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Why Time Flies By As You Get Older
Ant notes a piece up on WBUR Boston addressing theories to explain the universal human experience that time seems to pass faster as you get older. Here's the 9-minute audio (MP3). Several explanations are tried out: that brains lay down more information for novel experiences; that the "clock" for nerve impulses in aging brains runs slower; and that each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.
And we just think it does.
Michio Kaku did a great show about time for the BBC and at the end of one episode he asked young/old people to count 60 seconds. The older people consistently counted for much longer than the actual minute while younger people consistently counted much faster.
If you think about it, when one were 5, the 5 years has gone forever in the eyes of that person. When one becomes 10, he sees it as time has gone twice as fast. Something like that.
I didn't H(ear)TFA, but it's in MP3 and I'm deaf you insensitive clod! :)
I calculated it out, and If you factor in how slow time moves after you die this is pretty obvious.
I want to be older, I'm tired of this long school day bullshit.
Anyone want to trade bodies?
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
It felt like 5!
I've assumed that time is actually just speeding up. Based on research that consisted of watching lots of Star Trek: TNG, I decided a spatial anomaly is to blame. As a bonus, this also explains the Pioneer anomaly; the probe appears to be slowing down because it's getting out of reach of the speedy-time anomaly.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I've always put it down as either our heads getting bigger, or brain matter getting either denser or more complexly connected. I'd like a defrag please.
Generally young people have a lot more to look forward too so time seems to go by quickly, older people have really not much to look forward to so time goes slowly. How many times in school did you count down the days till summer? With older people there is less to look forward to because there is generally less things to -do- that is fresh and new. While you might have really enjoyed TV while young, by the time someone is older they begin to see that all of the plots are exactly the same.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
shit, that's a boredom-laced eternity.
How about this: the universe has expanded to it's apex some time ago and is now contracting, and the gradual deflation of the space-time continuum is causing time itself to slow down, befuddling our limited perception? Doesn't the basic theory that underlies all we know about the universe warn that this very scenario is a possibility? Or are we now under quantum theory where time doesn't start slowing down until we realize that it already is?
...Oh shit, I sure hope not, if we are then I've just triggered the end of the unive
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
> I'd like a defrag please.
...needing to defrag is like saying you need fresh horses...
Hellooo...have you seen the type of brains available now? Six, going on seven layers...adaptive reasoning, darwin-series inhibitors, enlarged stem, v2 fight-or-flight firmware. Things have changed since some people started wearing pants you know.
If you are 1 year old, then 1 day represents about 1/365th of your life. If you are 10 years old, then 1 day represents about 1/3,650th of your life. Thus the older you are the faster time may appear to pass by. When you are 1 year old, 1 day may seem to last much longer than 1 day when you are 10 years old.
A radio host will explain why the pioneer anomaly has taken place. The explanation will be structured according to the following: 'it could be reason A, it could be B, it might be C, or it might be something completely different'. News follows at 9.
When you're one year old, your entire life memory is a year. Thus, a year's passage is a lifetime. When you're 100, a year's passage is 1/100th of the same time.
Q: Why did the boy throw a clock out the window?
A: To see time fly
Table-ized A.I.
My personal theory without reading TFA[1] is this: When you are younger your head is in "learning mode". In learning mode the brain tries to absorb as much info and details about a given event as possible. In order to do this, it has to focus on lots of details. The more details the brain processes, the slower time seems to move because we unconsciously calculate the passage of time by the quantity of events, in part. The more events, the more time we assumed has passed. Thus, if we are paying attention to more events, consciously or unconsciously, then more events are used in our mental time passage calculation.
[1] Skipped it out of a random whim
Table-ized A.I.
I've thought a good bit about this.
1) Each day is a smaller percentage of your life as you get older.
2) Christmas is a black hole that slows down time. You're a greedy kid who is constantly anticipating Christmas.
3) Related to 2, when you are looking towards a goal (finals, spring break, etc) I think time slows down a bit. But most people aren't going to do that for retirement (even if we are allowed to retire). You then go into day-by-day mode and that goes a lot faster.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
If it is phycological that means I just need to change my way of thinking right? Right? Right? Come on... why isn't anyone answering me?
Of course (?) one hour for a person of age 5 is a LOT longer than one hour for a person of age 50. Compare how many % that hour is of his/her life... One hour is 10 times bigger part of life for 5 year old than 50.
"Life is like a roll of toilet paper: the older you get, the faster it goes."
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I would say it has to do with what the brain expects. When we are young, or we try something novel, the brain doesn't know how to best allocate resources to it. So it allocates more resources to counter the unexpected events that could pop up, this results in some energy waste.
When we do something we have done before, we know what to expect so that the brain can efficiently calculate resources required for that task. This more efficient resource allocation results in dampened personal experience as we age, because incidents of unexpected events reduce in frequency.
I figured that out all on my own in my mid twenties. Seems like it was just yesterday.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
---
Psychology Feed @ Feed Distiller
On a related note:
The Secret Advantage Of Being Short
So if we grow taller with age, time will remain constant.
Brilliant!!
Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things. People also get more responsibility as they age, so more responibilities = less time. That's my thesis; I think it's pretty good!
"I want to be older, I'm tired of this long school day bullshit."
Better to want to do the very best you can where you are in life. I wouldn't trade my 65 years of experiences and my white hair for anything in this world.
Heard once (no reference available) that the subjective experience of a normal modern lifetime is half over by the time you reach 20. So the last 60(?) years seem as long as the first 20. Wonder if it's a linear decay or something more exotic... with only one (admittedly unsubstantiated) data point, it's impossible to know.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
that MP3 felt more like 7 minutes rather than 9.
Wait.... Shit..
You've heard the saying "time flies when you're having fun", right? Well there is an important reason for this.
There are only two things that exist in this universe from a human perspective. These two things are the desire for pleasure, and the filling of that desire. Even a cursory look into it will show you that pleasure (and the pursuit thereof) is the regulator of all human action. For instance, I would not be typing this message for you were it not to give me pleasure (or a calculated amount of suffering for a greater future pleasure).
Picture a small pool of water - this is the desire for pleasure - and a drop of water hitting it - this is the fulfilment of it. The ripples, the water's sole measurable reaction to the droplet, are waves which we perceive as pleasure. Pleasure is felt at time of impact between desire and fulfillment - this is why, unfortunately, pleasure isn't felt forever as the fulfillment, like a drop of water, is nullified within the larger body of the vessel.
Consider the bandwidth of these ripples. A larger vessel will result in a larger bandwidth. As we grow, this vessel grows larger with us, due to the increased pleasure that lies beneath the surface. The lower bandwidth results in the perception of an acceleration of time.
So why does lower bandwidth result in "faster" time? Again, we need to go back to the start where I made the important point that a human organism is regulated by pleasure. It only perceives pleasure. Therefore, a lower bandwidth of pleasure means that the time between the ripples is not perceived by the human organism. As such, more time is passing between perception of pleasure - the the timing of the inanimate level (i.e. the clock) moves at a faster rate versus our perception.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
every 15 minutes it's breakfast time.
Maybe it's because we experience events in real time and recall all events almost instantly.
So when you are 10 years old you only recall a very small amount of life. Recollection is instant and seems to encompass a huge amount of experiences (which is true since you are new to life).
But when you are 50 years old you recall all 50 years almost instantly and it seems as though it has happened so quickly (it has - you just remembered 50 years in the same small amount of time where you used to recall only 10).
This is quite different to what the article suggests since they talk of the density of the experience rather than the speed of recollection versus amount of life experienced.
Porcupine Tree's most recent album has an excellent 15 minute epic on this subject, titled "Time Flies". Check it out if you're bored one day and in the mood for some excellent modern rock.
Also, when you're 5 years old, the maximum amount of time that you need to spend doing something in order to feel like you've achieved something worthwhile is probably in the order of 5-10 minutes or so (drawing a picture, writing your name, building a sandcastle at the beach, making something with Lego).
When you get to middle-age, things take much longer (achieving success in your chosen field, raising children, paying off a mortgage etc).
My theory is that it's the lengthening of the distance in time between major milestones that makes time appear to move faster as you get older. It simply takes a lot longer to achieve anything of significance.
I came to this conclusion back in high school.
It's all related to metabolism. The slower your metabolism, the faster your perception of time. Consider a fruit fly or equally small creature. They have lightning quick metabolisms. They also experience their entire lifespan in the course of a day or so. Their quick metabolism equates to a slow perception of time. That single day seems like forever to them, an entire lifetime.
So as we age and our metabolisms slow, our perception of time is skewed and appears to speed up.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
It's quite obvious really. Time actually is speeding up, and has been since the big bang, at which point time was actually stopped. Thus each person gets to experience time speeding up within their own lifetime.
The discrepancy between old people and young people at any given time is due to old people having memories of when time really was going slower, so in comparison the current rate of time feels extra fast to them.
Gosh. It seems like just yesterday[1] that NPR was causing a big fuss over deep linking of content, and here it is again on the main page.
[1]: I must be getting old.
Kid-proof tablet..
My grandmother is 94 years old and I asked her if time slows down when you get older, ie: after retirement age, and she said it does. Hence the speed of time is all relative to how busy someone is.
"Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana."
I assume that's where the department name under the story headline comes from.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
57 seconds. And I would have been within a couple of seconds a decade ago, too. Most musicians tend to have a fairly good concept of tempo.
So, does any of this explain why my metronome keeps speeding up and slowing down? I keep replacing them, but the new ones always seem to be broken too...
9 minutes? This seemed like hours...
Are you sure that was a 9 minute audio file? I could have sworn it felt like it was less than 5.
Why does time seems to slow down when you are not drunk. Because it's boring when you're not drunk....
Methinks it is a combination of size and complexity. When you're young, smaller and (relatively) non-complex 'time' is 'fast' (as realilty is easier to perceive/process) . As you grow, you become more complex as a system, and 'time' is 'slower'.
(Excuse the apostrophy explosion, the quoted terms are either abstract or relative and thus mean varying things to different people..).
Novelity stretches perceived time. As you grow older and most everything of your day become routine, novelity runs low and therefore time flies. This has been my theory for a few years now.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Now I just feel old and depressed. Yay! Thanks, Slashdot!
I think our internal clock measures our metabolism. Since metabolism slows down with age, objective clock time appears to run faster.
Anyone else notice the leadvoice suits Futurama?
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Great article and all, but isn't this somewhat "light" for slashdot news? I mean, every self diagnosed nerd admitting to visiting this site (should) already learned this.
I do respect the simple presentation for the uninformed a lot though, it communicates the whole idea a lot better than i ever would (to big audiences).
I miss the in depth technical subjects. This article is what digg.com should present me.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Full attention != Full processing capacity
He obviously has tons of background daemons running and was in a situation of "some degree of peril" and physical change (the skin graft thing) which clearly would have triggered several others. A more useful, relevant, pertinent (and I predict...) reliable benchmark would be something like "thoughts per second" or "operations per thought" (since different thoughts would have different operations and a different number of operations). "Thought operations" (or "thoughts") could be a standard for thinking-speed.
So - how an AI thinks is more important than how fast it thinks since "operation speed" can changed via hardware. Thinking-speed is a result of underlying algorithms that actually make up the "I" in AI. Thinking-speed is also affected by the AIs own growth and ability to change itself. IQ of an AI would also result from that.
Which also implies that AIs can be distracted from a task - simply by causing it to a) spend more operations about input received or b) making it think about something else simultaneously. An AI being able to manage that/reduce the effect of the distraction, again, is dependent on design, self-growth and self-modification.
It would be have sounded even more worrying if in those 0.68 seconds, he had as many "thoughts" as an intelligent person would in a year...or two. (Endless loops, non-breaks, etc. adds to the worry.)
Ofcourse, I do agree with your statement. It IS an eternity for any AI.
Sidenote with math-conjectures:
60 trillion OPS = 60 x 10^12 OPS (or in MIPS = 60 * 10^6 MIPS, since we are not assuming only-FLOPS) - and yes, many operations make up 1 instruction, so assume best case is 1 instruction = 2 operations. So 30 * 10^6 MIPS? An X9100 is 32472 MIPS ~= 32 * 10^3 MIPS. So only slightly-less-than 1000 times slower than Data.
ObFloyd:
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to nought
Or half a page of scribbled lines
This article had for me a QOTD which is really getting to the heart of this topic:
How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on./quote :)
And when you are 40, it is 1/40th. So your experience of a year is ever contracting.
It's relativity.
each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.
The way I see it, it's like this: the longer we've lived, the shorter each minute is when compared to the whole of our lives. When we're ten years old, we've lived 5259600 minutes. Ten minutes out of that is 1/525960, or, a REALLY small fraction. But, when we're twenty years old, ten minutes is 1/1051920 of our lives, which makes ten minutes seem half as significant as it was when we're ten years old, hence time "goes by faster."
When you are older, you have more stuff you need to do, and more stuff to focus on, and thus, less time for think about time passing. I don't know, maybe's it's just me...
Now get that Turing machine off my goddam motherboard.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Seemed like seven to me.
My other sig is extremely clever...
I'm 35, and so far can honestly say the life only gets better as you get older, at least if you invest enough ongoing effort in learning stuff and making something of yourself. I was a full-scale nerd at school and uni, hardly went out, but now thanks to the effort I put in over those years got a great job, quite enough dough, all the hardware I want, a great wife, and lately beginning to explore nightlife in earnest - just got into death metal and drone metal since this summer ( check out Sunn o))), they're awesome, and I'm going to see Rammstein tomorrow)
From my perspective, getting older means nobody can tell you what to do anymore, so you can have exactly as much fun as you want. Yes, you got to earn your way, but that's not exactly hard if you got any skills at all, and makes it more real to boot. Plus you get more experience in how to interact with people, which makes _that_ part more fun, too.
Anybody telling you adult life sucks is probably just doing it to themselves, is my guess.
Once in a while I notice that the tempo of a song playing on the radio seems to be off. Faster or slower than I remember it. My theory has been that my mind is operating slower or faster, repectively, than usual when this happens, or at least the part of my brain the processes music is.
Most of the theories here seem to be tied in some way to history, to the length of life lived.
Nay, I say, it is not a problem of the past, it is a problem of anticipation!
We don't take notice of the day because the day rarely changes - it's those milestones ahead on which our eyes are fixed.
Young children very rarely look past now, and as they get to school age they may look to the day or the week.
Once we're out of our teens we're planning for the month, the term, maybe next year, but rarely past the end of the school program.
Hit 25 and you're making a 5-year plan.
Hit 30 and you're thinking about your 25 year mortgage.
Hit 40 and you're planning retirement.
Hit retirement and you're looking at eternity.
Eternity. Now that's a long time to be hurrying up.
- EW
(who can't remember his login, nor what he had for breakfast)
...actually based on reality: your brain gets better at filtering out the unimportant over time. When you are young, everything is important. When you get older, you get the concept of triviality. Your brain becomes trained to discard the unimportant...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We you're young you are mostly free to do whatever, whenever you like. As you get older, you have a job, family, friends and responsibilities. Your time is not your own. Depending on your finances, you are living check to check, which means the hours, days, weeks, and the months seem to blur while you await your next "bone". At least that seems to be the case for me. :-(
As we get older, we generally acquire more mass. As it is accepted knowledge that mass warps space/time and accelerates time relative to space/time in dimished proximity to mass, it kind of makes sense... - Averyge Joe
Of course the simple answer is that time is actually speeding up. Prove me wrong.
No, I don't.
(The impatient may wish to skip ahead 49 seconds into the clip.)
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!