Why it feels like time speeds up as you get older

It seems as you get older, you remark more and more on how quickly the time is going.

The Roman poet Virgil wrote in Book III of Georgics...

fugit inreparabile tempus

Which roughly translates as "it flees, irretrievable time". The phenomenon that our once-dizzying expanses of time in which to luxuriate and live are growing shorter and shorter, is not a new one.

Scientists from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich looked at the phenomenon in 2005 as Scientific American reported. Marc Wittman and Sandra Lenhoff surveyed 499 participants between the ages of 14 and 94 about how quickly they perceived time to be passing.

What was noticeable was that for shorter durations (days, weeks, months, even years) there was no marked difference between ages. Young people said days had gone as slowly as often as old people did.

Most participants felt that the clock ticked by quickly.

However, for longer periods of time, such as a decade, older people perceived time moving faster.

Participants over the age of 40, in particular, felt that time elapsed slowly in their childhood, but accelerated throughout their early adult life.

Partly this is due to relative experience. One year of your life is a fifth of your life when you're five years old. When you're 20 it's 1/20th.

It is also due to the way the brain recalls memory.

We store memories based on new experiences, and new experiences will be more vivid and easy to recall than regular ones. Our brain wants to recall unique events more easily in case they occur again, so we are able to deal with them as a survival advantage.

It's called the Holiday Paradox.

The phenomenon explains why you'll remember new experiences more freshly, and simply put you'll have fewer new experiences as you age.

Thus your early years are more memorable and seem like a larger expanse of time - you're less likely to forget them, compared to later years.

Unless of course, you keep learning new skills, seeing new locations and having new experiences.

It seems they really do keep you feeling young.

HT Scientific American

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