Why does time seem to speed up as we get older?

[HydrogenBond]

Another way to look at this difference in time perception is based on the amount of data that can be processed in a given time scale.

At the shortest time scales, we might witness individual events or data points. As time scale expands, we will witness many such data. To make this witness more efficient, it will take on the form of an equation or relationship.

 

The younger person is picking up data points, while an older person is thinking more in terms of relationships. The time scale is different for each.

I remember as a child I could recite all the batting averages of any player at time in the season. This is all point data without any overall relationship. I can't do that now since my mind is about connections. The wisdom of old age brings together generalities of life which have very long time scales.

 

When we are having fun, we are wrapped up in the integration of the event. When we are bored and time moves slow, we go back to point of time.

[SmoothHerring]

Kriminal99 put it quite well and simply: as one gets older, he/she registers less Events and the treshold for an Event gets higher. How much time is certain time interval is defined subjectively by how many Events fit into it.

 

When we are young and get immersed into fantasy worlds while playing, time can fly by without noticing. Before long we are brought back to reality by mom shouting to dinner, which one would often not like to do. The wild fantasies are not rational and have short lifespans, because the only reason for them is to make you experience something. You go through a transformation from a pirate to the biker mice from mars to spiderman to superman in a span of an hour. Hell of a lot has happened in an hour.

 

Once you get older the fantasy worlds change their nature; they become rational. They have the exact opposite purpose, not the experience of them, but the ability to plan future and manipulate outer world. This fantasy world of concepts remains the same despite the flow of time. One may spend a lot of time there, and even return to the apparently same thoughts the next day without noticing that time actually evolves outside the frozen concepts. There is no one to shout "stop dreaming" when you are planning your calendar or solving theoretical problems in work; it may even seem like you are interacting with reality when the fantasy refers to the reality.

[spartan45]

Type into Google ‘is time s’, do not finish with either slowing down or speeding up, just let Google complete the sentence and you will see it thinks you want to know ‘is time speeding up?’ the most popular, which seems logical because we are all getting older and so slowing down.

There may be something else going on here however. It was 1980 I first thought time was speeding up, becoming very noticeable after about 1997. During the early ‘60s there were rumours that to stop astronauts / cosmonauts being space sick it was found necessary to fit all spacecraft with Schumann wave generators running at 7.83Hz (the ‘heartbeat’ of the Earth).  Could it be the 7.83Hz Schumann resonance frequency is increasing, causing the human perception that time is speeding up?, due to changes in storms, causing increased lightning activity around the world, linked to the increase in Schumann resonance frequency-

Source: http://www.trinfinity8.com/why-is-earths-schumann-resonance-accelerating/

Changes in storms -

 Source:http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/changes-storms

 

Now to speculate what could result from this. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection seems logical. An example: bot flies given a plain black or white, or a striped surface, representing animals fed upon, avoid the striped surface. Therefore natural selection explains why Zebras have stripes (Okapi also have striped back ends) because those with plain colour would have been more vulnerable to the flies and the infection they bring.

However there is another method of evolution not well known. In 1988 John Cairns (biochemist) published a paper on how bacteria that could not feed on lactose were introduced to a slide-plate with only lactose for food. Natural selection could not apply because no food was available for reproduction. Incredibly, the bacteria overcame the problem by changing its DNA to allow lactose consumption.

In 1993 the film Jurassic Park had the plot that to prevent breeding, all the dinosaurs were made female. Mathematician Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) scoffs at the idea of such controlled breeding, saying nature will find a way. Like this impossibility in Jurassic Park, what if this perception of time speeding up is the prelude to man’s evolutionary progression? No…. oh well just a thought.

Source: John Cairns 1988 paper reference in 2004 paper ft. Adaptive mutation in Escherichia coli. See ref 11 in this 2004 paper and the end paragraph (2004 article) titled evolutionary significance.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC451643/#r11

Source: Bruce Lipton – Fear vs Love State and stress’s Effect on your body. Scroll to 31m into the 51m video:-

[Zina]

I read somewhere that it feels like time goes slowly when you're a kid cause you're experiencing so many new things and learning so much but when you age time goes faster cause theres not much new interesting and exciting things going on and you might not do as much in one day as when you were a kid.

 

A kids day: School, come home and play, watch cartoons, shower/bath time, bedtime.

 

Grown ups days: Job, come home and cook dinner or do housework, shower, tv/computer, bed.

 

Elderly day: Hobby ( knitting, take care of flowers etc ), coffee, maybe wait for help at home with cleaning and showering, TV/coffee, bed. ( based on what I experienced working at an elderlyhome ) 

[GAHD]

I think a lot of time-perception has to do with how much information is "discarded" by the short term memory before being shunted to long-term.

As you get older, more and more things "fit into a box" in your worldview.  EG: Driving to/from somewhere (like work) . How many of you can take a trip down memory-lane and re-live (this morning/yesterday/last week)'s drive to work? Barring any significant landmarks in the memories,  the multiple cars you passed are likely "just cars" the pedestrians are "just people." The funny bumper stickers are lost to "the you of now" even if you chuckled at them, the colorful plumage of singles trying to stand out in the crowd of pedestrians lost to the memory white-wash. "cars are cars" "people are people" that's about all an average memory of a daily event will contain.

Weather is is a result of diminishing neural plasticity, or gaining more highly focused interests, is not something I've really put much thought into. But "fun that makes time fly" is usually a comfortable situation without much new stimulus.

However, a "crisis situation" seems to "shut off" the discarding of information. You'll often hear the phrase "the longest hours/days of my life" from PTSD crowd. I think this has some interesting experiments you could do with it: "Stress more to feel like you have more time." It might also explain some of the adrenaline-junkies.

[exchemist]

Type into Google ‘is time s’, do not finish with either slowing down or speeding up, just let Google complete the sentence and you will see it thinks you want to know ‘is time speeding up?’ the most popular, which seems logical because we are all getting older and so slowing down.

There may be something else going on here however. It was 1980 I first thought time was speeding up, becoming very noticeable after about 1997. During the early ‘60s there were rumours that to stop astronauts / cosmonauts being space sick it was found necessary to fit all spacecraft with Schumann wave generators running at 7.83Hz (the ‘heartbeat’ of the Earth).  Could it be the 7.83Hz Schumann resonance frequency is increasing, causing the human perception that time is speeding up?, due to changes in storms, causing increased lightning activity around the world, linked to the increase in Schumann resonance frequency-

Source: http://www.trinfinity8.com/why-is-earths-schumann-resonance-accelerating/

Changes in storms -

 Source:http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/changes-storms

 

Now to speculate what could result from this. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection seems logical. An example: bot flies given a plain black or white, or a striped surface, representing animals fed upon, avoid the striped surface. Therefore natural selection explains why Zebras have stripes (Okapi also have striped back ends) because those with plain colour would have been more vulnerable to the flies and the infection they bring.

However there is another method of evolution not well known. In 1988 John Cairns (biochemist) published a paper on how bacteria that could not feed on lactose were introduced to a slide-plate with only lactose for food. Natural selection could not apply because no food was available for reproduction. Incredibly, the bacteria overcame the problem by changing its DNA to allow lactose consumption.

In 1993 the film Jurassic Park had the plot that to prevent breeding, all the dinosaurs were made female. Mathematician Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) scoffs at the idea of such controlled breeding, saying nature will find a way. Like this impossibility in Jurassic Park, what if this perception of time speeding up is the prelude to man’s evolutionary progression? No…. oh well just a thought.

Source: John Cairns 1988 paper reference in 2004 paper ft. Adaptive mutation in Escherichia coli. See ref 11 in this 2004 paper and the end paragraph (2004 article) titled evolutionary significance.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC451643/#r11

Source: Bruce Lipton – Fear vs Love State and stress’s Effect on your body. Scroll to 31m into the 51m video:-

This Schumann stuff is all woo. It is a simple electomagnetic phenomenon. I quote an extract from the Wiki article:

"This global electromagnetic resonance phenomenon is named after physicist Winfried Otto Schumann who predicted it mathematically in 1952. Schumann resonances occur because the space between the surface of the Earth and the conductive ionosphere acts as a closed waveguide. The limited dimensions of the Earth cause this waveguide to act as a resonant cavity for electromagnetic waves in the ELF band. The cavity is naturally excited by electric currents in lightning. Schumann resonances are the principal background in the electromagnetic spectrum^[1] beginning at 3 Hz and extending to 60 Hz,^[2] and appear as distinct peaks at extremely low frequencies (ELF) around 7.83 (fundamental),^[3] 14.3, 20.8, 27.3 and 33.8 Hz.^[1][4] "

 

Nothing whatsoever to do with space sickness or human perception of time, and this idea of the "heartbeat of the Earth" is pure whimsy. 

 

Nor can I find any reputable confirmation of this notion that the resonance frequencies are changing. I suspect this is rubbish invented by woo-merchants.

 

But thank you very much for the interesting snippet about why zebras may have evolved stripes. I had no idea that this might be to disorient the compound eyes of biting insects. Having looked this up, I find it is indeed one of the leading hypotheses for why the stripes evolved. :) 

Edited February 27, 2017 by exchemist

[Mariel33]

I wouldn't say time speeds up the older people get, but that it's the other way around; if all people in the United States had to live on the exact same land and territory as all people in Iran, would time still seem short?

[exchemist]

I wouldn't say time speeds up the older people get, but that it's the other way around; if all people in the United States had to live on the exact same land and territory as all people in Iran, would time still seem short?

By "the other way round" I presume you mean that it is, rather, that the older people get, the more time speeds up?

 

That, of course, would be quite different......