Faster and Faster
Why does time speed up as we age?
“How did it get so late so soon?
It’s night before it’s afternoon.
December is here before it’s June.
My goodness, how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?”
-Dr. Seuss
“When I look back these days, time has traveled faster,” said a friend of mine in an older social group. “When I was a kid, it took forever to get from one Christmas to the next. Now they seem to come one right after the other.”
Around the room, we smiled and nodded. We had all felt it. Time seems to go faster each year.
“Why is that?” someone asked.
None of us knew.
Birthdays and anniversaries recur with amazing speed. We blink our eyes and our grandchildren have gained a year, then suddenly they graduate from college.
But it’s not just the years that fly by. Brushing my teeth last week, I looked over at my husband who was doing the same, and I said, “I don’t understand. It seems I did this just an hour ago!”
At my 50th class reunion, I was aghast at the crow’s-feet, the gray or bald heads, and the thickened waistlines. How could that happen so fast? It had been just a few years since we were students.
According to Einstein, the faster we go, the slower time passes. We DO slow down in our later years. Is that making time go faster? Hardly. Einstein’s theory covers physical travel and the speed of light, not the speed of life.
Theories abound about the reason for the sense that time passes faster now than in our youth. Here are some:
A year is a smaller part of our life as we grow older. At age five, a year is 20 percent of our life. At age 50, it is only 2 percent.
We easily forget repeated tasks and daily chores. They merge into a blur, and our memory of past time shrinks.
We are less eager for the future. When we are young, we look forward eagerly to the next significant event—a driver’s license, marriage, a first child. Time seems to move faster now because we are not impatiently waiting for the future to arrive.
(Shift your minds into high gear because this one is complex.) Duke University Professor Adrian Bejan concluded our sense of time is related to the number of mental images our brain meets and the state of our brains as we age. As we get older, we see fewer mental images per second because of changes in vision and less-clear brain pathways for transmitting information. So, when we are very young, our brains process more images per second than when we are older. Process many images; time seems to move slowly. Process fewer images; time seems to move faster.
It’s as if our brain has a metronome that provides our sensation of how much time has passed. Ask children to time a minute without a clock, and they will estimate it to be about 40 seconds. Adults will likely guess a minute has passed after 60-70 seconds.
There is an interesting variation on our sense of the speed of time, in addition to it seeming to speed up as we grow older. Time does seem to fly by during novel activities. But when we remember the activity later on, it will seem to have lasted longer than our more mundane experiences. In the memory of a roller coaster ride, for example, we think of it as lasting much longer than the brief 112 seconds of the average roller coaster ride.
Why? Our brains encode new experiences, but not familiar ones. Our judgment of elapsed time is based on the number of new memories created over a certain period.
This new-experiences concept adds yet another theory to the shortening of time as we grow older. If we have fewer new experiences, time seems to shrink.
The moral of the story: to slow down time, find ourselves some new experiences.
Now, if someone could just explain another mystery to me why my memories of childhood are crystal clear, my memories of the middle years are a little fuzzy, and I can’t remember a thing about yesterday’s lunch.