Why Time Flies By As You Get Older 252
Ant notes a piece up on WBUR Boston addressing theories to explain the universal human experience that time seems to pass faster as you get older. Here's the 9-minute audio (MP3). Several explanations are tried out: that brains lay down more information for novel experiences; that the "clock" for nerve impulses in aging brains runs slower; and that each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.
Or its all in our head (Score:2, Insightful)
And we just think it does.
Re:Or its all in our head (Score:5, Funny)
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I dunno, I think I'm getting older because I swear that audio sounded more like 6 minutes...
It was 6 fucking minutes. Kids these days can't tell time for shit.
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Am I a bad man because this thread made me laugh? Go ahead, mod me troll or what have you, I deserve it.
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And yet, when you're bored, time seems to crawl, but when you're in a stimulating environment, time seems to fly! It's a total paradox!
(I'm not being sarcastic, I think you're right..)
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The time going by quickly when you are having fun phenomenon really only applies while it is happening. I've notice that after an event filled stimulating weekend (whether those events are having f
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We also think about the past, how quickly it...passed, much more often when we are older. If we can't help being fixated on the idea then of course that's just what we're convincing ourselves in.
There might be even more direct mechanism in this; supposedly we perceive passage of time that's happening right now as faster with much of activity, slower without it. But when it comes to memories, it's reversed - when there was hardly anything going on, that period seems like a blink of an eye; almost nonexistant
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Michio Kaku (Score:5, Interesting)
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They did the same in this story
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I've noted that the clock on the wall is ticking faster than it did when I was 10. It's deeply ingrained in my mind - oh how I hated that endless ticking.
I've thought for close to a decade now that our perception of time slows down as we age. It brings up some interesting ideas for Sci-Fi - an AI could easily have a perception of time hundreds to thousands of times faster than our own. Oh how the days would go on. Plenty of time to dream up things!
Re:Michio Kaku (Score:5, Funny)
It brings up some interesting ideas for Sci-Fi - an AI could easily have a perception of time hundreds to thousands of times faster than our own. Oh how the days would go on. Plenty of time to dream up things!
Data: She brought me closer to humanity than I ever thought possible, and for a time...I was tempted by her offer.
Jean-Luc Picard: How long a time?
Data: Zero point six eight seconds, sir. For an android, that is nearly an eternity.
Re:Michio Kaku (Score:5, Interesting)
Zero point six eight seconds, sir. For an android, that is nearly an eternity.
I've always wondered at this line of dialog. From Measure of a Man we know that Data's processing speed is "60 trillion operations per second". If we assume he dedicated his full attention to her offer for the entire 0.68 seconds, that's almost 41 trillion operations required to consider and eventually reject the offer.
If Picard ever stopped to think about it, I'd imagine that might begin to worry him...
Re:Michio Kaku (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah but not all 41 trillion operations were devoted entirely to logics in that 0.68 seconds. The Borg queen practically felt him up and kept licking on the that piece of skin on his face. That stimuli is a lot of operations for an android you insensitive clod.
Re:Michio Kaku (Score:5, Informative)
Picard would probably use his 100-billion neurons firing 1,000 times per second = 100-trillion operations/second to ask "Why is Data so slow? Can't he get an upgrade?"
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You don't use every part of your brain for every thought.
Plus... electronics are faster. Even a hundred million "neurons" firing at several ghz would give us a run for our money.
The real question is - if we break past the ghz barrier, how smart will AIs be? When we're finally able to simulate a hundred minds on a single CPU, what happens when you make it just one mind? One mind with perfect math skills, and the creativity to use them...
Full attention != Full processing capacity (Score:3, Informative)
Full attention != Full processing capacity
He obviously has tons of background daemons running and was in a situation of "some degree of peril" and physical change (the skin graft thing) which clearly would have triggered several others. A more useful, relevant, pertinent (and I predict...) reliable benchmark would be something like "thoughts per second" or "operations per thought" (since different thoughts would have different operations and a different number of operations). "Thought operations" (or "thoug
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Depends what you class as an operation.
Indeed, all artificial neurons in data's brain could be fired once in one big SIMD [wikipedia.org] operation.
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Maybe it's because many of us hate school growing up, you watch the clock all the time. Because it's boring, anxiety due to bullies, puberty, an oral presentation coming up, you don't have your homework done, etcetera.
I know school was the worst period in my life. Kids want to have fun, and school is a factory-like drill, and by the time you're an adult, it's ingrained to you, so you don't notice it as much.
Idk, but as soon as I got out of high school and the rigid drill, time just seems to be going faste
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at the end of one episode he asked young/old people to count 60 seconds. The older people consistently counted for much longer than the actual minute while younger people consistently counted much faster.
Where they permitted to use any heuristics?
I just tried it with the old "One one-thousand, Two one-thousand, Three one-thousand, etc" method with my eyes closed and got it right on the dot.
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Re:Michio Kaku (Score:5, Funny)
I just tried it and fell asleep. Is that a sign I'm getting old?
Re:Michio Kaku (Score:5, Funny)
Ha! It's a trick question! Only old people have Werther's Originals!
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59 seconds. So what?
People just don't know how to count.
Re:Michio Kaku (Score:5, Funny)
Trial 1: 3.5 seconds
Trial 2: 2.7 seconds
Trial 3: 1.8 seconds
Frak, I need to switch to decaf!
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Aren't you awfully young to be drinking coffee?
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57 seconds. And I would have been within a couple of seconds a decade ago, too. Most musicians tend to have a fairly good concept of tempo. There was a stretch in the 30s and 40s where I felt like I was rushing, and apparently I was. Didn't quite compensate enough in the 50s.
I figure the younger people were just grumbling and thinking, "I gotta get this over with so I can do something more interesting." By contrast, the older folks were probably bored, and got distracted. I wonder how many of the old
Precise Calculations (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Precise Calculations (Score:4, Insightful)
If the size of a single "tick" reaches infinity at the time of death, as you suggest, then you'd never actually die - your consciousness will be streched out forever, like the image of an object falling through a black hole's event horizon.
If you're right, that means that your last-ever experience is gonna last until the end of infinity itself, even if it will only feel as a single subjective "tick".
I just decided, I wanna die having the greatest orgasm of my life.
Perception (Score:3, Insightful)
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nine minute audio?! (Score:3, Funny)
shit, that's a boredom-laced eternity.
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Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey (Score:2)
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How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on.
Is it just me or do these fortunes tend occur with an odd touch of synchronicity? Or do the story submitters choose what it will say?
1 Day Expressed as a Percentage of Your Life (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually you are very close but you stole an idea I had almost 50 years ago but even then I thank Einstein for his relativity theory. :)
Time in fact is relative so that when you are 2 years old 1 year is half your life so it represents a very long sense of time. When you are 50 it is 1/50th of your life so the passage of 1 year is very little time.
The sense of time is at least in part a function of your life experience and you can check this by simply talking with young children about the time frame of chri
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So my conclusion is to go with Einstein in that time is relative.
Except that Einstein's special theory of relativity is talking about time _really_ being relative, not perception of absolute-time being relative.
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What if you could ride a train that goes at the speed of light, away from that boring movie. Would said movie become even more boring?
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Yes. Unless it was Twilight or New moon then the doppler effect would make the audio hilarious for all eternity.
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Re:1 Day Expressed as a Percentage of Your Life (Score:5, Interesting)
I visualized this idea in a graph [jdueck.net] a few years ago.
also: distance between milestones (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, when you're 5 years old, the maximum amount of time that you need to spend doing something in order to feel like you've achieved something worthwhile is probably in the order of 5-10 minutes or so (drawing a picture, writing your name, building a sandcastle at the beach, making something with Lego).
When you get to middle-age, things take much longer (achieving success in your chosen field, raising children, paying off a mortgage etc).
My theory is that it's the lengthening of the distance in time between major milestones that makes time appear to move faster as you get older. It simply takes a lot longer to achieve anything of significance.
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If you are 1 year old, then 1 day represents about 1/365th of your life. If you are 10 years old, then 1 day represents about 1/3,650th of your life. Thus the older you are the faster time may appear to pass by. When you are 1 year old, 1 day may seem to last much longer than 1 day when you are 10 years old.
I have been saying that exact same thing for 20 years, basically what percentage of your life a day or year is. It makes even more sense if time doesn't exist. You are born, live and die all in a fixed amount of "time", maybe all at the same time.
Relative memory versus time (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Relative memory versus time (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. At age 57, time doesn't "pass faster" for me than it did when I was 23 or 24, but each day adds a lower percentage of new experiences and memories than it did back then. This should be obvious to most people over age 10 who have decent memories.
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Yeah...it's not like a day actually seems longer. It's just that your memory of the last year seems shorter. I remember half way through my first year of college that semester seemed so long. It was that it was actually longer, it's just that with the new relationships, new intellectual experiences, net friends, new...er...substances, there was just so much that happened in those few months.
Now I look back over the last few months and the bulk of it is been there done that stuff I've been doing for decad
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At age 57, time doesn't "pass faster" for me than it did when I was 23 or 24, but each day adds a lower percentage of new experiences and memories than it did back then.
Well, duh. Near the level cap, it takes more XP to advance.
Re: Relative memory versus time (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a show on the BBC recently that was a biography of John Mortimer, who died last year at 85. He was interviewed a lot in the show and one of the methods that he advocates to stay young is to keep changing and doing new things - career changes, move city, just keep doing something new. He said that think if people can do that, they can cram more new experiences into their later years, and get more out of life.
Seems kind of obvious, in a way, but it's amazing how many people become trapped in their own routine. Routine is what makes time pass quickly.
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When you are 1 year old, you don't even know what a
day or a week really is.
Now, where's that nipple?
My Grandfather always said, (Score:5, Funny)
I knew it (Score:3, Funny)
I figured that out all on my own in my mid twenties. Seems like it was just yesterday.
my theory (Score:3, Insightful)
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Possible solution? (Score:4, Interesting)
On a related note:
The Secret Advantage Of Being Short [npr.org]
So if we grow taller with age, time will remain constant.
Brilliant!!
We have more stuff to do! (Score:5, Interesting)
Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things. People also get more responsibility as they age, so more responibilities = less time. That's my thesis; I think it's pretty good!
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I>Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things.
By this logic, everything should be reversed; most people have a lot more fun when they're kids, and as you point out, more responsibility (thus, drudgery) as adults. Time should be practically crawling uphill by the time we're in our 30's.
Of course, I know you're joking, but actually. . .
-FL
How much faster? (Score:2)
Heard once (no reference available) that the subjective experience of a normal modern lifetime is half over by the time you reach 20. So the last 60(?) years seem as long as the first 20. Wonder if it's a linear decay or something more exotic... with only one (admittedly unsubstantiated) data point, it's impossible to know.
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Could also be that the speed of our internal clock is inversely proportional to the size of our brain and directly proportional to the effectiveness of its synapses.
For me ... (Score:2)
Porcupine Tree (Score:2, Informative)
the correct explanation. (Score:2)
It's quite obvious really. Time actually is speeding up, and has been since the big bang, at which point time was actually stopped. Thus each person gets to experience time speeding up within their own lifetime.
The discrepancy between old people and young people at any given time is due to old people having memories of when time really was going slower, so in comparison the current rate of time feels extra fast to them.
Tortoises and Hares (Score:2)
Novelity (Score:2)
Mmmmyep (Score:3, Funny)
Now I just feel old and depressed. Yay! Thanks, Slashdot!
Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not falling for that one again.
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Are you sure you'd want to? The typical work-day is longer than the typical adolescent school day... On the other hand, school doesn't bring a paycheck... Let me ponder this a bit longer before we make a deal.
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Only one? Someone hasn't watched 'Office Space,' said movie should be viewed as a documentary of what's to come!
When I was your age (Holy crap, I can legitimately use that phrase in a sentence!) a neighbor well into his mid to late 70s made every attempt to assure me that the best years of life are when you're in school. For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bett
Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Funny)
For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. A Flock of seagulls, Wham, Adam and The Ants, Human League, Culture Club etc. I don't know how we did it, but we finally realized that just because a synthesizer could make nearly every possible sound, they didn't all have to be in the same song! And the fashion! Dear God, what horrors! - shoulder pads, big hair, jackets with sleeves rolled up, zip-up shoes (remember Ciaks?), scraps of brightly fabric tied everywhere, puffy shirts, skinny leather neckties, faux military uniforms, solitary white gloves. Oh, the humanity!
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Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Interesting)
For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. (...)
Sometimes it feels I'm the only one who liked the 1980s...
Those were the times of Cindy Lauper, (young) Madonna, A-Ha and pop-things alike.
Those were the golden years of 8-bit computing. Machines like Amiga, Mac etc were created in that decade.
Those were the years of Gorbachev, Thatcher, Khomeini... The video of Genesis' "Land of Confusion" was hilarious.
The girls were colorful and with crazy hairs...
It was shamelessly stupid and joyful.
The 1970s OTOH, were overrated IMO (I'm glad I was too young to experience that).
Bell pants? Afro-power microphone-like hair? Beatles gone? Progressive rock? Hippies getting older?
Aarrrgh...
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I like aspects of the 80s too, the technology, at least the computers, were a lot of fun. They were simple enough you could understand them pretty much entirely, you could actually get down to the bare iron and not be wrapped up in 15 layers of abstraction, even proprietary software was somewhat open - you had books like "The Complete Spectrum ROM disassembly" - a complete and well commented listing of the entire machine OS - imagine if someone tried to do that with Windows - firstly, you'd need something t
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Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. A Flock of seagulls, Wham, Adam and The Ants, Human League, Culture Club etc.
And Lady GaGa is an improvement?
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there's got to be some advantage to your youth
Makes me think of that old adage: "Youth is wasted on the young."
As a certified (and possibly certifiable) old fart of 56, that seems to become more believable every passing year.
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It's funny... I realized a while ago that in college I spent as much time as possible finding something to do other than learning as much as I could.
And now, my primary decision on taking a job is one that lets me learn new things, as is the focus of most of my hobbies and time outside of work.
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I'm only 10 years older than you and I already feel wore out enough to take you up on that.
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If you're 30, then you are young. You should have another 10 years or so before the effects of entropy really start making themselves noticed. Mind you, although my knees and ankles creak and my eyes don't work that well, I really wouldn't want the chore of having to live the last 5 decades all over again....
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At 28 I'm feeling actually better and more healthy as I was under 24; I've gotten more aware about my health and noticed that as a "sortof adult" (I still feel like I'm "the same entity" as I felt and identified myself in any age. I've just seen and experienced more, but the "essence", while evolving through those experiences, is still the same to me.) your body is stronger and sport is re
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the autonomy that comes with a professional income far outstrips merely having more time to ride your bike during the summer holidays.
im sure you do believe this, and its not a bad thing to have money obviously, but there is still something sad about that statement..
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Sure, but can you drive a 1959 "Uncle Buck" model without endagering small children?
Not a chance! (Score:2)
"I want to be older, I'm tired of this long school day bullshit."
Better to want to do the very best you can where you are in life. I wouldn't trade my 65 years of experiences and my white hair for anything in this world.
Re:Not a chance! (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't trade my 65 years of experiences and my white hair for anything in this world.
I'd trade for some better teeth, though.
Re:Kind of logarithmic scale (Score:5, Interesting)
The immortal Bill Watterson described [gocomics.com] that effect best.
No, you need an upgrade... (Score:3, Funny)
Hellooo...have you seen the type of brains available now? Six, going on seven layers...adaptive reasoning, darwin-series inhibitors, enlarged stem, v2 fight-or-flight firmware. Things have changed since some people started wearing pants you know.
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Oh, I see you're one of those models. You feel totally superior to the previous generation, but have not quite realized that your feature set will be superseded with a bigger and better one Very Soon(tm).
Good luck with all your new features, and pants, you'll be needing it.
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1) Each day is a smaller percentage of your life as you get older.
My thoughts exactly. I wonder if a person suffering from total or partial amnesia senses passage of time differently. And if so, whether a test made to determine sense of time's passage could help diagnose levels of amnesia.
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An equally old joke (Score:2)
"Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana."
I assume that's where the department name under the story headline comes from.