Physics explains why time flies as we age - This apparent temporal discrepancy can be blamed on the ever-slowing speed at which images are obtained and processed by the human brain as the body ages. As webs of neurons mature, they degrade, giving more resistance to the flow of electrical signals.

I wonder if this could be related to how time seems to slow down when someone is high.

Here’s a study suggesting psychedelics promote structural and functional neural plasticity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082376/

psilocybin mushrooms are pushing the envelope of being legal soon. Should be exciting.

Of course there's the factor of experienced years under your belt

This was always my understanding of the true cause of it, anyway. When you were 6 years old, summer vacation seemed to last forever... that's because you only have like, what, 3 years of sentience as your entire frame of reference? So as far as you could tell, a single summer vacation took up like 1/5th of your entire remembered life.

When you're 50, a single summer is just a blip on the radar, taking up a fraction of a percent of your frame of reference. So summers as you age feel progressively shorter and shorter than they did in the past.

Paul Stamets studies and advocates for medicinal uses of fungi. He's talked about some species of mushrooms that have been found to have great regenerative effects on human neural networks. I'm hoping it'll lead to future advances in dimensia prevention, but it's interesting to think about the way this could even effect our perceptions of time and aging

Practice mindfulness and focusing on the present and time moves a lot slower perception wise.

Psychedelics increase potential associative repertoire and also promote neurogenesis and synaptogenesis, so they may be a candidate for what you are talking about.

So basically we need to decrease the electrical resistance of our synapses. Maybe if we'd cool down our brains to superconducting temperatures then... Oh wait...

This drug is called meditation. Shown to increase grey matter mass and repair telomere caps. Good luck

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I don’t think this is the whole story. I also think conscious passage of time is important for our self-referential memory system, aka consciousness. We experience time in the small scale at approximately the same rate, whereas the feeling of larger time scales passing feels shorter. I think this is because the larger feeling is being compared to an evergrowing memory database

I recall a study about professional gamers who have maintained reaction times / visual synapsis blablabla.... does time go slower for them?

Wish I had the source!

I wonder if having the perspective of time passing quicker would contribute or even lead to the deterioration. Maybe worry is a better word..

That would be a great way to test it empirically rather than with a speculative study

a factor that nothing can truly resolve

Unless you also erase your memory.

If we have the technology to repair the degraded brain at that level, maybe we'll have the technology to selectively erase memories too.

And if we're able to "back up" those memories, and then restore them at will, we could have some sort of external database of memories, that we want to keep archived, but not actively in our brain.

Interesting also is how time seems to fly faster for people under high amounts of stress. That would make perfect sense under this model.

Shrooms supposedly build new neural pathways. The older you get the more you should shroom. I can get behind this.

Voluntary amnesia would solve that :)

Well the article said it happens when the neurons in your brain nature not degrade, which is maybe due to our accumulated life experience. If this is true then there’s nothing to necessarily repair right? We would possibly have to trade in our experiences in exchange for the ability to process more images per day. Wouldn’t be the worst trade off though!

Dredd slow mo

Another factor is the degradation of mitochondria over time - they get gunked up and oxidized. This might by why people with cognitive/memory issues can see improvements when consuming antioxidants.

I think there may be another factor here, in how static one perceives the world. It is well known that elderly homes or just living alone make their mental health drop much faster. This lack of stimulation might be accelerating the rate at which the brain creates resistance, slowing down thought processes. In other words, Make sure you rev your engine often to keep the oil flowing and clear of debris.

I'm sure sleep also plays a big part in this. If sleep degrades due to decreased happiness or quality of live caused by aging-related disorders such as arthritis, it might prevent cleaning processes that keep the synapses clear of debris.

Or you can just take meth, and time will go by much slower.

Judge Dredd would like to talk to you

I e discovered that certain stimulants can cause time to seem like it slows way down. I’ve had minutes literally seem like hours before.

I wonder how this would impact cognitive diseases like Alzheimer's or dementia. I would assume we would see less of it.

Of course there's the factor of experienced years under your belt, a factor that nothing can truly resolve. But that would still be one factor, while proper network maintenance would be a factor that COULD be resolved.

That is what I had always been under the impression that the speed change was caused by. At 4 years, 1 year is 25% of your life. At 20, it is 5%, and at 50 it is 2%, so it makes sense that it feels faster each time.

When I took too much acid due to user error, I experienced time dilation to songs and sounds I had reference too.

It would speed up and slow down and time would pause for a moment when the music I knew by heart should have had a steady beat.

Of course I could taste metal in my brain or at least the electricity while I was literally watching reality dismember like the matrix.

And this is very hard to test objectively since LSD is the ultimate form of “proof of qualia” but only to the person experiencing the event.

Would not recommend the average person doing this as had I not been a somewhat experienced psychonaught (This happened without supervision) I might have ended up dead or in jail had I left my apartment (Amazon Alexa is a great anchor)

But suffice to say, perception of time changes in these altered states so it’s not far fetched that the brain does this naturally.

Nootropics basically do exactly this, they also enhance learning for the same reasons. Your neural webs form faster, in other words, your neurons regenerate and form new pathways faster.

I thought it was just based on a lack of new experiences. When I travelled time slowed down again, and sped up at the same time. But mostly slowed down. When I'm home doing the same thing as always a year goes by in an instant. When you're a kid, everyday is a new experience.

Other things to keep in mind that (May) prolong time is your willingness to be more attentive to the present moment. Temperature also has an effect on how we perceive time as well as our mental state.

Nice response, you asked a valid question so it appears you support their conclusion, then follow it up with the obvious debunk. Resistance does not slow electrical signals.

I like the idea each year is a smaller percentage of your life so it appears faster than say when you were 4 or 5 when that year was a substantially larger portion of your experienced life.

Adderall

Or the fact that each year is a much smaller percent of your life. At age 10 a year is 10% of a life. At age 50 a year is 2% of a life.

Right! As you get older each minute you experience is a smaller fraction of your life total. Nothing will change that comparison.

You'd still have the problem of time seeming to go faster while doing a routine. At some point you've seen it all.

I always figued it was relative. When you are one year old, 1 year = your entire life. When you are thirty years old, 1 year is one 30th of your life, making it seem to go faster. I'm sure I'm wrong, but that was always the way I thought about it.

I always figured it's because people get in routines which causes time to appear to fly. Years 22-25 was almost the same deal everyday and now at 26 every week if very different and last year went by pretty slow to me

Of course there's the factor of experienced years under your belt

I feel like this is almost a bigger component of the feeling. If you've only experienced 10 years, a single year is 10% of your whole life. At 100, it's a measly 1% of your life.

Maybe it can be attributed as well to the fact that as you get older, a year represents less % of your life at that point plus the fact that we tend to remember and feel more time when we are experiencing new things which again with age happens less and less? I’m just rambling but the topic is so interesting

Responsibilities has something to do with it as well right. I mean kids have to go to school for 8 hours and that’s it , then it’s play for the rest of the day. Adults on the other hand has to go work for 8 hours , then they play husband /or wife + play mom /or dad for eight more hours then it’s bedtime and repeat. Depending on what your responsibilities are that day will definitely factor in the time and therefore make you feel as if you don’t have enough time. I remember I had to do a weekend in county jail and it felt like time stopped.

Mushrooms slow time time back down

What if life is just a series of events attuning your brain to a different method election transference?

Then if we maintain degraded experiences in the form of lower resistance, we should live forever!

Except our fleshy CPU only has so many cycles in it's hardware.

So psilocybin and neuro genesis?

To bad big Pharma would take that drug and sell it at such a high rate that only the 1% could afford it.

This would actually be every bit as valuable as life extension technology. By allowing people to more slowly experience their life as they age, you're effectively giving them a "longer" life.

This is what it sums up to in my head. Eventually we will degrade to <30fps

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You can only see 30 FPS.

Listen buddy the human brain can’t see more than 30 FPS. Get off it.

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There is a reference to published peer reviewed research at the bottom of the article.

You also have clear benchmarks when you're young, giving one time to reflect on specific periods. don't really have these after college

Precisely. I’ve done a lot of travelling, moved house 10 times in two countries both where I’ve had to learn the new local language and meet so, so many people and had so many varied experiences. I’ve married and had children. These last 10 years I’ve spent in Asia of discovery, learning and growing as a person have genuinely felt like a second childhood- like a whole lifetime, whereas my parents and friends at hone frequently remark ‘I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since you left, that flew by’. But they are all living in the same place with the the same jobs and routines. Of course it flew by for them.

Get out there, meet new people, learn and do new things as much as you can!

This.

This has been covered many times before by scientific articles. Another factor in play is how your brain deals with “noise.” Essentially, as a child, you haven’t yet learned what is significant and what isn’t. The brain regards literally every detail significant, because it is new, thus children lay down very rich memories.

By contrast, adults have learned to filter out unhelpful or useless information. And so the details we store as memory exponentially decrease as we age, especially if we maintain strict routines. If you want to see this in action (and potentially blow your mind),next time you’re driving, try to notice the telephone poles. Take in how weird and foreign they look, because most of the time you’ve just blended them in with the scenery and forgotten they’re actually there.

The best way to combat the passage of time is to constantly put yourself in unfamiliar situations.

new experiences and healthy breaks from routine really do change how you perceive things, its been demonstrated in numerous cases at this point. as you age and reflect back on a year of your life, of course it is relatively shorter than when you were 5 years old, but your day to day and week to week perception of time passing is way more tied to what you are doing (and how long youve been doing that same thing) rather than how old you are

It's probably some of both and other factors. The brain is not just an algorithm that exist in the ether. It requires hardware (wetware) to run.

Novelty fuels the time dilation engine in the brain.

This is why roadtrips always seem faster when returning home.

Basic training, first child, first year of college, man those took forever. Four years at the office? Instant.

This is actually what I always thought I had heard. When you're 4, the previous year seems extremely long because it's literally 1/4 of your existence. When you're 50, the year seems much shorter because it's merely 1/50th of your existence. That always made sense to me, but I'm not sure how accurate that may be. I don't remember if it was an actual study or just a hypothesis.

I always thought it was even simpler (and sort of the opposite of that) that: When you're young, you simply don't have that much going in on your life. You get up, go to school - play with friends - come home - eat supper - watch a bit of TV, go to bed. So like 6-7 'events' going on. (and all generally with little to no stress)

Now, as adults? You can have 6 or 7 'events' happening in an hour: stress getting to work, stress at work, stress dealing with clients, dealing with home life, with your kids, with your finances (investments/bills), reading the terrible news, thinking about the future, relationship stuff - etc. etc.

i.e. - you're compressing so much more stuff in a day, so your brain simply doesn't process it all, and 'skips' through - unlike when you're kid, you inevitably focus on the lesser volume of generally less stressful items. Your brain can simply process things in greater detail, so you notice it more - and time seems slower, yet the opposite is true as an adult. (that's my totally anecdotally based experience.)

Not concrete evidence but as someone that took a break from daily life and went traveling for 3 years...my mind got fucked so hard when it came to perception of time. Meeting so many new people everyday, sleeping in different places/cities everyday. It was mental. Sometimes people that I met weeks before felt like I had met them years ago!

I've done this. It doesn't work. I met my first serious girlfriend in my early thirties, got married (someone else) a couple years later and am about to have my second kid (couple more years). All of this time has flown by despite an enormous amount of new experiences.

This is real. Spend a year doing something very new to you, and the year will take forever...in a good way.

Yup, I always thought it was just based on a lack of new experiences. When I travelled time slowed down again, and sped up at the same time. But mostly slowed down. When I'm home doing the same thing as always a year goes by in an instant. When you're a kid, everyday is a new experience.

Unfortunately anecdote does not support your theory. Even older people with a great deal of variety in their lives will tell you that time seems to pass much quicker than it used to. A film camera running at a slower speed and capturing fewer frames does seem like a reasonable theory.

This is exactly how my layman self thinks it works. Again no science to back it up, but completely logical on the face of it.

The link to the actual scientific paper is at the bottom of the article...

You also experience less and less "new" things as you age. New experiences tend to stick in your mind as road signs along the way. When you're young things are constantly changing, you're moving, starting new jobs, going to new places, doing new things. When you're older you spend months and months doing literally the identical things over and over. Sometimes I walk into my office and it literally feels like I just left.

Although I'm a lay man on this matter, one thing that really made my eyebrow go up was the "Physics explains..." in the title.

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This has always been my preferred theory.

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I agree. When I went to college, it felt 2x as fast as before because you typically had half the class time compared to high school (for me). After a couple months on the job and things started going even faster.

Might I also raise you the possibility it is also partly due to the fact that if you get in a rhythm and a common routine, like most do as adults, your days blend together because theres Nothing to really tell them apart so your memory discards the half of it. That makes time seem like its flyyyying. If you fill your days with different and interesting things you literally feel like you are living fuller, with more time. Time moves slowly when you fill your memories every moment. Haha i dont do this im just saying i definitely know that routines and days blending together makes time fly, ive lost months and years.

But you forget so much about the past as well.

This is about consciousness of time, not physics.

Exactly this. Every moment is a lesser fraction of your total known time

I’m glad you are here to refute a paper published for peer review with your internet comment and opinion.

I read a recent brain science theory that the brain encodes time via events. Since events are only registered if processed by the brain, a slowing brain process would effectively lower the resolution of time encoding, like accidentally recording events at 12 frames a second instead of 24. This is just to say that the notion is not absurd on the face of it.

Yes. I always imagined that time seemed to pass paster as you got older because your experience of relative timescales gets longer as you live longer; at 10, 5 years is half your lifetime; at 50, 25 years is the same relative proportion to your lifetime.

You completely misunderstood both what the title says and the article says. The number of new images your brain processes is reduced, not the speed of which they're processed.

So for instance, over the space of lets says a second, a child will process lets say 50 images. This '50 images per second' becomes your experience of time.

Now you're 30 and the number of images processed per second is 25, however your brain is still using that 50 images a second clock. So when your brain only experiences 25 images, your brain feels like that was half a second when in reality it was 1. So your brain experiences everything twice as fast as when it was a child.

Obviously these are just made up numbers for the example, most likely the degregation isn't linear and your "base clock" likely changes as well. But the title and the assertion of the paper seems perfectly reasonable.

3) speed by which neurons absorb information about immediate surroundings decreases as we age leading to a less identifiable sense of experience. We judge passage of time by our recollection of this experience, and thereby physics helps explain our altered perceptions.

Fully agree. Was the physics explanation given by a younger person?

Though, I truly believe that more thoroughly 'experiencing' every second (as per this instance: being more comprehensively aware, faster) brings this same 'sense' or consciousness of 'longer' time.

If you're more focused every single moment, aware of the little things, & appreciating thoroughly/on an existential level 'your time' will 'pass' slower

Yep, you're totally right. This professor with his peer reviewed, journal accepted study knows absolutely nothing.

You got it. The researcher didn't get it.

There is a great numberphile video about this, its called the Weber Fechner law.

This is the reason why.

thank god someone said it

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Wouldn’t it be far-fetched?

Isn't more likely that that it's due to the length of time relative to your age. At age 10, another decade is a whole lifetime for you whereas at age 50 it's only 20%, and you don't experience it to be as overwhelming.

I don't think your explanation and this one are mutually exclusive, it could easily be a combination of the two factors. There's plenty of evidence that the brain degenerates gradually as we age so it wouldn't surprise me.

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Totally agree. As a working adult, I'm basically just going through a routine Monday to Friday. Weekends have their own routine as well, and if I'm lucky somewhere in there I get some time to do something just for me...

As a kid, it felt like each day was unplanned. Which friend is available today? Are we going to cruise the neighborhood on our bikes? Or go skateboarding? Go swimming or fishing? Or maybe try to catch frogs or crayfish in the creek? Everyday (well, many days) brought new experiences and adventures.

Routine is what makes life go by fast, at least for me...

Routine is part of it. We aren't as conscious of as many things and have a better concept of time progression than when we are younger. A 10 year old can't understand 1 month from now as well, or at all, compared to someone in their 30s.

Our ability to focus also increases and that causes us to lose track of time. Stare at a clock for 5 minutes versus playing a game for 5 minutes. One is going to seem a lot faster even though they are both 5 minutes.

Edit: while it is probably true that a kid and adult watching a clock perceive the time differently, it wouldn't be drastic enough to impact our lives like this.

I've always thought it was as simple as how a length of time feels compared to how long you've been alive. 1 year when you're 2 is half your entire life. But 1 year when you're 50 is just a tiny fraction.

I always just assumed it was because each new day is a slightly smaller percentage of the time you have lived.

When you are 10 a year is 10% of your life, when you are 50, it's only 2%

I am fond of that way of thinking too. You can see that by picking one weekend and only watch TV or play games alone. Take a different weekend and get up early for a walk, gym, museum, shopping etc for two days straight. On Mondays after think about how fast you felt time passed.

I think when working a routine job with same weekends the brain is not processing and evaluating new info. When younger work order new and weekends are less of a routine so you steer forming new connections and memories constantly.

It helps to spice up week days and week ends to slow things down even when older.

Im going to believe in that explanation no matter what cause i REALLY dont want to wake up tomorrow and find out that im 40 or something.

Basically, the larger percentage of our life that we are on autopilot, the less time we notice

I always thought it had something to do with routine. Like our brain gets better at slacking off and being efficient when doing familiar tasks, so it isn't as stressed as it is in a new situation. Doing something that is mentally exhausting definitely makes it feel like time is dragging on

Isn't your second paragraph endorsing the basic mechanism behind this theory though? Yes there are times in our older lives when the brain slows down to take in more detail, but on the average our brains go slower as we age. We can't muster the sustained fast processing of youth as a baseline.

I agree. Look at most older people's lives. Even just 30+ years old. They do the same boring things ever day, for years on end. In a better experiment, we should have older and younger people doing things that feel equally novel to them.

This was posted by a clinical Professor of medicine with a MD-PHD-MBA and you have what qualifications to make this guess?

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Time feels like it dissipates when you die off of it. I wonder if they could do measurements to confirm this theory while under an MRI.

I don't think it's accurate to say there is more neural activity on LSD. It's neural activity of a different quality.

And as you age you experience less novelty since you’ve seen everything before.

I’m 24 years old and would have to agree. Sometimes I feel like I’m 40. But time is all relative to the perceiver. The earth is approx 4.5 BILLION years old. Did those billions of years fly by or was it slow?

TBH, I think that this is a much bigger factor. I mean we do things we do daily at the same speed and (at least to me) it doesn't feel like I'm doing them faster than before, they just have increasingly less meaning the more often I do them.

I don’t think you should abandon that idea just because of this publication. This guy is just spitballing and his theory doesn’t really make sense. The change in time experience as we age doesn’t take the form of each moment seeming to fly by quicker, it’s the feeling of weeks, months and years flying by faster than before (as one saying has it, “the days are long but the years are short”). If it were to do with signal speed then we should expect each moment to seem faster.

Always beware of physicists straying into other disciplines. They tend to think that all other scientists are just failed physicists, and from there that there is a simple physics-based answer to various problems, which all the failed physicists just haven’t thought of.

It's probably both

This has always been my theory and makes the most sense.

This is the theory I've been taught and it's the one I still believe tbh. This publication just seems like another theory, with less credibility.

Was complaining this afternoon how the last 3 hours of my shift felt closer to 5 hours. I think we should be paid at the rate images are obtained and processed by the human brain.

Exactly. Life seems to fly by and then my wife wants to go to Ikea ...

I wonder if this is a passive degradation or an active mechanism that could be blocked.

It seems counterintuitive that our brains should intentionally slow themselves, but it could (hypothetical example) be to reduce calorie consumption - to free calories for repairs or reduce intake to make food available for the young.

But why would time seems faster if we process things more slowly?

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This sort of implies that your perception of your life has a fixed length, but I have much older memories now than I did when I was 5. Do you believe that the perception of your life does indeed grow as you age, but not as fast as you actually age?

Yep, when I moved to Chicago the first few months felt longer than the past few years, and my new job? Those first few months I was learning so much in terms of the new tech stack architecture, and novel information that the first couple of months seemed to last forever, and not in retrospect too, I remember feeling how much longer the days felt etc.

You mean obese people are actually sprinting through life ?

You might be on to something.

This is not how mass or gravity or the pull of space-time works. :)

Well amputees lose body mass AND slow down! My god, you might be on to something!

;)

Sounds good to me. We know time is relative, we know time moves slower the further you move from the Earth (astronauts on the ISS age slower than on Earth). My theory is that time depends on the concentration of energy (including mass) and so the entropy of separate, closed (not isolated) systems. A child has low mass and is still developing a default mode network (a default neural network) and so might, relative to its context/surroundings, experience time as developing relatively slow. Contrast this with an adult who has an established default mode network and higher mass; the increased concentration of energy and so higher state of entropy would result in faster experience of time.

All speculation of course. But to me it explains why ‘time moves faster when you’re having fun’ and ‘slower when you’re bored’: higher vs. lower state of entropy relative to environment.

I moved to Germany. I can visit new cities and/or towns every weekend, and see new things in most of the rest of them that I didn't get around to the first time. And if I managed to use all that up, I can move again to a new place. Maybe in 10 years I'll go live in Japan or something.

Introduce new experiences into your life every day, and don't allow yourself to fall into repeatable patterns, and you'll experience more of "life", because it will be slowed down to a normal pace.

I came to this same conclusion recently, it makes sense to me.

Yes, and wear a tinfoil hat to deflect the collisions of the time stealing government neural weapons.

By that logic, time is faster for Peter dinklage than it is for Shaq?

It took me a minute and a half, at age 33. Math adds up.

Novel experiences are supposed to slow down time but every new experience is referenced/informed by and built upon the prior. Like, we can learn a new language but we already understand the concept of language.

I'm curious about how we percieve time in a dream-space. In my dreams, I can spend "hours" doing something completely nonsensical as if it's normal, old hat. Like, "ho-hum just placking my elbowteeth together super fast to conjure flatoms from this fourgly dimensional soundstain that is actually my nonmom-in-reverse. As one does."

Dream-me not only understands whatever the hell this means, she accepts it as routine and wants to get it over with so she can enjoy her putty swing while it's still fresh. Someone analyze pls?