
Why the days seem shorter as we get older - bookofjoe
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-review/article/why-the-days-seem-shorter-as-we-get-older/2CB8EC9B0B30537230C7442B826E42F1
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baxtr
There is literally nothing else to access here than the abstract. The article
costs 23 EUR...

Abstract _Abstract Why does it feel that the time passes faster as we get
older? What is the physical basis for the impression that some days are slower
than others? Why do we tend to focus on the unusual (the surprise), not on the
ever present? This article unveils the physics basis for these common
observations. The reason is that the measurable ‘clock time’ is not the same
as the time perceived by the human mind. The ‘mind time’ is a sequence of
images, i.e. reflections of nature that are fed by stimuli from sensory
organs. The rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases
with age, because of several physical features that change with age: saccades
frequency, body size, pathways degradation, etc. The misalignment between
mental-image time and clock time serves to unite the voluminous observations
of this phenomenon in the literature with the constructal law of evolution of
flow architecture, as physics._

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lol768
The site seems broken even with an institutional subscription, the "get
access" button doesn't do anything.

FWIW, throwing
[https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000741](https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000741)
into sci-hub does the trick.

~~~
aboutruby
[https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000741](https://sci-
hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000741)

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larrik
I always assumed it was because your frame of reference gets longer and
longer. For a 5 year old, a day is 1/1825 of their entire life, whereas for a
50-year-old it's a smaller piece of your life by a factor of 10.

~~~
cgriswald
We are really comparing "50-year-old's current experience" against "50-year-
old's memory of 5-year-old's experience". So I've never been sure frame of
reference mattered.

Instead, I've always suspected it is novelty and memory. To a 5-year-old
almost everything is new and novel, and his memory is absorbing absurd amounts
of information each day. If he finds, say, a bottle opener and has never seen
one before, it might fascinate him. He might spend 30 minutes just playing
with it, turning it in his hand, pondering what it is for, etc. Then he'll
remember all the little lessons he learned from it. (He might even think more
about it later.)

You, on the other hand, have seen so many bottle openers that you've got a
sort of platonic ideal of it inside your mind. You see it and don't even have
to consciously think about it. You might not even remember later that you saw
it, where you saw it, what color it was, or anything about it.

So my take has always been along the lines that a 5-year-old's experience is
_filled_ with brand new interactions with the world, so each day in memory is
'bigger'. We older folks have been there, done that, so the list of things we
find important enough to remember is a lot smaller. Most of our "time" is just
gone.

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zaphirplane
What you are describing is opposite to the expression time flies when you are
having fun.

You are saying Time slows when you are having fun, I suspect your conclusion
is incorrect

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cgriswald
I don't think those two ideas are in conflict. First, fun and novelty are not
always the same thing. I can have fun playing my 5000th hour of Civ VI and it
can indeed fly by, but it doesn't mean something particularly novel happened.
Second, the experiencing self and the remembering self can have very different
perceptions.

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operatorius
I think that days seem to be shorter due to neuroplasticity and predictability
of events that comes from our experience. We can predict new stuff and same
old stuff does not excite us. Due to these reasons the amount of new strong
memories developed per some time unit reduces as you get older. I think that
the sensed speed of time passage is proportionate to the density of new
memories we make. We got used to some 'average' of how much we usually
experience per day and with that we have our expectations. Now that if I
expect 10 new things to happen to me in 1 day and actually 20 of them happens
I feel that twice as much of time had passed.

Is there a way to read this article for free somewhere?

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bookofjoe
Yes; here: [https://sci-
hub.tw/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/e...](https://sci-
hub.tw/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-review/article/why-
the-days-seem-shorter-as-we-get-older/2CB8EC9B0B30537230C7442B826E42F1)

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manmal
My anecdotal experience (age 33 now) is that sleep deprivation has a huge
effect on time perception. If I get only 5-6h of sleep, a week can go by and
feel only 1/3 as long as normally. When well rested and not stressed, a week
can stretch forever.

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koolba
That's interesting because time spent awake in the situation you describe is
reversed (more awake time with less sleep).

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jolmg
It's been my experience as well. Since you're tired all day, you end up not
making good use of your time. I would space out more often and when I got
home, instead of doing useful things, I'd just sit on the couch and chill.
When you look back, since one did so little that day, it seems like it's
shorter.

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clairity
it's hard to tell from the abstract, but it seems to imply that it's the
dwindling of new stimuli over time that we perceive as shorter days (which
matches my intuition on this).

as in, more and more of our days succumb to routines that are entirely
forgettable. these largely automated ruts require little conscious input, so
we lose more of the day to nighttime cleansing. the interesting stuff occupy
smaller and smaller slices, which feel like shorter days when recalled.

~~~
ip26
Which is, FWIW, sometimes a useful feature. Virtuous activities like exercise,
long hikes, etc can _drag_ on _forever_ at first, and one of the things that
allows me to keep going is the promise that it will begin to go by more
smoothly. It's only once you get into the "groove" where it becomes pleasant!

~~~
ngold
I agree, if you want to slow down your day, learn something brand new. It may
or may not be exciting but your perception of time will slow down.

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fzeroracer
I think this also ties into how conscious we are of time passing. For example
if you stare at a clock, a minute can feel like ages. While if someone is
actively engaged in something else, we tend to lose our conscious perspective
of time without other external stimuli such as lighting.

When I was younger, daydreaming during class could cause it to be over in
almost an instant. If I constantly kept track of time while half-awake to
avoid oversleeping, it often felt like it took far longer to pass.

Which, with this in consideration also helps explains why solitary confinement
is so tortuous, since it destroys a person frame of reference for the passage
of time.

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8bitsrule
It's not to hard to decide (even while there's no access to the content) how
much science there is in this underimpressive conclusion.

"The misalignment between mental-image time and clock time serves to unite the
voluminous observations of this phenomenon in the literature...."

So ... it was already obvious to many, then?

"Why do we tend to focus on the unusual (the surprise), not on the ever
present?"

Hmmm. I'll venture that it's something to do with survival? But let me check
the voluminous literature on that.

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galfarragem
Awareness - more than age - seems to determine how we perceive time:

\- When we are focused in an activity 3 hours seem 30 minutes.

\- When we are travelling alone outside our confort zone 3 weeks seem 3
months.

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notablyconfused
The "store" operation in mammalian episodic memory is triggered by novelty
signal. Novelty is poor predictability. As we become more familiar with the
world, fewer things are memorized as episodes, so in hindsight things contract
to more high level faster narratives.

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robterrell
Oliver Sacks wrote about time perception and aging as well:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/08/23/speed-5](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/08/23/speed-5)

~~~
halleonard
Full pdf:
[http://www.skidmore.edu/~flip/Site/Lab/Entries/2007/2/2_Time...](http://www.skidmore.edu/~flip/Site/Lab/Entries/2007/2/2_Time_Keeps_on_Slippin,_Slippin,_Slippin_%E2%80%A6_files/Speed%20by%20Oliver%20Sacks.pdf)

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blancheneige
what about our retroactive perception of time that might be stretched as we
try to recall the way we used to perceive time through the filter of our
current experience

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thrownaway954
Cause life gets into a routine after awhile... routines are boring and do
nothing to stimulate us.

Change things up once in awhile... get into a rhythm ;)

