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:Ugh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Perception (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:1 Day Expressed as a Percentage of Your Life (Score:2, Insightful)
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 christmas or birthdays or if you discuss an exciting event that is approaching. Their sense of time is distorted compared to say the perception of someone 25 or 50 waiting to experience the same type of event and what they will describe how far away it seems.
But there is one constant. No matter the age of a person, if they are kept busy or focused on something, the sense of time changing will be described in a similar fashion by all those age groups. It speeds up. How about a really good movie compared to a boring one. Ask a kid. This is an important factor if you want to claim the sense of time passage relates to simply a biological aging of our built in clock. Our internal clock doesn't just go wonky because someone is older. Not unless from the time we are born it begins to act erratically.
So my conclusion is to go with Einstein in that time is relative.
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.
It's brain efficiency (Score:1, Insightful)
I would say it has to do with what the brain expects. When we are young, or we try something novel, the brain doesn't know how to best allocate resources to it. So it allocates more resources to counter the unexpected events that could pop up, this results in some energy waste.
When we do something we have done before, we know what to expect so that the brain can efficiently calculate resources required for that task. This more efficient resource allocation results in dampened personal experience as we age, because incidents of unexpected events reduce in frequency.
my theory (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Ugh... (Score:2, Insightful)
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....
Re:1 Day Expressed as a Percentage of Your Life (Score:1, Insightful)
Other than being something interesting to think about, why would this cause my actual perception of time to change?
The perceived flow of time depends on what you're doing and thinking. This is obvious even to children, who get bored sitting in a doctor's office for 20 minutes but complain that they didn't have enough time to play after 4 hours of friend time. If it seems related to age, it's because our typical patterns of thought change as we age, and we grow more patient. Duh. I don't see what the big mystery is here.
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:Michio Kaku (Score:2, Insightful)
Aren't you awfully young to be drinking coffee?
Re:Ugh... (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:Ugh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ugh... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 the size of Britannica, and secondly you'd be sued to smithereens within milliseconds of thinking of the idea.
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.