I think this is the answer. When you’re somewhere new, doing something new, you’re experiencing sensory overload. As a kid, everything is new. If you want “dinner’s in fifteen minutes” to seem like the eternity it once felt like, get into a groove where everything is new to you. My theory would be proven if you could somehow get yourself into the state of mind that everything is worth pay absolute attention to. Your mind would be so busy taking in information, that a small amount of time would seem like a lot.
And another part is the perception of the future. What I miss most about college is the potential. Everyone at that stage is “embarking” on life, there are so many possibilities.
Maybe we should all just run to the toy store and buy ourselves something.
This is a key ingredient in this discussion, for me at least. Until older loved ones start leaving the scene everything seems secure and “out ahead” and you face forward and move forward with little concern for what’s behind. Partially this is due to having that sense of support from living loved ones. Somehow they give you the sense of purpose to blaze your new trails while having the sense that you can always “go home” to be with them for “recharging your batteries.”
Once they begin fading from your scene you must rely more and more on your inner sources of strength and purpose to continue to move ahead. Pretty soon, they’re all (or mostly) gone and you’re on your own. That’s when you and your inner child had better be on damn good terms.
Well, crap. I thought I was the first person to come up with the “percentage-of-a-lifetime” explanation, and I still think it’s the best. I’ve also noticed that time slows down a little when I’m very busy – especially on vacation, when I’m extremely busy with unusual sights and activities.
On the other hand, the busy-ness factor doesn’t explain the elderly, who in general aren’t as busy as they were in their prime. I remember last November, when I mentioned to my 92-year-old mother that Christmas was right around the corner. She replied, “Didn’t we just have Christmas?” (and yes, she had all her faculties).
I’m afraid I can’t accept the answers based on comparisons to time lived, or expectations of time left to live.
The experience is too universal and, more importantly, much too visceral for that.
I don’t see any evidence that our brains are doing this type of comparison, and can’t conjure any evolutionary or biological reason why it should. This effect is not something that happens merely when we reflect – it’s in the gut, so to speak.
Now to complicate the matter further – I have read in accounts by Nazi death camp survivors that the days seemed grotesquely long, but that the months seemed to pass with startling speed. And this observation doesn’t square with any explanation I’ve heard.
Still hoping to hear from anydoper who might know of case studies, especially if there is any evidence of alteration of this effect from brain injury.
My feeling is that some version of the “processing speed” theory must be at play. After all, there’s no mechanism that I know of which would allow “objective time”* to be perceived by the brain. It makes sense that the brain would gague the passage of time according to some internal variable.
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*Yes, I know that there is no universally constant time, but as far as macro-experience is concerned on the human level, I believe it’s safe to treat the world as though there were. After all, we’re all moving at speeds equivalent enough to be considered constant as far as time measurement is concerned.
I have tried a mind game on myself at times when I needed to pass an amount of time without referring to a timepiece. In the mornings, if I start the computer booting and go downstairs to the bathroom to brush my teeth and take my meds, by the time I get back everything is up and running.
The experiment is to sit at the computer, close my eyes, and visualize the steps involved in going downstairs and handling that business and coming back up. It’s amazing how my mind wants to hurry through things that my body has to do at its own pace.
I suspect this is a part of the problem. Our minds aren’t into real time reenactments. They resist such tedium.
We all know the movie cliche that everything moves in slo-mo when we live through a traumatic experience.
It’s happened to me. On the other hand, I’ve had traumatic experiences that seemed to happen in a flash, or that leave no memory behind at all.
Difficult to know how much of that is true to the experience, and how much is colored by memory.
But if processing speed is the key, it would make sense that during times when our brains are flooded with attention-heightening chemicals, as they often are during emergencies, we’re using more processing power, processing more data per unit of time, and therefore would perceive a slowing of time.
On the other hand, if we react to the trauma by “freezing”, by blocking input (Zaphod’s shades, so to speak), then it would make sense that such experiences would be correlated with a sense of things happening “at once”.
So the possibility of experiencing such events as being sometimes slowed down, sometimes speeded up might weigh in on the side of our experience of time being essentially keyed to the rate of neural activity in the brain.
I have an observation: I remember the end of the first semester of college. I could hardly believe that a semester had already passed. It seemed far faster than any previous semester of school, which had each felt at least four times as long. (I remember thinking that if life continues at that pace, it will be much shorter than I was expecting.)
Though there was a gradual speeding up of time before and after the end of high school, that step immediately after high school was far greater than the gradual increase since.
I don’t know how to explain the post-high school jump in the speed of time.
That’s the best part of being in school. Even in business school in my mid-late 20s, you have a sense that you are working towards something better. It’s like, yeah life kind of sucks now, but at least it will get better once I graduate and get that new job. It’s actually a problem with some business and law school grads that you spend so much time striving for some dream job only to find out that it really kind of sucks and you’re left feeling a bit directionless. Kind of like, the dream of being a lawyer or banker is a lot more exciting than the actual job.
When you’re a teenager and driving, you speed alot and are more prone to reckless stunts because you feel you’re invincible, death is a looong way away.
When you’re an adult, you speed sometimes but try to avoid the reckless stuff because you know now you’re not invincible, death is a possibility.
When you’re a senior, you drive slowly and carefully, knowing you could die at anytime and there’s no way in hell you’d try anything reckless because you’re scared you’re gonna die.
This is more symptomatic of the phenomenon discussed here, rather than causal. I think this is also very closely realted to the accumulation of wisdom as you age. The more wise you become the more aware you are of the potential side effects and consequences of your actions – and the actions of others, particularly in relation to your own mortality. I know I’ve become more cautious as I age. I’ve started watching what I eat more closely where in my youth I’d stuff any old crap down my throat. I’m more careful in the things I do both to see that it is done right and to make sure that it doesn’t accidentally cause undesirable reactions. I am more conscious about my own mortality, as well as the lifespan of the things I own; I treat my “things” with more care than I did when I was younger so as to make them last longer.
Perhaps this is an important element in the perception of time’s passage. Wisdom makes you more aware. Greater awareness makes you more sensitive to things around you as they relate to you and your existence. Heightened sensitivity to your both your surroundings and your existence makes you more aware of the fragility of life and the need to preserve it, which in turn makes you aware, in a vague, unconscious way, of how reckless you were in your youth, how much damage you must certainly have done to yourself in the process, and how much it may have shortened your life expentency, which if course makes you think of how much time you have left in this mortal coil.
I’m sure that’s not the sum total of the experience, but it likely plays a key role.
I can agree and even strongly relate to that. My life has always been and continues to be the struggle to find time to enjoy my life here and now. I don’t want to work my ass off now and wait 'til retirement to enjoy the fruits of my labour because by then I’ll be to old to enjoy what I wanted to when I was still young enough to do it properly. We work to live and live to enjoy life. Neither of these need be mutually exclusive. As was said, it’s all a matter of striking an acceptable balance between being a responsible, working adult and taking the time to get in touch with your inner child. They’re two very different entities but each an essential part of the whole. Your responsible adult wants a family, fiscal stability and a good life. Your inner child wants lego. Lego and gummy worms.
In other threads, I’ve touched on part of the answer. As we age, the dopamine level decreases. Levels of dopamine are tied to perception of time. Check the archives for citations, or just go googling. Here’s one to get you started. http://www.edwardwillett.com/Columns/timeperception.htm
Marijuana and some other substances, on the other hand, decrease dopamine levels, making time seem to pass faster. Dopamine levels also fall with age, beginning in the 20s and continuing thereafter. That may also contribute to the feeling older people have that time is passing more quickly.
Now, I’m only 22 and can’t bring many empirical facts based on personal experiences, but I have a strong feeling that time speeds up as we age due to the process of learning.
Others have mentioned in the this thread that learning demands processing power which will make our experience of time slower. Obviously, when we are younger we learn new things everyday, not only from litterature and hearsay but concrete day-to-day matters that become mundane as you grow up.
Like Hari Seldon, you will start to see patterns in the things you learn and you can puzzle together the pieces of life and make it more trivial – something that will also make your learning process faster for the new things that you do learn.
When you’re young, people want to know how old you are. Those birthday cards with ages printed on the front, they go up to 21. After that they start going up by decades, people stop caring, it becomes harder to tell your age by looking at you and so on. You get divided into grades based on age but gradually… age stops mattering, you start getting more variance and by the time you enter the workforce you’re surrounded by people of ALL ages. It is like you have little slots in your life labelled 1, 2, 3, … 19, 20, 21, adult. And adulthood loses its novelty after a while so things start going faster.
Time speeds up as we age because we’re falling through it; the longer you’ve been falling, the faster you’ll be travelling. I’m not sure if there’s a terminal velocity, or what happens when you hit the bottom.
