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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

#81

Post by j_lou888 »

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."

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#82

Post by j_lou888 »

ashray wrote: post #15
danso wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 t…

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."

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#84

Post by itmag »

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…

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Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#85

Post by yobfountain »

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…

The 'film camera' metaphor is how I have always imagined it works as well. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. It's critical that you are able to retain knowledge in your 'formative' years. But after a certain point it less important to record new information. I have always wondered if the amount of info we store drops off proportionally or exponentially.

Consequently, when someone has a bunch of adrenaline dumped into their body, they often say that time 'slowed down.' I believe this is further evidence that our brain boosts the bit rate on our memories at critical moments.

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#86

Post by shrikant »

Alex3917 wrote: post #36
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…

"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…

> 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.

Wow, this makes so much sense, and accounts for why (in general) people get less receptive to new ideas as they get older: no categories to place the abstractions in.

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#87

Post by angstrom »

Udo wrote: post #73
angstrom wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>This would also explain why days with unusual content seem to last much much longer than others (at least that's my experience). I've heard this explained in part because of how our neocortex works. New events tend to require the involvement of more layers of the neocortex than ones that are redundant and routine. This is part of the explanation for the time dilation we experience when surprised by something like a…

Cortical layers tend to be more of a way of dividing a specific low-level task up into sub-functions of information processing. For example, they do different networking/interconnect jobs in different layers and as one would expect different areas of the neocortex have varying layer counts (ranging from 1 to 6). A more comprehensive computational unit of the cortex is actually the neocortical column which is a "horiz…

Yes, that's a closer description than what I recall. My understanding is based on a book I read several years ago: http://www.amazon.com/On-Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/080507...

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#88

Post by lywald »

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…

I'm trying this... Here's the C# code to SpeechSynthesis the time every 5min http://pastebin.com/MxTh3zHH Add reference System.Speech

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#89

Post by AD1066 »

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…

"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."

I like this because it reinforces my belief that time moves subjectively slower in the immediate period following significant environmental changes. The first few days of a vacation, for example, pass very slowly in my mind but the longer you remain on vacation the faster the days go by. Same goes for the first few days of college classes, or the days following a relocation to a new area.

I disagree with the original article because the rate of the passage of time seems to correspond more with the amount of new stimuli we experience, which (in most cases) just so happens to become less with age.

Re: Why time appears to speed up with age

#90

Post by zerostar07 »

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.
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