I was talking with my grandmother the other day, who is 94 years old. She said something to the effect of "It's just like I eat breakfast and then it's time for bed." My theory on this phenomenon is that one's memory is like a slide projector, fillled with snapshots of images, sounds, feelings. As an infant, the mind is filling itself with as much information as possible, in order to learn and adapt to a new environment. So the mind takes 10,000 "memory snapshots" in ten minutes, making time appear to go very slow for a child. As we age, less and less of the information our senses process is neccessary for survival, (and we probably have less room for memories or something like that) and so our mind takes fewer snapshots... thus making time appear to go faster. It's like the difference between watching a movie in slow-motion or all speed-ed up: the only difference is the amount of information that the camera recorded.

A few more thoughts:

  1. The brain only thinks when it has to This is why we can, for instance, touch type very fast. The brain doesn't consciously figure out what buttons to push, or where they are, so it doesn't remember it.

    When you are old, you don't have to think as hard to get through the day - it's mostly routine. Therefore, you don't remember it, and the day seems to fly by.

  2. The brain likes to optimize things Although this is somewhat anthropomorphic (Can you be anthropomorphic with the brain?), it is also true. If you do a certain task a lot, the brain will optimize things so that you can do it without conscious thought. Touch typing is one example of this. I don't have to think to type. I just focus on what keys/letters I want pressed.

The brain is weird.
I've realised lately that every year of my life seems to go by faster than the year before. Then it hit me....

Imagine you are a four year old. Relatively speaking, what fraction of your lifetime does one year account for? A whopping one quarter. Now, if you are a 25, a year amounts to an insignificant 4% of your lifetime, and this percentage decreases with age...

The point is that as we get older, we tend to think of our lifetime, that is, the years that have already passed us as a constant period. This can be perhaps because the amount of things we remember is pretty much the same throughout. (ie. memories get archived into the back of your mind)

To make things worse, the more boring and repetitive your life becomes the more "constant" your previous experience seems to be (i.e. nothing changed) and thus the years zoom by even quicker and become more and more insignificant.

Maybe this perception of time also stems from the fact that in the first decade of your life you learn much more than in the following decades. This makes your first years much more "dense" than the rest, also giving you the impression that time went by slower in the beginning.

I've always thought that one's perception of the speed of time is directly proportional to how much life experience one can remember.

Look at it this way: when you're six years old, you can't remember much more than the last couple of years, if that. So one year of school is equivalent to half your (remembered) lifetime, which seems like forever. On the other hand, once you're twenty-six years old, two years is just a fraction of your remembered lifetime, so it seems to go by much more quickly.

It also depends on how much you're living your life, of course. When you're busy with an interesting career, a tour of Europe, or an active social life, time seems to go by a lot faster than if you're living alone on Social Security. But that is an independent phenomenon which even Albert Einstein commented on:



          AY= α/AA



               AA            AA
                1             1


          AA = βt + γ





               t           t
               0           0




          δ = 80/ln(81)

               80 ln(t + 1)
          EA = ----------
time (yrs.)  EA (yrs.)  Life%
0            0.0      0
1           12.6      16
2           20.0      25
3           25.2      32
4           29.3      37
5           32.6      41
10          43.7      55
15          50.5      63
20          55.4      69
30          62.5      78
40          67.6      85
50          71.6      89
60          74.8      94
70          77.6      97
80          80.0      100




  • "Life starts after 65"
  • "Old people are slow"
  • "Those annoying birthdays seem to roll around faster every year
    True, they do. Better start celebrating your Effective Age.








There is a simple scientific explanation for the common observation that time appears to pass more quickly as we get older, which is this: Time really is flowing at an ever-increasing pace.

This is a natural result of the expansion of the universe: In accordance with Einstein's Theory of Relativity, as space gets stretched out time is correspondingly compressed. So if the minutes seem to be flying by far faster than they did when you were young, console yourself with the thought that it's not because you are now old - it's just that time is flowing faster than it used to.

N.B. This is clearly wrong, but I still think it's a great explanation.

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