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Why time appears to speed up with age

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Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#61

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

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).

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#62

Post by yason »

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.

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#63

Post by Joeri »

Udo wrote: post #13

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'm also partial to the "perceived time == amount of new experiences" theory. Some years seem much longer than the years that came before them because i had lots of new experiences those years.

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#64

Post by jewbacca »

benologist wrote: post #55

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+...

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://www.everything2.com/title/Everything2%20is%20not%20Wi...

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#67

Post by philwelch »

Udo wrote: post #13

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 this comment is a slight bit too critical for an OP that's obviously in the genre of playing with ideas. (Most of everything2 seems in this genre.)

> a large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well

Depends on what you mean by "very well". Aggressive data compression is usually considered a good way of storing things.

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#68

Post by mistermann »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #61

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…

This is interesting, I hope you write the article some day, I hope you can find the time.

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#69

Post by mistermann »

8ig8 wrote: post #17
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #4

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, mak…

Your comment reminded me of this wonderful video: Moments http://vimeo.com/8189067

For me, this was well worth watching. I bet the age of the viewer (amongst many other things of course) has a large affect on the individual impact.

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#70

Post by Udo »

philwelch wrote: post #67
Udo wrote: post #13

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 this comment is a slight bit too critical for an OP that's obviously in the genre of playing with ideas. (Most of everything2 seems in this genre.) > a large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well Depends on what you mean by "very well". Aggressive data compression is usually considered a good way of storing things.

My criticism of the article is so harsh exactly because it does not represent itself as merely an idea, it instead attempts to convey the impression of being a groundbreaking scientific discovery.

> Depends on what you mean by "very well". Aggressive data compression is usually considered a good way of storing things.

We're fundamentally in agreement on this. It is, however, not lossless compression, and that's in part where I would assume the speedup comes from.

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