Why time appears to speed up with age

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

  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).

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.

Your comment reminded me of this wonderful video: Moments

http://vimeo.com/8189067

off topic:

why is equation rendering still broken on the web?

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

edit: thanks mbell! mathjax looks great

project to get mathjax working on wikipedia ~> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax

breakdown of mathml support ~> http://caniuse.com/mathml (only firefox and safari)