Why the days seem shorter as we get older(cambridge.org)
cambridge.org
Why the days seem shorter as we get older
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-review/article/why-the-days-seem-shorter-as-we-get-older/2CB8EC9B0B30537230C7442B826E42F1
38 comments
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 into sci-hub does the trick.
FWIW, throwing https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000741 into sci-hub does the trick.
I’m wonder why the convention hasn’t evolved to simply posting sci-hub links in the first place. There seems to be overwhelming sentiment that the paid-access journals are not helping the progress and dissemination of science.
I would expect hackers to avail themselves of the technical means to “route around the damage” so to speak.
I would expect hackers to avail themselves of the technical means to “route around the damage” so to speak.
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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.
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.
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.
Novelty is definitely a factor. Improv training increases the novelty people find in interactions, and not coincidentally, people comment that it makes them feel younger.
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
You are saying Time slows when you are having fun, I suspect your conclusion is incorrect
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.
I think it is more than that.
I think the perception of time is the rate of change of your brain state. Intuitively, this makes sense-- if I double the rate of your neurological activity, the world will seem to move half as fast. Similarly, if I freeze the activity of your brain and resume it some time later, you'd perceive no time to have passed.
But I think it also applies on longer timescales, too, and to variations in the rate and degree the brain transforms itself-- If you repeat the same thing every day, your brain changes little, and those identical, indistinguishable experiences collapse onto each other in your brain's compressed representation. That is to say, if each week of your life is the same, the situation approaches one where I took your beginning-of-the-week brain state and transplanted to the end of the week without any changes. I should predict that under that circumstance you would not experience the passage of time.
On the other hand, learning and experiencing dramatically new things forces your brain to change substantially, and the kind of cognitive delta that would normally occur over weeks or months of experiential stasis can happen in days or hours.
Once people leave school, many years of routine can go by without many clear perceptual markers. I am noticing this in myself, and it's become a nontrivial motivator for making substantial life changes.
Compounding this is the fact that neurology slows down as we age. I recall seeing a chart that suggested that a 60 or 70 year old will have roughly half (? maybe worse) the reaction time of a 20 year old. That suggests that 8 hours for a 20 year old would feel like 4 hours to a 70 year old. The study did not examine children under 18, but extrapolating the trend would suggest that children's brains are substantially faster still. Perhaps an hour for a young child is neurologically equivalent to 4 or 5 hours for a middle aged adult.
I think the perception of time is the rate of change of your brain state. Intuitively, this makes sense-- if I double the rate of your neurological activity, the world will seem to move half as fast. Similarly, if I freeze the activity of your brain and resume it some time later, you'd perceive no time to have passed.
But I think it also applies on longer timescales, too, and to variations in the rate and degree the brain transforms itself-- If you repeat the same thing every day, your brain changes little, and those identical, indistinguishable experiences collapse onto each other in your brain's compressed representation. That is to say, if each week of your life is the same, the situation approaches one where I took your beginning-of-the-week brain state and transplanted to the end of the week without any changes. I should predict that under that circumstance you would not experience the passage of time.
On the other hand, learning and experiencing dramatically new things forces your brain to change substantially, and the kind of cognitive delta that would normally occur over weeks or months of experiential stasis can happen in days or hours.
Once people leave school, many years of routine can go by without many clear perceptual markers. I am noticing this in myself, and it's become a nontrivial motivator for making substantial life changes.
Compounding this is the fact that neurology slows down as we age. I recall seeing a chart that suggested that a 60 or 70 year old will have roughly half (? maybe worse) the reaction time of a 20 year old. That suggests that 8 hours for a 20 year old would feel like 4 hours to a 70 year old. The study did not examine children under 18, but extrapolating the trend would suggest that children's brains are substantially faster still. Perhaps an hour for a young child is neurologically equivalent to 4 or 5 hours for a middle aged adult.
I thought about it too, and it is not an uncommon theory.
The issue I have with it is that you are essentially plotting an inverse function and it breaks down at age zero.
You can use tricks like quantization (a common one: you only consider whole years), add some constant, etc... but then, it stops being an simple and elegant idea.
Now I think the passage of time is complex and messy subject. We have things our body can use as time bases: heartbeat, brain waves, the laws of motion, day/night cycle, winter/summer cycle, music / rhythmic sounds, the amount of data we have as we recall past events, etc... It can't be simple. The paper points out one factor: the fact that our body functions slow down as we age, but it can't be the only reason.
The issue I have with it is that you are essentially plotting an inverse function and it breaks down at age zero.
You can use tricks like quantization (a common one: you only consider whole years), add some constant, etc... but then, it stops being an simple and elegant idea.
Now I think the passage of time is complex and messy subject. We have things our body can use as time bases: heartbeat, brain waves, the laws of motion, day/night cycle, winter/summer cycle, music / rhythmic sounds, the amount of data we have as we recall past events, etc... It can't be simple. The paper points out one factor: the fact that our body functions slow down as we age, but it can't be the only reason.
I honestly don't understand why some people believe this. I dont think about my whole life history every day (and even less from moment to moment).
I also dont have perfect recall but even if I did, at any one moment I am only referencing memories from the same amount of past moments (or at most slightly more).
I really wonder how much more differently than me do you process everything, think, and perceive for this to ring true rather than a pretty but obviously false story.
I also dont have perfect recall but even if I did, at any one moment I am only referencing memories from the same amount of past moments (or at most slightly more).
I really wonder how much more differently than me do you process everything, think, and perceive for this to ring true rather than a pretty but obviously false story.
Agreed. My guess has always been it is because of lack of variety, not an intrinsic property of getting older.
Take a summer off and travel to unknown lands, and when you get back tell me that didn't feel just as long or even longer than summer break did in grade school. Spend that same summer in the office or in your normal routine and it will fly by.
Take a summer off and travel to unknown lands, and when you get back tell me that didn't feel just as long or even longer than summer break did in grade school. Spend that same summer in the office or in your normal routine and it will fly by.
My first exposure to this idea came from this website: https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/
I feel like it will take 50% of my life to scroll to the end of that site.
ding
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?
Is there a way to read this article for free somewhere?
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.
> When well rested and not stressed, a week can stretch forever.
I am actually quite surprised that the article makes no mention of (emotional) stress which I believe has a huge influence on the perception of time. cf. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's "flow" vs a state where one is bored.
I am actually quite surprised that the article makes no mention of (emotional) stress which I believe has a huge influence on the perception of time. cf. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's "flow" vs a state where one is bored.
That's interesting because time spent awake in the situation you describe is reversed (more awake time with less sleep).
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.
I feel very differently. Weeks in college (typically around the end of the semester) where I pulled 2 all nighters, slept all day a couple days, and generally got much less sleep on all the other days would feel like months. Whereas a month in the middle of the semester would feel like a week due to the monotony.
Now that I work full time I don't go through cyclical periods of sleep deprivation so perhaps now I would experience this the same way you do.
Now that I work full time I don't go through cyclical periods of sleep deprivation so perhaps now I would experience this the same way you do.
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.
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.
That might be part of it, but I think based on the abstract they're more trying to say that the amount of stimuli we can perceive in a given moment is limited by physical processes that slow down as we age, e.g. your eye movements (saccades) are slower so the mental images you build up from visual input are less as you age, and with fewer mental images/perceptions in any given moment makes it feel like less is happening and therefore time is moving faster subjectively speaking.
At least that's how I read it.
At least that's how I read it.
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!
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.
I would think that, but I had a solid 3 years where I didn't work for anyone or have a routine and it went by just as fast, if not faster.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
- 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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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.
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
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
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 ;)
Change things up once in awhile... get into a rhythm ;)
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.