No one is sure where this feeling comes from

[82_28]

Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?

Yes, we all get older. But now, getting older has become a video fetish; all kinds of people take pictures of themselves every day for six, seven, eight years and then blend the images together into a ... well, if you've missed the Web craze, Homer Simpson's "Every Day" is a perfect catcher-upper.

Not only can you see Homer switching jobs (cavalryman, Indian, king, infantryman, fisherman, fireman), you watch his body grow, swell, swag. As with all things Simpson, the physical changes are dramatic.

But what these videos don't show are the psychological changes, and one of the most universal changes is that as humans age, they change the way they feel about time.

Faster And Faster And Faster

As people get older, "they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are," says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University.

This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world.

No one is sure where this feeling comes from.

Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine says that since the touch of the lips, the excitement, the taste, the smell — everything about this moment is novel — you aren't embroidering a bank of previous experiences, you are starting fresh.

Have you noticed, he says, that when you recall your first kisses, early birthdays, your earliest summer vacations, they seem to be in slow motion? "I know when I look back on a childhood summer, it seems to have lasted forever," he says.

That's because when it's the "first", there are so many things to remember. The list of encoded memories is so dense, reading them back gives you a feeling that they must have taken forever. But that's an illusion. "It's a construction of the brain," says Eagleman. "The more memory you have of something, you think, 'Wow, that really took a long time!'

"Of course, you can see this in everyday life," says Eagleman, "when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there. But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you're not really writing it down anymore. There's nothing novel about it."

That may be because the brain records new experiences — especially novel and exciting experiences — differently. This is even measurable. Eagleman's lab has found that brains use more energy to represent a memory when the memory is novel.

So, first memories are dense. The routines of later life are sketchy. The past wasn't really slower than the present. It just feels that way.

There are all kinds of arguments one could have with this theory, but before we poke it, we want you to feel it.

Here's a celebration of dense early memories from a very recently departed (not to heaven, just back to California) intern at NPR, Maggie Starbard. With a bunch of friends (Caitlin Fitch, Mark Turner and Mike Eckelkamp), Maggie decided to dwell on a lazy beach where kids are collecting dense memories by the truckload:

Now for the pokes. Who said that novel experiences belong exclusively to the young?

Older people have novel experiences — lots of them. Some of us have crazier middle ages than youths. We fall in love, out of love. Then our parenting years are filled with watching our babies' first thises, first thats. Retired people travel — if they can afford to — to duplicate some of those rushes of novel experiences.

Yes, it's true, the youngest years are chock full of novelty, but Duke's Warren Meck points out that when you hit your 60s and 70s, and time is beginning to run out, experiences get more precious and once again you remember all the details.

So take this "novelty" explanation for why time moves faster as you age and weigh it as you will.

Other theories may prove more satisfying.

Professors Meck and Eagleman explore a number of them on our All Things Considered broadcast. If you wish to hear the "Aging Brain" theory of why time goes faster, or the "How Long Have You Been Alive?" explanation, they await you at the top of this page, where the button says "Listen."

Audio report at link:

http://www.wbur.org/npr/122322542

[Howling Rainbows]

Life is a logrithmic experience. We can only double our age so many times.

From age 1 year to age 2 years we double.
2 to 4
4 to 8
8 to 16
16 to 32
32 to 64
64 to 128

A child of one year old has a perspective that a lifetime is one year. At two his lifespan has doubled.

Our perspective of what a lifetime is, is based on our last doubling of age. At 64 we know, instinctively, whether cognitively or not, that we don't get to do it again.

[23]

Time is nothing but a roll of toilet paper.

The closer you are to its end, the faster it unrolls.

Which suggests, of course, that your experience of time ends when you discard your spacesuit.

A comforting notion to some of us.

And a discomforting one to others.

[JackRiddler]

Life is a logrithmic experience. We can only double our age so many times.

From age 1 year to age 2 years we double.
2 to 4
4 to 8
8 to 16
16 to 32
32 to 64
64 to 128

A child of one year old has a perspective that a lifetime is one year. At two his lifespan has doubled.

Our perspective of what a lifetime is, is based on our last doubling of age. At 64 we know, instinctively, whether cognitively or not, that we don't get to do it again.

Exactly what I was going to say.

But a 1 year old isn't conscious of existing as an individual being in the same way, and won't remember anything specific (as a rule) except a sort of vague timeless forever. I'll base this on my own experience of actually realizing I existed and would remember everything (so to speak) henceforth, which happened in literally a minute at around 4 years of age. And I did remember everything after that as a continuum. Most people I've talked to about this also say they had such a moment.

So it really starts at around 3 or 4. A year is your whole life, then after another year it's half your life. Although, really, everything until around 8 or 9 is also a kind of forever, but with consciousness compared to the infant years. And then the next year is just 1/5th of what you remember as a continuum, at 20 it's about 1/15th, at 30 1/25th, and so on.

This is so obvious (alongside the effect that the first time for any given experience is almost always the sharpest and "slowest" memory of it) I wonder why it's not mentioned as a factor in the article.

If you assign a percentage value to each year as subjective time, and assuming a lifespan of 70, I think you've lived most of your subjective life by adolescence. (Someone remember how to do the math?) The thing I find now is that everything still feels recent, I feel just like I'm still very young, and the time of course flies - and it's impossible to explain to the young, or make them take it seriously. They tend to think the divide between young and old is huge and youth will last forever. As did I, although I was aware of the logarithmic effect already back then. The nice thing about where I'm at now is that pretty much everyone between 20 and 80 now feels like a peer.

[Nordic]

This is so obvious (alongside the effect that the first time for any given experience is almost always the sharpest and "slowest" memory of it) I wonder why it's not mentioned as a factor in the article.

Well, isn't that why we're here? Because the regular media just doesn't do it for us? They leave out obvious things, they don't do their homework, they are, well, kinda stupid.

I'm glad you guys figured it out without me. I was going to post that, thinking to myself "sheesh, I thought it was obvious ....."



I just had a birthday, and yes, last year was 1/48th of my lifetime. Nothing! Except that it did royally suck. Glad it was such a small year.

[jingofever]

Life is a logrithmic experience. We can only double our age so many times.

I don't think it matters whether our age doubles, triples, or whatever. The experience argument makes more sense to me. When you are younger and your brain lacks much input it is more conscious because because it is attending to that input. As you grow older and acquire more patterns your brain mostly just takes a peek at any scene and fills the rest of the details with what it expects to see, no attention required, just a simple application of Bayes' theorem. With more patterns to draw on you need to pay attention to less so time just flies by. I assume there is a peak level of consciousness for people sometime early in life. After that you join the Republican Party, buy a condo in Florida (or Atlantic City, for the gambling) and never look back unless you get lucky and suffer massive head trauma (I have actually read about several cases of this. You can spin it as either getting sense knocked into them or that you need brain damage to be a liberal. So if you are ever at a family gathering and want to convert your uncle or cousin, remember the correct dosage is just under a lethal blow, applied to the head. I'm not sure from what direction - you'll have to play around with that.) You become unconscious, just like Gurdjieff said. In fact, though I know exactly nothing about it, I think what occult practice (perhaps especially chaos magic) offers people is new patterns that they need to adapt to which makes them a little conscious or enlightened for a little bit. Of course if you stick with the same little ritual or hex or whatever they do you lose the benefit. I think Buddhists, with the same goal, encourage you to be mindful of every mundane detail of life. The East says slow down and pay attention, the West says overdose on drugs and have weird sex. Actually the East also says have weird sex. That's how I see it anyways.

[norton ash]

The stupid thing I can't resist doing (at 47) (actually it's becoming a compulsion) is forward/backwards comparisons.

So if I remember Sgt. Pepper songs on the radio as a 5-year-old... that was 43 years ago... 43 years before 1967 was 1924... omfg. That sort of thing.

London Calling was 31 years ago... 31 years before that was 1948. There is now the same gap of years between the Sex Pistols in '77 and the present, as there is between D-Day and the Pistols. Youngest-case scenarios for a World War II vet might have him going home in 1945 at 20... but he'd be 85 today.
These are the same guys I used to like to drink with at the Canadian Legion when I was 19 in 1981, and now they're all dead.

So what always seemed like frigging epochs, long decades of change... well, I guess I've covered those same HUGE periods during my own little spin on this mortal coil. And since 1980 seems like yesterday, time indeed seems to be speeding up for me.

[norton ash]

Wow... here "this feeling" is in action. On the animations thread in the Lounge, thurnundtaxis put up the beautiful French animated short "Night Bird" ... which I just watched now, humming the simple/haunting guitar score before the film even started, music which I last heard when I saw the film at a cinema in '78 or '79 (twice) as part of a "Fantastic Animation Festival" compilation.

Some things stay with you... a piece of music heard only twice in one evening. Maybe it helps if you experience them when you're 16-17 and have eaten hashish.

[NaturalMystik]

It seems like their theory may be that adding more novelty decreases the speed of time, or at least perception of it. Could timewave zero be a point where there is so much novelty that time completely stops or collapses?

[JackRiddler]

The stupid thing I can't resist doing (at 47) (actually it's becoming a compulsion) is forward/backwards comparisons.

So if I remember Sgt. Pepper songs on the radio as a 5-year-old... that was 43 years ago... 43 years before 1967 was 1924... omfg. That sort of thing.

London Calling was 31 years ago... 31 years before that was 1948. There is now the same gap of years between the Sex Pistols in '77 and the present, as there is between D-Day and the Pistols. Youngest-case scenarios for a World War II vet might have him going home in 1945 at 20... but he'd be 85 today.
These are the same guys I used to like to drink with at the Canadian Legion when I was 19 in 1981, and now they're all dead.

So what always seemed like frigging epochs, long decades of change... well, I guess I've covered those same HUGE periods during my own little spin on this mortal coil. And since 1980 seems like yesterday, time indeed seems to be speeding up for me.

YES YES. Especially inasmuch as many of these long-distant phenomena seem entirely contemporary to me, or really are still around. I do this every day. I always think how I was born with World War II still casting a shadow on everyone's minds, having only ended just 20 years before, and having very much set up my own life. (Without it I probably would have been born not in New York but in an isolated village of 400 without a road or power, however with all my grandparents alive.) Now 1945 is 65 years ago - equidistant from 1880! In other words I have now lived through more than 2/3 of what's still called the "postwar age."

As I became aware in the 1970s, there was a '50s nostalgia wave and to me it felt like an attachment to ancient history. I barely noticed the time go by, and then it was the 1990s and the mass culture was doing a '70s nostalgia wave! Yesterday I sang along with the radio to "Pulling Mussels from the Shell," and I couldn't help promptly announcing (at its end) that this song is pushing 30! Every movie I see, especially if I saw it before - for example yesterday we watched a DVD of "Happiness" (1997) - I'll announce, "More than 10 percent of all film history has passed since this movie was in the theaters!" (In case you're wondering why my girlfriend hates me.) And then I'll talk about how the audience reacted it to it "back" then. (1997? Don't tell me that's not The Present. I was already spending my life on the Internet.)

It's especially ridiculous with movies or bands I already thought were some kind of Final Death of Culture in the 1980s, and they're still around and there's been 25 years of often even worse trash since.

A NEW THOUGHT:

I do believe the feeling is magnified by an effect that is particular to our time, and did not exist before.

Mass broadcast media brought on a huge change: simultaneity and homogenization of cultural products across whole nations and regions, and the beginnings of a process that broke the old divide between the literate and oral social classes. Then came what we are still calling the media revolution - starting already with LPs, cassettes and VHS, long before mass digitalization, portable communications and the Internet - which increasingly put the means of recording and distribution in the consumers' hands while also making media consumption a pervasive activity that most everyone is constantly engaged in whether at home, work, in a car, on the street or subway, in a bar, or in a waiting room at a doctor's office or the unemployment department.

The combination and critical mass of technologies that has come together in the last few decades means that almost every entertainment and news snippet produced since music and film could be recorded is still in circulation or readily accessible, and often sampled and pushed at you in public or shared environments (office radio, outdoor TVs, music while you're on hold, etc.). So everything increasingly belongs to a constant present that in spirit reaches back to about the late 1960s or even the 1950s. (Black-and-white to color is one of the dividing lines between The Long Present and The Pre-Historic, as is to a lesser extent the move from orchestral big bands to rock and pop groups that any bunch of kids could start in a garage.) You have style revivals even while the style they're derived from is still commonly heard or seen. Acts that flopped and were never heard from again become golden finds 20 years later and exponentially more popular than they were in their own time. Many of the kids currently being exposed to what I believe is the third Beatles Revival are not cognizant of the fact that the Beatles broke up 40 years ago, and may think it's a current band. I think since about the 1980s (I have to be cautious because that's when I came of age) an era in the West no longer has a distinct "spirit" or feel, but rather an amalgam (worse: an average?) of all of them at once.

[Nordic]

[norton ash]

Good one, Riddler... great pic, Nordic. It all seems analogous to my TV-watching border collie barking at the onscreen dog in FW Murnau's "Sunrise" (1927) the other night.

Hush, Buddy, he's been dead for 80 years...

A surfeit of ghosts in the machine, replicating.

[JackRiddler]

[brainpanhandler]

Many of the kids currently being exposed to what I believe is the third Beatles Revival are not cognizant of the fact that the Beatles broke up 40 years ago, and may think it's a current band.

[barracuda]

So as the days and years grow comparatively briefer, the experiencial resonance somehow thickens, and every pain and pleasure, every new dead bird and love song accreates with layers of hidden meanings from your lived life that add richness, depth and breadth to each walk down the street on each new subsequent February the third. On some particularly lonely days, it feels as if I'm struggling just to put one foot in front of the other while slogging against the bittersweet syrup of memory.