Why Time Feels Like It’s Flying By?
I remember when I was a kid waiting an eternity for one of my favorite TV shows on Nickelodean to come on — Hey Arnold!. I also remember numerous mundane memories from childhood like sneaking a bite while mum prepares food, eating street food, cycling to school. My recall for more recent ones is not as good. As I’ve gotten older, everything seems to have sped up. That’s something virtually everyone agrees upon. Why is that?
Most common (incorrect) explanation:
Let’s say I am 30 years old, one year is only 1/30 of my age. When I’m 80 One year is 1/80 of my age. This graph shows one year as a percentage of your life at each age.
But, if you sum up the area underneath the curve, you’ll find that you’ve already lived half of the total by age six. We can rule out this theory of how our brains perceive time.
It completely depends on Chronoception — your ability to be able to sense the passage of time. Although you may be taught to read time and are taught the understanding behind time, your actual ability to sense that time has passed is an innate sense built into your body. Vacations fly by but not preparing for exams. Here’s why:
- [Speed up time] Focus/State of flow: When we’re focused on something we don’t notice that time is passing, and that makes them feel in the moment, shorter than they actually are. This can happen when playing sports or video games or artists when they’re fully engrossed in their work.
- [Speed up time] Age: When we age, it gives more resistance to the flow of brain signals. This causes the rate at which mental images are acquired and processed to decrease as you get older: chronoception changes. Since your brain is perceiving fewer new images in the same amount of time, it seems as though time is passing more quickly
3. [Speed up time] Increase energy usage: People’s brain energy usage over the course of their lifetime peaks around age five. If you think about it this kind of makes sense because when you’re a kid, almost everything is novel to you, and therefore your brain needs to use more energy fully 66% of your resting energy intake.
4. [Slow down time] Repetition: For instance the days go by fast during lockdown in quanrantine because of repetition. There are no novel days. You remember the days you got the Covid vaccine shots because it was novel and therefore your brain had to invest more energy in processing.
5. [Slow down time] Fear/Anxiety: Waiting to give an inteview or people falling show that they judge their experience to last much longer than it actually is.
6. [Slow down time] Boredom: When you’re waiting and waiting…….. 🥱
One caveat: The paradox of perception of time
Experiencing the perception of time and remembering the previous perceptions of time don’t align. For example, the holidays, they feel like they go by really fast but when you think back upon them. They last a long time. That’s because you had a lot of novel experiences and your brain formed a lot of memories, and it judges the duration of that vacation by the number of memories that were formed. All that novelty means lots of memories means it feels like it took a long time but in the moment, it felt fast.
The duration of a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.
Conclusion
If you want time to go slowly, there are a lot of things you can do that will slow time down. But, maybe the happiest life and the longest remembered life is one where time really seems to fly by. It’s like Einstein said — “Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it’ll feel like an hour, but sit next to a pretty girl for an hour, and it’ll feel like a minute.” So, how do you want to spend your time?
