Why Time Flies Faster as You Get Older

[David Baxter PhD]

Why Time Flies Faster as You Get Older
By Dr George Simon, PhD
20 April 2010

No one has yet come up with a full explanation for why time seems to accelerate as we get older, but there are some theories to account for this disturbingly real phenomenon.

It?s a common complaint from us older folks that time appears to go by faster and faster as we age. This phenomenon is reported fairly universally across many countries and cultures. But it?s still a fairly unresolved question as to why time appears to be so much more fleeting as we get older. Recently, some theories have been developed to explain this phenomenon.

Some researchers seem to think that the perception time speeds up as we age has a lot to do with the amount of experience we acquire as we age and the relative lack of experience with novel, intriguing new experiences. They propose that when we?re young, and almost everything is new and interesting, much more information has to get encoded in the brain. Our first walk in the forest, our first day of school, our first kiss, etc., all stimulate our senses and flood our brains with a deluge of previously unknown information. The processing of all this information takes time and is actually quite exhausting. Doing things that have become routine ? like driving to work every day ? don?t require any new processing, and the experience seems to go by quickly. So, it appears the brain is wired in such a way that when we learn something for the first time, the experience itself appears to take more time. Some researchers note that when most people think of early experiences that are deeply etched in memory, even the act of remembering or reliving them appears to go in slow motion.

A few researchers question the theory above as a suitable explanation for why time appears to go by faster as we age. They point out that as we get older, especially in our 60s and 70s, memories become more precious than ever, and when people recount their experiences, they tend to give almost every detail.

So far, no one has come up with a really satisfactory explanation for why time seems to accelerate as we get older. And I for one can testify to the fact that this phenomenon is disturbingly real. I can?t believe it?s the middle of Spring already when just the other day it was Christmas! I?d say ?Stop the world, I want to get off!? but I?m not quite ready to jump ship just yet. What I?d really like is for time to stop racing away from me at such an unmerciful pace. You see, the faster it goes by, the more I have to reckon with the fact that my time on the planet is inevitably running out. (Sigh)

 

[Daniel E.]

Some researchers seem to think that the perception time speeds up as we age has a lot to do with the amount of experience we acquire as we age and the relative lack of experience with novel, intriguing new experiences.

This does remind me of the notion that time is an illusion except as a measure of change.

 

[Ronbell]

No question that's why. You only conscientiously seem to remember significant events, and as you get older everyday events are made less significant based on experience. I think a vivid imagination/refining your memory, and making everyday experiences seem extraordinary would be a solution.Or you can just do what I do, and do absolutely nothing about it.

 

[dfossick]

It's really quite simple,as you age, each day is less of a percentage of your life.As an example, when you are 10 years old a year is
one tenth of your life,but when you are 50 a year is only one 50th of you life making it seem the years are slipping by much quicker
as you get older.You can quote my theory if you like.Enjoy each day like there is no tomorrow

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Yes, that theory has been suggested before and is similar to what Einstein had to say about time, if I'm not mistaken.

By the way, welcome to Psychlinks, dfossick.

 

[Retired]

If I can offer a non scientific hypothesis, but rather an assessment based on having lived the experience.

In younger, learning and working years, time was governed largely by other people, by job related obligations, scheduled vacations, scheduled days off to catch up on activites that could not be done during the work week.

In retirement, when I pretty well control my time (when my wife chooses to relinquish some of that control) and choose the activites in which I become involved.

For the most part, I choose activites that I enjoy and truly want to do, and these activites seem to make time disappear...I lose track of time, because there is no deadline and usually nothing pressing me.

Of course there are still the required obligatory activities especially medical follow ups, so necessary for those of us in the Golden Years! After all, we need a subject of conversation when we get to get together with other old fogeys...but I digress.

Time does seem to go by quickly these days, when we look back to events that seem to have ocurred three four years ago, actually took place ten years ago. Kids of friends whom we think of as babies suddenly show up as ten year olds.

So I agree that concept of time is different in aging than it was in younger years, making pro active time management even more important.

Sadly, there are just not enough hours in the day to get done all the things I want to get done.

 

[luminous veil]

I'm not yet in a position to speak about aging (or the associated wisdom), but I think it could be something like this- when you're traveling for a long time, as you get closer to your destination, time seems to slow to a crawl if you are anticipating the destination as something positive. Assuming we can view end-of-life as something negative, getting closer to it would make time seem to speed up, due to the opposite of anticipation. On second thought, what other people have said makes more sense, though.

 

[bluebird]

Yes, I've heard the less novel experiences theory. That would be true - but the older I've gotten, the more novel experiences I have - and time just seems to go faster and faster! =)

 

[David Baxter PhD]

I agree. I started replying to your comment today and by the time I finshed typing it was next week!

 

[bluebird]

Wait a second - it's 30 minutes later! What happened to all that time?? ;-)

 

[Daniel E.]

This thread is starting to remind me of that old scientist in Back to the Future:

 

[Michael Smoker]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, unless that's not a no-no in this forum as it is in most.

A former friend of mine had his own theory of why time subjectively passes faster the older we get. It has to do with how memory is stored in our brains. The earliest memories are stored closest to the external world's point of access and therefore take the least time to travel, as electrochemical impulses, from the sensory nerves and forebrain to where storage takes place. Later memories are stored farther away and take longer. As a result, our physical brain processes experience more slowly over time, while the external world doesn't slow down, causing our brains to fall behind in its response time to external stimuli and even our own conscious thoughts.

I don't know if that makes any sense from a medical point of view, but there it is.

Michael

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Resurrecting old threads is fine here.

However, I'm afraid I don't think your friend's theory has any physiological foundation.

 

[Banned]

It's a nice theory, Michael, but memory just isn't that simple or black and white. Your brain goes through several steps just to get the information into memory (it has to code it, store it, and then know how to retrieve it)...and there are numerous dfiffernt kinds of memories - episodic, semantic, procedural (all kinds of long term memory), there's sensory and short-tem working memory. Your brain relies on numerous tools to recall something at any given point in time - and how well you can retrieve them depends on how well you coded and stored them.

The theory of your friend's is very black-and-white, leaving no room for the diverse ways to process things in our memory. For example, I can remember my OHIP card and Ontario Driver's License number without even thinking, even though I haven't lived in Ontario for over seven years. I can't seem to memorize my Alberta health care number or driver's license number...why is that?

Nice theory...but he may want to go back to solid science and what we know about memory over decades of experimenting and researching.

 

[Michael Smoker]

I think the theory only addresses how long it takes to get things INTO memory, and doesn't say anything about memory retrieval. But your point is well taken.

My own view is that the familiarity-of-experience theory presented in the original post in this thread sounds pretty convincing. I remember the first time I took a shower at age 10 (before that I didn't have running water), but over the past 20 years I have often had the experience of stepping out of the shower and not remembering at all that I had washed myself only seconds earlier. The first shower was a novel experience, so I experienced it fully; while subsequent ones were more of the same old thing, and my brain simply elided it because it saw no need to process an all-too-familiar sequence of actions and sensations. When you add up the vast number of ordinary and customary sensations that get elided in the average routinized life, there is a smaller fund of recallable data from each passing year, so that, in retrospect, the year seems to have passed faster than earlier ones. The reason this is so convincing to me is that I don't experience time as passing faster in the _present_ tense. My present experience moves at the same speed as it always did. Only in recall does time seem to pass faster. ... But since I'm no expert on these things, maybe the science of what I'm saying isn't "solid" enough for you.

Michael

 

[David Baxter PhD]

I think the theory only addresses how long it takes to get things INTO memory, and doesn't say anything about memory retrieval. But your point is well taken.

Actually, no. It addresses retrieval as well as processing through the various stages of memory.

 

[Michael Smoker]

Whatever. People on here seem to only want to quarrel.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

My intent was to clarify, not to quarrel.

 

[Daniel E.]

Blogger musings on the novel experience theory:

Living Longer by Stretching Psychological Time

[URL="http://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2010/02/slowing-down-the-speed-of-time.html"]Slowing Down the Speed of Time


[/URL]