Why is it that as we age, time seems to race along?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21qna.html

by fleaflicker • 17 years ago

11 14 17 years ago

david927• 17 years ago

I always thought that, as a child, we differentiate, and everything we experience splits into new branches, creating intelligence, whereas when we get older, we assimilate, everything we experience gets merged into a previous experience or understanding, creating wisdom.

ajju2• 17 years ago

As a corollary, when everything seems old hat to you, you've truly become old.

True wisdom maybe maintaining your curiosity and an open mind so you can branch out at any age but knowing when to "split into new branches" and when to "[merge] into a previous experience". Given how abstract that sentence is, this is clearly an art.

banned_man• 17 years ago

I've always thought it to be the exact opposite. Experience for a child is intermingled because children can often only perceive one plot-line. I remember that, when I was 5, I would watch reruns of various TV shows and think that prior episodes had been taken apart and combined. In fact, they hadn't been, but in my mind the 2 or 3 plots in each episode were stored as separate entities.

When you're older, you're more able to process concurrency and your sense of self is more compartmentalized. You have a work-line consisting of your career and job life, a family-line, a vacation-line that emerges when one travels and is otherwise ignored, and probably several friends-lines (college friends, work friends, friends of the families) corresponding to various distinct social groups. Each plot-line is allocated only a fraction of the time given to the single plot-line a young child has, and thus each progresses much slower per year.

For a child, a year is an eternity. For an adult, it can be very short, because many plot-lines advance very little in this time. If you have a vacation spot you visit every year, every time you go you are bringing up year-old memories that seem as if they occurred yesterday, so time seems to be going extremely fast.

parenthesis• 17 years ago

I always thought it was just down to this:

The year from one's birth to one's first birthday is one's whole life.

The year from one's first birthday to one's second birthday is half of one's life.

...

The year from one's 29th birthday to one's 30th birthday is only 1/30 of one's life.

...

The year from one's 99th birthday to one's 100th birthday is just 1% of one's life.

ajju2• 17 years ago

Good point. Seems obvious in hindsight although the article also presents another theory: "the monotony of the events of old age compared with the vividness and novelty of the experiences of youth must also be considered."

randallsquared• 17 years ago

Yes, at 35, this is how it seems to me, too.

rgoddard• 17 years ago

Plus, the number of milestones and changes that occur when you are younger are much greater then when you are older, and those changes are more novel. You have your first word, your first step, your first day of school, the first time you learn to ride a bike, the whole puberty thing. There is a huge number of changes occurring that you have never experienced before. Plus you have the anticipation of all that is to come, and when you are focused wanting something to be here, it feels like it takes much longer to arrive.

As an adult, I often have days when I become so involved in what I am doing that I lose track of time, poof all of a sudden the day is over. The only time I can remember that happening when I was younger was when I was either reading or playing video games.

Femur• 17 years ago

"Time is what a clock measures." -Einstein

arien• 17 years ago

A bit offtopic maybe, but there's a nice short story from Stephen King about this time perception phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Pretty_Pony

mynameishere• 17 years ago

When I was a kid, I had the capacity for boredom. I really don't anymore. I suspect that's about it. A child is always looking at the clock, waiting, waiting, itching to get onto the next thing, feeling like the next sensation is too far away.

rue• 17 years ago

I have been thinking this a biological thing...consider another similar example, e.g. seeing a movie, commercial or something for the first time. Regardless of age, subsequent times have always felt faster than the first one to me.

From this, I entirely unscientifically surmise that the extra time experience comes from the creation of pathways and whatnot in the brain--which occurs less often the older you get. The more specific explanations could be actual spare cycles in the brain that are only used then encountering something new, or more plausibly, the ratio of conscious vs. unconscious cycles or plain stimulation of the regions responsible for time comprehension.

angstrom• 17 years ago

New experiences are always more vivid. The more unusual it is to your previous experience the move vivid it becomes in your mind.

Take for instance travel. Driving someplace new you're more alert about the course since you don't know what to expect. Once you've repeated it a few times or hundreds of times, like say driving to work, it becomes predictable. As long as traffic is moving along at a decent pace, you're perfectly oblivious to the passage of time.

Now take skydiving or bungee jumping for the first time as another example. You may free fall for 5-30 seconds, but the adrenaline pumping in your brain makes it seem like slow motion. You remember every vivid detail. After 1000 jumps it's nothing near the vividness of the first 10.

The only lesson I've been able to draw from this is that if you want life to slow down you have to live it and experience new things.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

This is a good reason to learn to love traveling: you're always doing and seeing new things.

ChrisXYZ• 17 years ago

I think it comes down to novelty.

When I'm a regular working stiff, the months seem to fly by because each day is so similar to the last. They all just blend together in your memory, and you find yourself looking back and thinking, "Where did last month go?"

Humdrum days are also forgettable and you don't really think about them as you go through the motions. So at the end of the day, there isn't a lot of substance that your mind holds on to. Looking back, it's like they were over in an instant.

I remember when I was traveling, some weeks seemed to go on forever, because every day was crammed full of new, interesting experiences. But as soon as I got into a routine, time seemed to speed up again and the days started to run into each other.

Why is it that as we age, time seems to race along?

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