what the formula would look like if it took into account the fact that life expectancy is increasing. According to people like Ray Kurzweil, it's increasing exponentially.

deleted 14y ago

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daviddaviddavid 14y ago

For anyone interested in how humans conceptualize time and what effects this has on language, I highly recommend "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Truly one of the most interesting books I've ever read. For a brief overview of the approach they take to the problem, the Wikipedia entry for conceptual metaphor is a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor

alokm 14y ago

Here is my take. When you experience something new, your brain works overtime to learn new things. Thats why in a familiar setting time flies by. I guess thats why some people are adventure seeker and travelers. At old age most of the things become routine. Here it is argued that the whole life of a person is counted. I simply think, life is divided in various threads. You do something new and a new thread is created. Its along a single thread that you may measure your perception of longevity. If you do something routine then it seems to be fast to you as it becomes routine. Also I remember a link on HN that explained how time virtually stopped for Near Death Experiences.

Detrus 14y ago

The brain changes with age and perceives the passage of time differently. Just like your face changes with age and perceives touch differently. The pop science is here: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-time-feel-like-it-goes-faster-as-we-get-older/answer/Vilan-Natanzon http://www.quora.com/Why-does-time-feel-like-it-goes-faster-... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcjvfBsz_4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcjvfBsz_4 Not as lazy as the article's speculation. There is an experiment! The experiment is people of various ages are asked to estimate a minute with their mind. Older people overestimate, children underestimate. Your brain has a clock, a set of neurons that fire at a relatively consistent interval and help synchronize the rest of the brain. As you age this brain clock's interval gets longer. Forming fewer new memories because of lifestyle changes is speculation. Without widespread changes in the brain making new memories more difficult to form, you'd still form a lot of new memories, even with your boring adult lifestyle.

Dn_Ab 14y ago

What about simple time lapse? With images and video the larger the time lapse the faster things appear to be moving especially with blur. What if something similar held for memory? The key memories that are remembered will typically have longer lapses for the older than for the younger. Cognitive expectations might then correct this gap by fudging a perception or sense of elapsed time, creating a quickened time lapse like effect for experiences, which strengthens as you get older. It would be interesting to ask people with autobiographical memories how they perceive time - according to my analogy it wouldn't change since they maintain most 'frames'.

rehack 14y ago

From an experience: Difficult time passes more difficultly, i.e feels longer. Example on a day if you are fasting, time always seems earlier than what you expect. For example on days I may think 'Gosh its still 12 PM, still 7 hours to go before the fast breaking time!' Only yesterday, the fast breaking time was 6:54 PM. And my wife called at me from down stairs to come down for it at 6:53 or so (I work from my SOHO on the upper level), I thought gosh 1 more minute, how can I wait! So it could mean that the perceived time (that has passed) is also a function of how frequently we sample it. Or if differently said, how much we 'live in the moment'. Edit: minor rephrase for clarity.

DanI-S 14y ago

I always liked to think that our perception stays the same - it's just that time is speeding up.

cookingrobot 14y ago

This reminds of of a similar calculation I did in college when thinking about big computing problems.. I called it "hurry up and wait". Assuming Moore's law continues (computing power/$ doubles every 18 months), and you have a big computation to do, should you start now or should you wait? If you have $1000 to spend on a computer and a problem that's going to take 3 years for it to compute, you can actually wait 1.5 years before you start. The computer you buy then will be twice as fast, and you'll finish at the same time. On any problem that takes more than 1.5 years, the fastest thing to do is just wait until you can afford a computer that can complete it in 1.5 years.

begriffs 14y ago

Marcel Proust wrote a profound series of books that investigates memory, personal change, and the subjective feeling of time called, "In Search of Lost Time." He had an exceptional memory and recalls his own perceptive and idiosyncratic feelings starting from early childhood. Some of his observations are universal though, and you'll be delighted when he helps you remember them for yourself.

jimmytucson 14y ago

Brian Skinner, physicist and basketball analytics extraordinaire, wrote a really nice blog post about this 3.5 years ago [1]. Mining the comments from that post shows it's been banged around numerous times before that [2][3]. [1] https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/parenting-and-the-feeling-of-time-my-eight-lifetimes/ https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/parenting-... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21qna.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21qna.html?_r=1 [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20071116094344/http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jmkenney/ http://web.archive.org/web/20071116094344/http://ourworld.co...

benologist 14y ago

What is this SEO spam garbage? Every single link including the reference goes to junk pages and the article itself is cut & pasted all over the internet. https://www.google.com/search?q=T.+L.+Freeman+discusses+the+relationship+between+actual+age+and+effective+age https://www.google.com/search?q=T.+L.+Freeman+discusses+the+...

jewbacca 14y ago
everything2 is most definitely not SEO garbage. I'm pretty sure it predates the concept of SEO. It has a very genuine community, and its content is pretty close to 100% voluntarily user-generated. It's kind of like a proto-wikipedia, without the requirement for maintaining a neutral point of view, supplemented by freeform creative content. Maybe more like the collective journal of a certain type of young geek from the first half of the last decade. Lots of essays and painfully earnest poetry. It was initially associated with Slashdot. As for the content being spammed all over the internet, I would guess that E2 is a reliable and extensive source of high-quality, human-generated text, with a dense network of contextually valid links included. Why not just scrape wikipedia? I'm not sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2 http://www.everything2.com/title/Everything2%20is%20not%20Wikipedia http://www.everything2.com/title/Everything2%20is%20not%20Wi...

dotcoma 14y ago

Because you get slower.

eliajf 14y ago

My grandfather, who died last year at 93, used to say that when you were 2 going on 3, that was 33% of your life. At 49 going on 50, though, that's 2% of your life. 33% goes a lot farther than 2%.

natecavanaugh 14y ago

About 15 years ago (that long already? ;)) I saw a documentary state that scientists had done studies showing that time perception could be manipulated by changing their temperature. The warmer it was, the more slowly time seemed to pass. The colder it was, the faster it seemed to pass. They hypothesized that since people's core body temperature dropped as they age, that it could be a factor in why time seemed to pass faster as we age. For some reason I've always favored this solution.

stretchwithme 14y ago

Don't worry. Its probably going to get get excruciatingly long at the end. Seriously, its the thinking too much about the past and the future that lead to this perception. You probably just thought about it a lot less when you were young.

goggles99 14y ago

Here is my take on the question... 1. Kids are bored too often so time seems to take forever. 2. Career life and building a family is so busy that time flies by. 3. Retirement and empty nesting seems to go by fast because you think more about your pending demise and also have nothing to show for your life day after day (career goals ETC.)

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago

My theory is different. Our brains work like film cameras, the faster the camera is rolling the slower time in the film seems to be going during playback. Because less time has passed since the last frame was captured. The slower the camera is rolling the faster the film seems to get when you play it back. Our perception of time is based on comparing what we last remember while we were conscious with where we are in time currently. This is why daydreaming while driving makes your trip seem a lot shorter. I call this "Brain Idling". When we're young our brains have a lot of grey matter and we're addicted to information accumulation, talking, chatting, and being mentally stimulated. As we age we stop learning (no school, no collage, nothing new going on in life), have less grey matter and start going on auto-pilot. When we drive to the store, when we shop for groceries, at work, at home. We've memorized our lives so well we no longer think about what we do, we just naturally do it on auto-pilot and our minds start to "idle" a lot more that usual. The film in our camera-like brains is snapping images at a much slower pace. A lot of time is passing between mental snap-shots. So when we look back (playback) the events of the day (all the things we remembered) it feels like time has flown by at light speed. I freaked out over how fast time has flown by after I hit 21 and tried out an experiment. I installed "talking clock" for windows on my pc and made it announce the time every 5 minutes. Yes. For the whole day. Every day. After the 2nd day of using this technique time slowed down by massive amounts. A day felt like a week. A week felt like a month. It was insane. I felt like I was young again and the world was moving at a glacial pace. There are downsides of course, it's unsustainable. You have to take breaks every other day or so otherwise you get used to hearing the time and ignore it. It can also get exhausting when your brain can't take a break and daydream or idle and think about nothing. But it does work. I wanted to write a nice big article on it but I'm so swamped by work on projects and new clients needing UI/UX consulting that I just keep putting it off. On the plus side I've discovered a way to slow down time (at least for me).

mistermann 14y ago
This is interesting, I hope you write the article some day, I hope you can find the time.
itmag 14y ago
Could you please email me? I was unable to find contact info on your web site. Thanks! :)

yason 14y ago

I've always held the opinion that time is the number of events, realizations, ideas, and new experiences. When you're kid, everything is new from what happens on the sandbox to school to friends to foods to afternoons alone to crossing over your old boundaries in general, in both physical and emotional sense. So much happens in a month that it equals five years for an adult. When you're an adult, much of everything is something you know. The fraction of new things in your life depends on your own activity. Even if you wanted to be on the bleeding edge of life, you generally still have a job and a lot of routines in life—routines that might not be set by you but will still affect you. And routines and repetition doesn't count. The key to adult time is to realize that the mundane things aren't the same, ever, even though they seem like it. You never know what will happen: there is newness every day, in everything you do, if only you can unlearn to dismiss it. The other path—the path that isn't sustainable—is to start reaching for experiences intentionally: after you've climbed all the mountains and dived to the deepest caverns of the waters, done the craziest roller coasters and raced the fastest races, you're still not much more ahead of where you started. Those things can be done for fun but what I'm referring to is the trend of experience-hunting which is a reaction to the pace of finding new things in life that has slowed down since childhood.

deleted 14y ago

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aquarin 14y ago

Because you heart rate decreases. Other internal clocks also seems to be reflected with the age.

agumonkey 14y ago

Not sure but according to Von Bertalanffy, brain "frequency" tends to slow down with age anyway. The same amount of perceptive events are spread onto longer periods of time thus appearing speeding up.

caf 14y ago

Another thing this would neatly explain is why it seems harder to make new friends when you get older. With someone I meet at 15, when I'm 20 i'll have known them for 5 effective years. If I meet someone new at 30, on the other hand, I won't have known them for 5 effective years until I'm 40.

novaleaf 14y ago

my own subjective data: in my childhood, a day seems to go pretty slow, probably because of just "messing around" tends to get boring. However I never felt the years as passing at a different rate than they do now (in my mid 30's). I'm the type of person who "looks to the future" however so maybe if I was past-oriented I'd feel different.

kator 14y ago

My father always says life is like a roll of toilet paper. The further you get on the roll the faster it spins and the less of it you have left the more you cherish it. Time is clearly a solid and measurable component of our physical world but our perception of it is warped by our own personal experience. My wife can sit next to me for 8 hours and futz around the house etc while I sit with my headphones on and code 'in the zone'. I come out of the zone feeling as if I had just experienced only maybe an hour of zone time and she will laugh and point out the window at the dark night. :-) I have six children, a daughter-in-law, a grandson and two cats. My life is clearly not moving any faster then my children but I do keep reminding them that as they get older they keep making me older! I would argue that actually life goes slower the older you get. You have more context against the rest of your life and the OP might be using that as the reason we perceive life going quicker. But to me it's more like the "weight" of my life to date allows me a lot more perspective, I often measure an event against the birth of a child, a marriage, a house I used to live in etc. Less about the MM/DD/YYYY and more about the "Around this event this happened". When time seems to have moved quickly is when you're talking to your mom and dad about your grandson and the day your baby girl was born and how they're going through all the same things you did when you were having children. It's the reference points that stun you. That somehow 25 years just vanished in a flash of light. But the reality is this is the same as this group talking about TRS-80 Model I's with 4k of memory. A lot has happened since then even though it was sort of like yesterday for those of us who lived through 300 baud modems and 16k memory upgrades.

mnl 14y ago

He claims so, but he is not removing any parameter... And why such a (rather trivial) linear model is considered as a proved theory?

FreshCode 14y ago

This is why I love HN. The comments are better than the article.

itmag 14y ago

Has anyone here managed to defeat this effect somehow? How did you do it? Meditation?

j_lou888 14y ago

Time seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable and less surprising. When you're growing up, life is filled with novel and surprising experiences that are used to anchor our memory because of those aforementioned qualities. Psychological time is directly related to the formation of new memories. As we grow up, everything gets into a routine that we barely notice at all. Just think of how much you remember of your daily 9 to 5 for example. This phenomenon has been studied several times. In 1890, William James wrote the following in his 'Principle of Psychology': "In youth, we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn out…But each passage year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse."

sanj 14y ago

Note that this is a joke paper written for the Journal of Irreproducible Results: http://www.jir.com/ http://www.jir.com/

Groxx 14y ago
I can't find any evidence for this on either site.
- Jorian 14y ago
  You did not look very well. The article by T.L. Freeman exists. It is in: http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Journal-Irreproducible-Results/dp/0894805959 http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Journal-Irreproducible-Result...
  - Groxx 14y ago
    You're not looking very well either. The author / pen-name / anything sounding anything like the article isn't in any of the information on the Amazon page, nor is it anywhere in JIR's list of 'selected pseudonyms'. Google searches of www.jir.com find nothing, nor does going through a large portion of the site that I could find. To be clear, I admit it's possible, maybe even likely. But nobody has shown any evidence that it's true, just a claim and a link to a page that does nothing to support it.
    - Jorian 14y ago
      It is not on the internet, so it doesn't exist? I happen to have that bundle somewhere in my basement but won't bother to dig it up. I remember that joke-publication quite well. Even if it's not to be found on the web, it's at least referenced by others. That's an easy find. http://acacia.atspace.eu/papers/FeelOlder.pdf http://acacia.atspace.eu/papers/FeelOlder.pdf Note that that one was published in '91, so before the article by Professor Pi.
      - Groxx 14y ago

zerostar07 14y ago

With it being published in the Journal of irreproducible results i assume this is a joke, right? Still, I think the hypothesis is not correct. Time seems to run faster when you are occupied. People get more busy after their 20s so i guess that's why time seems to fly. If i can judge from myself, time seemed to run pretty fast on a 9-6 job (i was there 20-26). Working independently (26- ) has definitely made my days longer, much longer, sometimes irritably so.

Tichy 14y ago

The premise is completely wrong. If you are young, you don't know what percentage of your life one year is. More likely explanation is the compression of memories: if you experience things that are similar to things you have experienced before, they won't use up as much memory. Think about your daily commute to work: can you remember every single day you commuted? Or did all the commutes blur into one?

erlkonig 14y ago

The fluff in Freeman's article (Journal of Irreproducible Results, I think) is the same cheerful fluff students were subjected to in the non-honors physics class at my high school in the 1980s, where the point of using physics predictively went out the window (leaving only untestable descriptive math, which isn't a waste of time, but could be applied to something testable), and with the same fundamental failure of simply not caring whether there might be an underlying mechanism related to the impression of remembered time versus the subjective speed of time currently. A change in behavior can also have a huge impact on how fast current time is flowing. A simple hypothesis that the subjective rate of time passing is related to the intervals between encounters with the unfamiliar easily leads to a more fruitful set of thought experiments than Freeman's weak exercise. And potentially one that could be rephrased in biological terms. I've noticed that when I take trips to elsewhere in the world, the more different the place, the more time dilates, both while I'm there and in memory afterwards. Doing only the familiar is the recipe to time slipping by, unmarked and unnoticed, like driving to work and realizing upon arrival that one has no memory of the trip. So the question is: What should you do to extend your subjective time?