A few days ago, NPR had this interesting segment on why time seems to go faster as we age. (8:37 audio) Interesting stuff. I liked the different explanations the segment offers, and I would add one more: A watched pot never boils. When you’re younger, aging is a great thing and you eagerly anticipate being older. The anticipation makes you much more aware of the passing of time.
Justin Levine says:
Put me down for the ‘proportional’ theory that was discussed. This seems to make the most intuitive sense.
When you are 10 years old, a year ins’t simply a year, it is also 10% of your entire life. In terms of your ability to retain memories, it is even significantly more than that. A year for a 50-year-old is only 2% of that person’s life.
We experience time not only as a fixed measurement, but as a relative measurement of our experience. Thus a 2% measurement is going to seem ‘less’ than a 10% measurement.
If we lived to be 1,000 years, days to us would seem like hours as we aged to our upper years (compared to how a 100-year old would experience a day).
Seems simple enough.
February 4, 2010, 3:09 amCornellian says:
Your life also changes enormously between 0 and 10, between 10 and 20 and even between 20 and 30. It doesn’t change much between 50 and 60.
February 4, 2010, 3:30 amCornellian says:
If we lived to be 1,000 years, days to us would seem like hours as we aged to our upper years
I’ve sometimes wondered what someone with that kind of lifespan would be like. Would such a person at, say, 637 years still be pretty much the same person he was at 40, or would he be something completely different? Would he become indifferent to the lives of others because they would seem to come and go so quickly?
That reminds of Anne Rice’s vampires, who would periodically get sick of the world and have to go into a sort of hibernation for a few decades, lest they go completely nuts.
I’m sure there are other SF/fantasy novels that have dealt with the issue. Not the reaction of society to long-lived people, but the psychological impact of the long life span on the person possessing it.
February 4, 2010, 3:37 amKazinski says:
Maybe we just don’t want to dwell on the fact that we are falling apart as we get older. That every year there is someplace else on our bodies the Dr’s want to poke probe or scope.
Or maybe the fact we are losing brain cells at a faster rate so we just don’t keep the details of memory that we did when we were younger, thus time seems to pass faster.
February 4, 2010, 5:51 amArkady says:
Yeah, I’m coming up on 70 (too damn quick–is this a data point?).
February 4, 2010, 6:26 amI was talking to this youngster of 52 recently, and I likened getting old(er) to owning an old car. You know, when you own an old car, you’ve got every rattle and squeak cataloged in your mind. One day, you hear a new sound, and think, “Uh Oh”. Well, having an old(er) body is like that. You’ve got all your aches and pains cataloged, and one day there’s a new one, and you think, “Uh Oh”.
Shag from Brookline says:
In my 80th year it’s clear that downhill is faster than uphill. Add to this, without dialect, the PA Dutch saying: “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” Geezers have to watch out for the slippery slope. My reading pile gets higher as my eyesight weakens.
February 4, 2010, 6:51 amBT says:
As they say down in south Texas, getting old ain’t for sissys.
February 4, 2010, 7:30 amSoronel Haetir says:
My great grand-mother told me it never slows down. Certainly the proportion theory seems intuitive to me as well.
Cornellian,
One book that jumps to mind is Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love. The glue narrative was about convincing just such a person that he wanted to go through another round of rejuvenation treatment.
February 4, 2010, 8:22 amTokyoTom says:
I pondered over this years ago, and concluded that it seems that our perception of the speed of time is proportionate to the length of experience that we have behind us.
February 4, 2010, 8:36 amWidmerpool says:
Why do older drivers go slower? Because their reflexes are slower. Ergo, time goes faster.
February 4, 2010, 9:06 amAnderson says:
Time goes faster because you’re going slower. Fast-moving youth are closer to the speed of light than slow-moving oldsters, so time slows for the kids. Like, 0.0000000000000000002% or so.
February 4, 2010, 9:18 amFrank Drackman says:
Remember that Twillight Zone episode…”Long Live Walter Jameson”??? This College Professor turns out to be immortal, forget the details, but it was cool when he was confronted by a Colleage with a Photo from the Civil War. Guy was like 3,000 years old.
February 4, 2010, 9:30 amThat’d be cool
PeteP says:
I forget.
I forget lots of things anymore ….
What time are they serving jello today ?
February 4, 2010, 10:17 amMLS says:
Concur. It is not that time in the present seems to be passing by more quickly, but as we look back on the past we come to realize just how quickly events in our lives have unfolded.
Just the “other day” my daughter was born. Day after tomorrow she celebrates her 29th birthday. It seems almost as if those 29 years have passed in the blink of an eye.
February 4, 2010, 10:38 amstan says:
I, too, have always been a proponent of the proportionality theory, although it seems not to apply to the immediate passage of time, only my perception of how long ago something seem to have occurred. Professionally, if I recall having handled something about 5 years ago, it always turns out to have been closer to 10 years ago.
February 4, 2010, 10:57 amStruthius says:
Agree with stan. I always double however long ago I initially think something happened, unless I can pin it to some landmark event. I disagree with the “done it before” theory, at least in my case. In my 50s, I quit corporate America, and moved to rural Texas from LA. In short changed everything. Time STILL went by in a blur. My wife and I couldn’t believe how quickly the first year went by, and continue to be amazed 10 years later, a period where we both started new careers and had new experiences.
February 4, 2010, 11:07 amGuest101 says:
I think it’s more than mere proportionality; I think there’s a physiological basis to it. I’m “only” 32 (objectively still youngish, I guess, but it doesn’t feel that way!), but I feel internally more or less like the same person I was at 18 or 19. I’ve learned a lot in the intervening years, and my views on most of the important issues have shifted substantially, but I can look back on that age and see basically myself in a way that I don’t when I think of myself at 10 or 15. I would hypothesize that during the first couple of decades of life the personality really is changing in qualitative ways that essentially stop when adulthood is reached, and that the perceived acceleration of time is related to this stasis of personality– when one’s perspective on the world is not fundamentally changing every year, the days and years seem to run together much faster.
February 4, 2010, 11:37 amJSinAZ says:
I believe the answer lies in how much cognitive bandwidth is consumed by whatever activities with which we are engaged.
The process of “learning” is the mind making connections between events and reactions – the newer the event is that is being processed, the more conscious interpretation (ie. consumption of bandwidth) takes place. The more we repeat the action, the more of the event is processed in a non-cognitive way, maybe even as a neuro-muscular response with no cognition at all. As an example, standing upright takes a lot of concentration when you are young – eventually the hardware of the cerebellum hooks into the process, and no thought is actually expended on the act of balancing on one foot.
The more events that are processed non-cognitively, less load is presented to the concious mind. Less “sampling/action points” fill the space between the events the mind actually must process, and thus time seemingly “speeds up” because there is actually less for the mind to do.
More concious activity == “things seem to take longer”; less mental work == “I was on autopilot and drove the two-hour commute without even noticing”.
February 4, 2010, 12:06 pmMichael F. Martin says:
Stephen Hawking famously has the perception of time as a ratio of time elapsed divided by age (with some proportionality constant indeterminate).
If we learn by building out a neural network with new connections and routes steadily over time, but our sensory input is basically time-independent, then it stands to reason that our perceptions would seem less “dense” as we age.
The way to stay young — to stop time — is to keep learning and having new experiences at the same rate as when you were a child.
February 4, 2010, 1:24 pmjss says:
They say married people live longer….but it just seems that way.
February 4, 2010, 1:31 pmJSinAZ says:
Michael Martin – yes, this is my thought as well. I am fairly convinced that age per se has little to do with the subjective increase in speed of time’s passage. Instead, maturation of young brains means more is being done, more efficiently, in a cumulative way – our brains get much more adept at spawning recognizers for patterns, and presumably the conscious part has more experience-memories from which to draw and in turn develop ever more sophisticated responses to these patterns.
Eventually our day-to-day experiences (to the conscious mind) become little more than highly abstracted sequences of patterns to which we react with very little cognition at all; as a result, the days fly past at an ever increasing rate since we are experiencing so little of the minute-by-minute reality around us.
February 4, 2010, 1:55 pmShag from Brookline says:
This is what happens when (September Song) “The days dwindle down, to a precious few, ….”
February 4, 2010, 2:01 pmDan says:
Interesting thoughts here. One sci fi writer Stephen Brust wrote about long lived elves interacting with short lived humans, from the perspective of elves, saying everyone around him (the elf) seemed to grow old and die at an astonishing rate. I imagine this is like living forever. You seem normal, it’s everyone else who changes rapidly. It would take the fun out of living forever, I would say.
One idea of why time seems to fly: You can only remember so much. When you’re young, you remember a great deal that happened to you in the past year. As you get older, you tend to forget a lot of the day to day stuff. I don’t think this is a bad thing, a lot of stuff you do day to day is too boring and repetitive to bother with remembering with. And yet, if at the end of the year you look back at what you did, you remember much less at 60 than you would at 10. In retrospect, therefore, times seems to fly, there’s less memory in your mind to mark its passage.
February 4, 2010, 2:31 pmRalph Kinney Bennett says:
I’m nearing 70. I can still remember the timeless time of my youth and I have always felt that it is school which first imposes a sense of time on most of us. Before I entered first grade and had to be aware of clocks and schedules time was a halcyon of endless days and seamless changes of season. The only interruptions were church on Sundays and, as nights fell, the call of my mother or grandmother: “Come in, kids. Time for bed.”
February 4, 2010, 3:24 pmOnce school began there was an inevitable parceling of hours and days and months and thus, an imposed measuring of time — sometimes slow (When will summer come?) and sometimes fast (the spring of my senior year in high school). Now I keep active and engaged and interact as much as possible with younger people (I became a volunteer firefighter after I retired, and that helps a lot) and I don’t pay much attention to the “fleeing years.”
ACS3 says:
I think it’s because your metabolism slows down as you get older, which makes the world seem to rush by faster.
February 4, 2010, 3:24 pmDon says:
At 7 years old,a year = 1/7TH of your life—-at 70 =1/70TH.
Using the OLD math……1/70th<1/7th
February 4, 2010, 3:32 pmrmd says:
You’ve reached middle age when you stop saying that “time flies when you’re having fun” and realize that time flies whether you’re having fun or not. Because when you get right down to it, time doesn’t really care about what you’re doing one way or the other.
February 4, 2010, 3:40 pmDavid Chesler says:
I vote for proportionality over more new things to have cognition of.
In either case a professor put it succinctly:
February 4, 2010, 3:42 pmdt/dt is not constant.
Lizard Hill says:
Down here on St John in the US Virgin islands, everyone is talking about how their electric clocks are slowing down considerably this year. (‘limin)
A friend attached his electrical meter to an AC outlet and sure enough our frequency is less than the expected 60 HZ
February 4, 2010, 3:43 pmWadamai Gunadu says:
” Now the years are rolling by me,
they are rocking evenly.
I am older than I once was, I am younger than I’ll be.
That’s not unusual, nor is it strange.
After changes upon changes we are more or less the same.”
Paul Simon, supplementary verse, The Boxer.
February 4, 2010, 3:48 pmDon says:
Less than 60 hertz less than more than 60 hertz
February 4, 2010, 3:48 pmDavid Chesler says:
I’m at the point of early middle age where I welcome the new aches and pains, because they take my mind off the old ones.
February 4, 2010, 3:49 pmBart says:
I think it is more derivative than proportional. Like dinosaur vision, we perceive only motion.
February 4, 2010, 3:59 pmJohnKT says:
Time passes so fast normally that I’m afraid I’ll run out of it.
But watching that two minutes between two puffs on a bronchodilator is forever!
Depends on what you’re doing, I guess.
February 4, 2010, 4:02 pmRexx Shelton says:
The article is right in one aspect for sure, and that is no one knows why time seems to speed up as you age.
“when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there. But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you’re not really writing it down anymore. There’s nothing novel about it”
This is true for every trip in which you are looking for a new place, whether it be going to work for the first time or going to pick up a date, to a new saddle club, or whatever, the way there always seems longer then the way back. I think that different in perception is as much due to the uncertainty as to the fact that it is the first time, for each time there after the way is familiar and certain.
I also think that one reason that time seems to go faster as you grow older has to do with the relative portion that a day becomes of your life. When you are one day old, one day is your whole life, an eternity. When you are 1 year old a day is still 1/365th of your life, still a relative large portion. When you have reached 50 the portion has shrank to 1/18,250th of your life, and while 24 hours is still 24 hours it has become less and less of your whole life, and like the last of the grains falling from a hour glass always seems to fall faster then the first grains of sand did, the days of your life seem to speed up as you accumulate more and more days.
February 4, 2010, 4:22 pmConcerned Citizen says:
Certainly getting older and the proportional perception of time has something to do with it. Time, like everything else, is not absolute, so there can be no question that time can either speed up or slow down.
February 4, 2010, 4:23 pmShag from Brookline says:
Husband to wife after many years of marriage: “Dear, you’re not getting older, you’re getting bitter.” Time can fly even when you’re not having fun.
February 4, 2010, 4:24 pmKoblog says:
Not sure of the physics, but I do know the exact day I became aware that time flies: the day I graduated seventh grade. It was the first time in my life I said, “Wow. That year went by fast.” Up til then school years really dragged.
The day I became “old” was the day I came home from high school (as a junior, I think) and, on a warm sunny afternoon, laid down and took a nap.
And now, after 30 years on the job, every warm sunny day I’m at work in a windowless office is one less day I have to enjoy life as it should be enjoyed.
February 4, 2010, 4:46 pmJimmyNashville says:
A decaying time function is the only thing that explains gravity and the expanding universe without stupid dark matter plugs. Energy from nowhere in the form of acceleration can be explained easily if time doesn’t clip away at an equal pace.
If everything is getting bigger and further apart at a proportional rate including your hand and the ruler you measure with then you sense nothing; but all you have to do is make time itself into a decaying function rather than a constant and you get acceleration/gravity… opening the door to gravity and perceived curved orbits perpendicular to the direction of expansion along with everything else we observe in the universe.
Our perception of time being constant is only a convenient and arrogant delusion of our psyche.
February 4, 2010, 5:11 pmWadamai Gunadu says:
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
February 4, 2010, 6:01 pmAlan Gunn says:
Looking back to when I was young, one thing that stands out is how boring it was a lot of the time. I have vivid memories of sitting in school, waiting for the minute hand of the clock to jump one minute ahead. College, the navy, and law school were better, and time there went faster. Today, I am so seldom bored that being bored is almost interesting. I doubt that this is the whole answer, but it could be part of it. I wonder if time passes faster for academics than it would if they were store clerks or working on an assembly line.
February 4, 2010, 6:16 pmTHE TEXAS SCRIBBLER » What time do they serve the jello? says:
[...] Getting old means time speeds up. The days fly by, the weeks rush past, pretty soon the season you were just getting used to is being replaced by another one. And before you know it, you’re another year older and deeper in debt. Wait. That was a song lyric. I think. What is this phenom, which isn’t relegated to the nursing home but seems to affect all oldsters? Well, there are theories. [...]
February 4, 2010, 7:23 pmJim O'Sullivan says:
My hypothosis is something like this. As we look back on our lives, we are rummaging through our memories. Right? Stay with me. When do our memories start to stick? Let’s say age four. (If you disagree, plug in the age from which you can remember things, instead of the numbers I’m using). When we go from age four to age five, and then look back, we are looking at all the time our brains have ever known – the functional equivalent of eternity, as far as our young memory banks are concerned. Then we go from five to six. Looking back, it’s one-half of our memory. Six to seven? One third. Forty two to forty three? You do the arithmatic. AS WE LOOK BACK, every year (and day, week, fortnight, month, season, whatever) seems shorter relative to the amount of time we perceive as “all the time we know.”
February 4, 2010, 7:30 pmVoila!
Jim O'Sullivan says:
Ooops. That’s what I get for commenting before reading the preceding comments. I basically repeated what Justine Levine said. I assure you Justin, I was not plaigarizing.
February 4, 2010, 7:41 pmjackdaw says:
When you drive to a place for the first time, the journey feels to take much longer. You are bombarded with novelty which you have to absorb and make sense of, you concentrate not to get lost, you’re full of anticipation, and in general your experience is more vivid. With subsequent journeys this sensation wears off.
February 4, 2010, 8:16 pmA child “drives” to a whole lot of new places, and therefore lives more intensively. Maybe this is also why many old people become avid travelers. They might feel they get more life out of their living years, i.e., expand their subjective time.
Of course, even if this is true, it just rolls back the question to why do we feel time passes more slowly in a more challenging environment. Perhaps subjective time is the density of memorable experiences. The mind of a child is also much more malleable, it memorizes better and more easily. Moreover the excitement that comes with challenges and novelty aids memory, too. If we measure the length of time by memorable experiences, children get a lot more of it.
Ira says:
Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately,
it kills all its pupils
February 4, 2010, 8:27 pmdfolds says:
Proportionality theory would require that every single aspect of life be perceived as accelerating temporally. Similarly, any explanation based on the notion of general slowing also requires that all events be perceived as accelerating temporally because a slowing of the rate of sampling the environment would cause all events to seem to pass more quickly irrespective of the level of interest. Either can be refuted by the existence of certain phenomena, such as waiting on the results of a biopsy, or for a potential romantic partner to call, that continue to pass every bit as slowly later in life as they did in earlier decades. I suspect this is the case — a few items of great interest continue to seem to take a very long time, and if so, proportionality or general slowing are refuted. Hence selective attention is a better explanation. We pay less attention to aspects of life that we’ve experienced before; hence, time seems to pass more quickly unless we encounter novel stimuli of great interest.
February 4, 2010, 9:06 pmRexx Shelton says:
Why would a proportionality theory require that every single aspect of life be perceived as accelerating temporally? Each individual proportion, i.e., one day, remains exactly one day, no more, no less. Each bodily process in that day takes just as long for an old man to do as it does for a child. Eating, breathing, etc. remains the same and perceived as taking no less time for the old man as for the child. It is the on going accumulation of days that makes each sequential day a smaller portion of one’s life.
Each event in a day is relative to the other events in that day. A day full of events seems to fly by, while a day with few events in it is perceived as dragging by, but at the end of a busy day, the day seemed to have lasted forever, and at the end of a eventless day (a day at the office with nothing to do), the day is perceived as having very little duration. I reckon that is because of what the mind has to hang on, or not, to in form of memories.
The only aspect of life that does accelerating temporally, and this is true for adult or child, is sleep time. Once you are asleep there is no sense of duration.
February 4, 2010, 10:19 pmRalph Rossum says:
George C. S. Benson, the founding president of Claremont McKenna College captured this whole argument perfectly. He once told me: “Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer to the end you get, the faster it goes.”
Ralph Rossum
February 4, 2010, 10:52 pmRandom_Physicist says:
There was a good post on the blog “Gravity and Levity” about the eight “lifetimes” a person goes through.
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/parenting-and-the-feeling-of-time-my-eight-lifetimes/
February 4, 2010, 11:11 pmDavid McCourt says:
The poet Michael Donaghy had an interesting poem about time. For him, it passed far too fast; born in 1954, he died in 2004:
February 5, 2010, 12:48 am