Do you recall summer vacations lasting forever? A year lasting forever? Weeks pass today, and before you know it, December arrives.” Why is time suddenly passing us by now that we’re older, and is there anything we can do to get it to stop?
Brain scientists have discovered some interesting aspects of the nature of time passage and its relationship to memory consolidation, attentional patterns, and how the brain processes new experiences.
Once you know how we perceive time, you’ll know why childhood lasted forever and adulthood was over before you could say it. And most importantly, it provides us with hints on how to regain that sense of having as much time on our hands as we wasted blindly.
Memory Density: The Rearview Mirror Effect
How long it takes is predominantly a function of how much memory you’ve accumulated in between. A week’s worth of new material is forever. If days are empty drudgery, time is lost.
Dr. Claudia Hammond, author of “Time Warped,” writes of how children create rich, rich memories because it’s all new to them. First day of school. Learning to ride a bike. First night away. With each new experience, there’s a new anchor for the memory, and time will seem to slow down on later return visits.
Most powerful drivers of time perception based on memory:
- Autobiographical memory – The more sensory-rich your memories are, the longer stretches of time will seem when recalled
- Day-to-day compression – Compressive days possess fewer memory markers and therefore weeks simply disappear
- The holiday paradox – Holidays pass rapidly, but live but durational when recalled, due to memory density
Adults always fall into routines. Same company picnic. Same lunch at the same diner. Same Saturday routine. Your mind stops paying attention to all those routine things in excruciating detail, filling gaps in your memory that allow months to vanish overnight.
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The Proportional Theory: Life as a Percentage
Psychologist William James had a mathematical solution: a year is a diminishing proportion of your entire life with age.
If you’re 10, a year is 10% of your whole life, so much lived. If you’re 50, the same year is only 2% of your life. This relative difference skews the subjective experience of time.
Let’s say your life is a tape. Physically, one year is the same as another year, but relative to the whole tape, each step gets progressively smaller proportionally. A 5-year-old adding one year to his life is adding 20%. A 40-year-old adding one year to his life is adding 2.5%.
Here’s a hypothesis for carrying this feeling of youth into the future: young life has psychological baggage. Blasphemous, maybe, but brain imaging sciences suggest time estimation appropriately gets reindexed when experience accumulates, and that suggests our neural computation of time changes as our database of experience expands.
Read More: The Science of Déjà Vu
Attention and Novelty: The Real Time Thieves
When fully absorbed and alert, hours seem to slip away. When fidgety and wretchedly aware of the passing hours, minutes crawl by. It is the agony of focus that accounts for so much of how childhood seemed to drag on forever.
Children live in this newness all the time. All of these things must be cared for: new words, faces, feelings, and rules. Adults pilot on autopilot most of the time, saving energy by falling back into the rhythms of the day. You drive home through the driveway without recalling the ride home because your head didn’t take the effort to file it.
Dr. Marc Wittmann of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology found that heightened awareness in the present moment slows the subjective perception of time. Mindfulness training actually alters your subjective experience of time by prompting your brain to work harder to extract more meaning from everyday life.
You understand why time appears to hasten its passage as you age: fewer novel stimuli leave temporary impressions, and every year is a shrinking percentage of life. The bad news? Time cannot be domesticated. Shatter the customs. Track down novelty. Pay attention to the mundane moments. Get somewhere else. Become proficient in hard skills. Those activities trigger your brain to get going, allowing you to concentrate and construct rich images, tapping into the subjective experience of time.
Your childhood summer always seemed to take forever because everything was novel. Recapture the richness by keeping novelty at position number one again.
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