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.
Why time appears to speed up with age
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Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#32[deleted]
Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#33For 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
Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#34off 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…
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Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#35As 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…
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.
Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#36This 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…
"A large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well."
My theory, which is logically consistent with yours, is that as we get older we spend more of our cognitive cycles thinking in terms of abstractions rather than using our senses to process direct experience. This is partly because as we get older we tend to immediately place things we experience into categories and then move onto processing these abstractions rather than continuously observing reality directly and unfiltered. So the other part of the theory would be that when we think in terms of abstractions, time goes by much faster than when we focus on direct sensory experience. It's likely that novelty also plays a role here as a mediating variable, in that we tend to pay more sustained attention to novel phenomena rather than immediately placing them into conceptual buckets and moving onto the next thing.
I also like this theory because it's consistent with how drugs that alter our sensory perceptions and make us focus more on our perceptions also tend to subjectively slow down time. Anyway I have no idea whether this is correct, but IMHO it's a much better theory than the original, which isn't especially logical and doesn't even really make sense.
Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#37As 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…
Yes, I agree - it's related to memory. NPR had a good podcast on it a couple of years ago:
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/02/01/122322542/why-d...
Time seems to go slower when we have tons of things to remember, when we are adding many memories in short periods.
Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#38Here 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.
Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#39This 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…
"A large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well." My theory, which is logically consistent with yours, is that as we get older we spend more of our cognitive cycles thinking in terms of abstractions rather than using our senses to process direct experience. This is partly because as we get older we tend to immediately place things we experience into categories and then…
> we get older we spend more of our cognitive cycles thinking in terms of abstractions rather than using our senses to process direct experience.
This would explain why vacation makes time slow down, yet go fast at the same time. The slow down for the new experiences, environment. The fast - for the lookahead-cache driven feeling of sometimes anxiety/dread of going back to the daily routine.
Re: Why time appears to speed up with age
#40The 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-...
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.