Time flies when you’re having fun.

Factual Questions
1

Well, it certainly seems to… from my perspective the passage of time appears to fluctuate continually – the good times are definitely over quicker than the bad.

I have noticed however that the older I get the faster time goes by. As a child, next week wasn’t really on the radar and the intervening 10 months between Christmas and my birthday were a veritable eternity. Nowadays (in my mid-thirties) days, weeks, months, even years seem to whizz by at breakneck speed. It seems like I finish one tax return and start the next.

Is there a scientific explanation of my perception of the acceleration in the passage of time? Perhaps there is a simple correlation with the ageing/deterioration of my brain, or maybe an increase in experience/familiarity/routine creates short-cuts in my time perception/recording mechanism? Maybe it’s more akin to a long-term antithesis of the adrenaline rush that makes time stand still. Alternatively I could simply be destined to hurtle exponentially into oblivion…

Are there any studies on this?

2

WAG - I always thought that you perceived time as moving quicker as you got older because the length of time we’re talking about (e.g. the 10 months from B-day to Xmas) was a smaller portion of the time you’ve been alive.

If you’re 5yrs old and you are thinking about this time next year, that’s 20% of your entire life experience away - hence a huge amount of time. If you’re 35, its 2.86% of your life…

Anyhoo, just a guess.

3

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Regarding your specific question, I agree wholeheartedly with Tarantula. I don’t know of any studies on this, but this explanation has always made so much sense to me that I’ve never questioned it.

4

My own personal theory on this topic:

As youngsters we’re experiencing things for the first time and then later as repetitions of those first ones. The first time you go someplace new, you focus on details and have no clue as to what comes next. Once you’ve been somewhere and go back the landmarks assist in compressing time in your mind.

As we age we have more landmarks and thus have things speed by because we recognize more features we’ve already seen.

Seasons pass more quickly as do days and hours. The recent past seems to expand while the distant past seems to contract.

It does appear that older people remember their youths better than their later years. Those first impressions and memories seem to have a better hold then the newer ones.

5

One frog to the other - “Times fun when youre having flies.”

Agree with Tarantula.

6

You don’t have it so bad. I am 73… ooops now 74.

7

Or how’s about … the older you get, the more you need to plan for the future … so you become ever more aware of it hurtling towards you? Just an idea …

Julie

8

Time flies when you’re having fun. A stopwatch works best.

9

For the converse (obverse?,) we can turn to C. Northcote Parkinson whose law says, “Work expands to fill the available time.”

10

I’ve posted links in other threads.

Your perception of time fluctuates with your body temperature, this has been well established in laboratory testing.

As you grow older, your body temperature decreases. The rest follows.

Personally, I believe there are other explanations as well, but this one actually has scientific evidence to back it up.

I suggest using the search engine, this thread has been around at least twice.

11

Something I saw on the discovery channel canada web site.

http://www.exn.ca/Stories/2003/02/25/52.asp

12

Nice try, as you grow older your skin wrinkles too. Your calcium intake lowers, your ganglia become useless, your back hurts from landscaping duty, etc.

How does one tie temperature into this?

13

I’ve noticed as I’ve, slowly and with great reluctance, made the transition from childhood-student-adult that time does indeed go by much faster as you get older. I’m 24 (25 next week. Aghh!) now and have been out of college for ohh about two years now. As a child every day brought something new and different I had a whole big world to learn about so I was aware of every waking minute of every day (more or less.) Once I was old enough to go to school there was still plenty to learn but it was more regimented. Individual days became more and more alike but the pace of elementry school is such that every week was different and new as each day had been before. Also I had things to look forward to, like not being at school and giftmas and such. All that routine and structure made the days seem much shorter than they had been. A year was an impossibly long time to wait.

As I got older and the subjects at school became complex enough to require not just a week but a whole semester to explain time started going by even faster. Now instead of my routine being altered every week my routine was divided by semesters. A year was still a long time but not out of the realm of perception. College was similarly divided. A year was now downgraded to just a couple semesters and a break. Graduation (four years away)was an impossibly far off date.

Since graduating* and (ugh) getting real jobsb time effing flies by so fast I’m getting whiplash. Once you start working every day blends into the next, your routine is always the same it doesn’t change every few months. It’s always the same work, always the same people day in and day out. There are no semester markers to help you keep track of the past year, instead it’s annual performance reviews. That three months off every year - gone. It’s two weeks, if you’re lucky, and you’ll pass on your vacation your first year so you can bank more days off for next year. You now think of your life in terms of years, not days, weeks or semesters but years. You’ll actually find yourself saying things like: “I’ll do this for a * couple years * and see how I like it, then maybe move on.” Retirement (forty-five years) now seems like an impossibly far off goal.

Not having reached retirement yet (still have another 40 years to wait…sigh) I can’t comment on how quickly time goes by then.

One thing that I have noticed is that when I travel and seriously break my routine the days no longer drift by, but are as different full of wonder as they were as a child. When I’m out there on the road, in some strange part of the world I’ve never seen before I’m once again aware of every minute of every day. After a couple months on the road a year once again seems like an impossibly long period of time. You feel as though there’s nothing you can’t do in a year, when you’re on the road.

That leads me to two conclusions about our perception of the passage of time and why it speeds up as we get older. First, once we get older we start working and get locked into our routines. This makes the days and weeks blend together so our memories get muddled. When you don’t have a routine, such as when traveling or when you’re a young child, every day is different from the last, you have clearer markers of the passage of time in your memories as result. Secondly periods of great personal change seem a lot slower and longer than periods stability. Look back at how much you grew and changed each year while you were in highschool or college. Now look back at how much you’ve changed each year since you started working? Big difference huh? Travel also changes people, or at least it does for me. When I travel, the person that comes back is always a little different than the one who left. Ever stop to reflect on past behavior and take a look at who you used to be and been amazed by the difference? Ever hear yourself say “Gawd, I can’t believe that was only a year ago, I’m so different now!” Said that a lot more when you were younger didn’t you? The older you get, the more slowly you change so that’s another set of memory markers getting farther and farther apart.

The second bit, about personal change, I think is related to what ** Tarantula ** said about units of time being a larger percentage of your entire life when you’re younger. After all when you’ve only got five years worth of experience to draw on each day can have a much more prodound effect on you than when you have 20 or 50 years of lifes experiences influencing you. Each can, and does, change you more when you’re younger than when you’re older. So each day is that much more important to you when you’re young (whether or not you realize it at the time,) so you are likely to remember the details, and perceive it as a longer period of time.

  • Big mistake btw. If you’re in college now STAY THERE. It sucks out here. Really sucks. Whatever you do don’t graduate, keep switching majors if you have too. Seriously undergrad life is the best.
14

The whole time warp thing probably happens for all the reasons above and more. Another thought: as a child, we are always waiting on the 'rents (or someone else), with little control of our own destiny. Doesn’t waiting on someone else (i.e., your SO to get ready to walk out of the door) stretch time out a little, even now? Also, much of the time, a kid’s day is filled with playing and idleness, or used to be, anyway. Next time I have time for a day full of idleness, I will let you know how long it takes. :slight_smile: I wonder if those highly-scheduled kids (band, karate, soccer, Boy/Girl Scouts, AND homework) perceive time as lasting forever.

Question for the older dopers: I’m 31 now. Does time speed up even more, or is there just “kid time” and “adult time”?

[slight hijack]
On a somewhat related note, I used to think that kids should go to school all year round (because of what they can forget over the summer). I now think that I was wrong and that everyone should get summers (or even better, autumn) off. Life is too short.
[/slight hijack]

15

Hmmmm. Well, while Washington University tends to support a general claim of temperature and the Perception of Time, this thesis from DePaul University notes that Subsequent studies in this area, for all of the discomfort they have caused their participants, have not proved conclusive, although a recent study (Hancock, 1993) did demonstrate that body temperature and the duration that subjects were awake were positively correlated..

Beyond that, however, the claims for temperature distortion are not referring to the same phenomenon that the OP is addressing. The ability to note the passage of time, minute by minute, is not the same cognitive activity as noting the passing of seasons or years. For one thing, you will note that part of the phenomenon of the increasing speed of life includes references to anticipatory time as well as elapsed time. Christmas does not seem to be an excruciatingly distant event from July for us geezers. I suppose that one could posit that speeding up the metronome would reduce all time perception, but I would want to see an explanation of how that occurred.

A more basic problem with the notion of decreasing body temperature increasing the speed of time for all people is that it does not map onto reality.
My temperature has been 97.9° F since I was in high school; it has not fallen in 40 years. Yet I clearly perceive time compressing as I age. On the other hand, for the lower-temperature-equals-faster-time phenomenon to act in the way that it does human temperatures would have to decrease steadily throughout their lives. Young children should have average tempratures significantly higher than teens, for example, to provide the difference in perception that occurs between the ages of 2 and 18. They do not.

“As you grow older, your body temperature decreases” is a vague statement that may be generally true. However, it does not quantify the change in either temperature or duration. It also fails to account for the fact that while temperatures fall at different rates for different people at different times in their lives, the perception that life is speeding up is universal.

I suspect that temperatures are not the answer to the OP. Psychological processes are more likely, including:

  • the fact that a day is around 0.001 of a two-year-old’s life, but only .00000547 of a fifty-year-old’s life means that the concept of a day takes up a smaller portion of one’s experience;
  • the fact that the more new experiences one encounters, the longer the period is perceived, and the younger we are, the more new experiences we encounter. (When I first drive to a place I have never been, it always seems to take a bit longer than the drive home past the now more familiar sights and when I return to the location, it seems to take much less time than my first trip.)
16

The slowest rate of time passage I ever experienced was in line for the time clock.

17

There has been some interesting work done by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced me-high chick-sent-me-high) on time and “flow”.

Damn, I just love that guys name :slight_smile:
http://www.talentdevelop.com/Page8.html

18

IMHO time flies when you’re busy, walks when you’re not.

as kids we’d got too much free time.

19

(1) the center of a Black Hole
(2_ airport lounge
(3) doctor’s or dentists’swaiting room!

20

As I said, perception of time has been linked to body temperature. Calcium intake has not.

See http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=69561

For example,
http://courses.washington.edu/phys2...perception.html
“Temperature of the body. The lower temperature usually is correlated with higher clock speeds. Researchers have found that 2-3 degrees of body temperature have significant changes in time perception. [Heating head caused a 20% change in perception of time interval.]
Models and tests have been proposed to explain these phenomena. It’s believed that the concentration of dopamine regulates the bodies clocks. Add dopamine and the clock runs faster. Direct checks of dopamine levels for the above circumstances are consistent with this theory.”

http://www.stariq.com/Main/Articles/P0000995.HTM
“One of the well-documented changes during the menstrual cycle is body temperature, which in turn affects the perception of time. The higher one’s body temperature, the faster time seems to pass, a fact that explains some of the disorientation one experiences with a fever.”

Apologies for misreading the OP, though I still feel this has at least some relevance, or is at least very cool.