
Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older? - prat
http://www.wbur.org/npr/122322542
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edw519
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit
with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S
relativity." - Albert Einstein

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mhb
Maybe this is naive, but the younger you are, the larger the ratio of each
unit of time to your total time lived. So each unit of time seems longer.

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alttab
I think its a mix of both, but mostly yours.

When you are 4, turning 5 is another 20-25% of your life. When you're 39,
turning 40 is more like .025% of your life.

Perception of time changes because we have more of it to compare it to, making
it feel like its accelerating. But that is all relative.

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mbrubeck
You mean 2.5%... or maybe your perception really has accelerated. :)

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alttab
Thats what you get when you divide 1/40 in the calculator and forget to move
the decimal over.

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rodyancy
It seems like the argument presented should be testable using amnesia
patients. Assuming that their past memories are erased and that all
experiences are "new" and need to be fully encoded, shouldn't science be able
to question them to see whether, novelty is in fact linked to our perceived
length of time?

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MrSartorial
I think that the hypothesis proposed in this article sounds like it's
certainly a part of the effect we feel, but there is likely some support that
the percentage of our live thus far that each moment adds up to plays a role
in our sense of time passing as well.

Think though, to your novel experiences later in life and how time passed. I
can certainly say that even though just recently I left Canada (my home
country) for the first time, to go to Mexico, I can recall every second of it,
and it did seem to take a long time.

So I would argue memories are encoded based on what is perceived, and I think
we perceive what is most important to us at the time. This is often something
we are learning; something novel. Routine is not encoded carefully because it
is not important to us. We aren't learning anything new when we follow our
routines. But when we experience new things, we are learning. The density of
the memory at this time gives a prolonged time passage effect I imagine.

There is a similar psychological effect: Think in terms of your closest
acquaintances or, better yet, a new love interest. Because you spend so much
time with them, getting to know them, you encode a lot of memories that
involve them, and so when you are apart for a short period of time, it seems
like much longer. This is quite noticeable after a break up, when you're time
with someone goes from very high to zero.

Those are some of my thoughts anyhow.

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vaksel
because you don't have the same amount of free time as before.

When you are a kid, all you have is a little bit of school. And then most of
the day is free to do whatever you want.

When you are an adult, you work from 8 to 6(counting commuting). You come back
from work, you don't relax, you go cook yourself dinner. Then you eat your
dinner. And have 3 hours of relaxation before you go to sleep and repeat the
process. On weekends? You go to home depot, you go through the mail etc.

As a kid, you might have 30 hours of "free" time when you have nothing to do.
While as an adult, that number might be 5-6 hours, since you have so many more
obligations.

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maurycy
The same seems to happen with learning languages, and generally, learning.

It's much harder to learn something drastically new as an adult, as you don't
have free time, you perceive a year as a short milestone etc.

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fcoury
My personal theory is that the novelty of an experience is not the only
factor. I think the notion that time passes slower when you're young is
because you didn't have much of it yet. When you're 10, 1 minute compares to
your experience: 10 years. Now when you're 30 that same minute is now compared
to 3 times more, based on your experience.

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btilly
Many years ago an older friend of mine made a comment whose full truth has
become clearer to me as I've grown older.

 _The older you are the faster time goes. The telescoping effect can be quite
startling._

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jamesbritt
I think when I reached 30 it occurred to me that, not only is life short, it's
shorter than you think.

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city41
There is a relatively new form of psychology called Acceptance and Commitment
Therapy (ACT). It basically marries eastern philosophy and meditation with
western science. One thing it does try to do is combat this sensation by
living in the moment. In one of my ACT books (written by the founder of the
movement), he advocates that as you drive to work you should practice staying
in that moment, take it all in, don't let your mind wander. Doing this makes
that 20 minute drive feel like 20 minutes.

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roc
Sounds interesting. But I'm really not interested in having my commute feel
any longer than absolutely necessary.

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city41
It's just an exercise :) But I guess rereading my comment I didn't really make
that clear.

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zupatol
Some novelties are newer than others. Those you remember best are those that
don't fit with your generalizations about the world. As you grow older your
generalizations get better and less things surprise you. The more you've seen,
the more generalizations you need, because you don't have time to review the
whole of your experience everytime you take a decision. The generalizations
become a gut feeling, you know how to react but you forget why. The gut
feeling makes you more efficient but by unconsciously generalizing from what
you perceive you lose sight of the details. If this explanation is correct,
there must be ways to reverse the process, at least for some events. Try
meditation maybe, or drugs? I haven't. Tell me if it works.

On the other hand it might just be your memory getting worse at recording new
things, because your brain gets old and no longer works so well.

Or maybe your brain is becoming more careful about what it records because
there's not as much free space as there used to be.

Or maybe your brain is just bored, at first it really loved this shiny new
recording thing and played with it the whole day, but then got used to it.
Nowadays it only gets it out for the really big occasions.

Anyway, this is really about the pace at which you record informations, and
about the amount of informations you discard. I'm sure these questions also
arise in algorithms or machine learning. Certainly some knowledgable scientist
on this forum is going to point out a parallel with some machine learning
algorithm or information processing theorem?

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rue
I would peg it somewhere in the memory pathways too. Still, generally, when I
for example see something for the first time - an ad, say - it feels much
longer than it will on any subsequent view.

Then there are the dreams: an immense amount of information, minutes or hours
of "dream time" but only seconds to minutes of real time. (For the
adventurous: you can actually get to a state where you can experience this
while awake by causing yourself severe sleep deprivation which leads to,
essentially, waking dreams.)

There is a flipside, too: the slow-motion feel you get in a dangerous
situation.

Maybe it is simply that the brain is capable of a higher processing rate than
what it usually uses, and it is employed when necessary. Usually in cases of
manipulating the memory pathways (including dreaming), but also triggered by
survival situations.

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kingkawn
Slow motion in film seems to approximate this density of memory. Rather than
making a moment so memorable that it is drawn out when we think back on it,
they can just slow the moment down to begin with.

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abecedarius
I've wondered if Feynman's counting rate --
<http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf> \-- varied with age.

(tl;dr While a grad student he got interested in this question of subjective
time rates and started counting in his head while doing different things. The
story doesn't say if he ever tried it again decades later. Unfortunately I
don't remember timing myself the first time I read it -- enough time's gone by
that I could have looked for a change now.)

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jodrellblank
I think there's a component where the older I get, the easier it is to lose
time and suddenly realise hours have passed.

Both because I know more / recognise more things so I have more mental world
to wander around in, and also because I work on longer tasks, can concentrate
for longer and take more interest in details so am not tripped up and awoken
as easily.

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willwagner
At least for me, I'm not buying the novelty effect. I have two kids and
everyday is not only something new for them, but it's new for me as I watch
them grow and as I grapple with parenthood, all of which is filled with unique
and novel experiences and feelings. Instead of slowing down time, it feels
like time has only sped up even further.

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sblom
It's well-established in the literature that a year feels like it takes (20
square years / {your age in years}) to complete.

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jjs
_(20 square years / {your age in years})_

What is a square year?

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nfnaaron
I think, when you're young you just don't think about time all that much. When
you're older, you do.

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sriram_sun
Cause its like a toilet paper roll

