Do we perceive time to pass faster as we age?

Question

I heard that many times and I really have that sensation. Does anyone have a good explanation why that is?

Psychologists assert that time seems to go faster with age, but the literature on this age-related perception of time remains controversial.
—source

[This guy](http://www.dibs.duke.edu/education/undergraduate-neuroscience/people/121-warren-meck) studies exactly that phenomenon. — Sklivvz, Jun 26 '11 at 23:11
I get more patient as I get older, which probably explains why I get more impatient with people who're less patient than me and want everything done now, now, now :) — jwenting, Jun 27 '11 at 06:32
As you get older, any lapse of time consitutes a comparatively smaller fraction of your life than the same lapse of time would have done, earlier in life. By the time you turn 10, one year will be a 10th of your entire life. By the time you turn 100, one year will be 1% of your entire life. Posting as a comment, as this is not research, but might still qualify for "good explanation". — David Hedlund, Jun 27 '11 at 06:52
@David This is indeed a very compelling explanation and until recently I accepted it at face value. But it occurred to me that there are two things wrong with it: (1) it’s apparently compelling but that doesn’t make it true. (2) it doesn’t actually explain why we experience time that way. What’s the *mechanism* that affects our perception of time passage? Why is it sensitive to scale? Granted, the same is true of other senses (an evolutionary adaptation to cover the large range of input stimulus variation, e.g. in light intensity between day and night). But what’s the advantage here? — Konrad Rudolph, Jun 27 '11 at 08:48
@Kon: as for (2) I would say that at large, we *always* adapt our scales to the appropriate order of magnitude, for practical reasons. If a project exceeds a budget by $1m, that's a bigger deal for a $1m budget than it is for a $100m budget. It's worse to be 1h late for a meeting, than to be 1h late for a convention that spans two weeks. So I don't see a problem in (2), but all that is irrelevant, because at the end of the day, I entirely agree with (1). That it seems plausible doesn't make it true; hence the comment. — David Hedlund, Jun 27 '11 at 09:19
I think it's because your sense of time is relative to what you remember. The older you get, the less often you learn something new -- not only because your ability to learn deteriorates, but also because you've become a lot more accustomed to your environment and thus learn new things less often. A newborn would be learning new things every minute, maybe even every second. At age 10 you're learning some new things every day at school. In college your ability to reason is refined to the point where a large portion of your learning is in fact validation of suspicions rather than pure knowledge. — Rei Miyasaka, Jun 27 '11 at 09:22
@David: Actually, we perceive many (all?) things following a power law, so that would make some sense. We perceive a change from 1000 Hz to 1100 Hz as smaller than a change from 100 Hz to 200 Hz, for instance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevens%27_power_law — endolith, Jul 04 '11 at 03:50
I remember seeing discussion on that topic in Michio Kaku BBC documentary Time. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5132896543158952711 — , Jul 03 '11 at 21:59
when I had my first child, she was 1/25 of my age, now she is 1/2 my age, so some time dilation is most definitely happening (citation needed). — horatio, Jul 08 '11 at 14:36
Here's a cool interactive demonstration of this concept: http://maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/ — cregox, Aug 15 '15 at 21:16
I personally believe we sure do perceive time passing faster, but it's not "*as we age*". Rather, it's **as we accumulate memories of the past**. If you don't keep focusing on the past, if you can forget the memories somehow, time should progressively go back to normal rate. — cregox, Aug 15 '15 at 21:18
Vsouce Michael here... https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwikkKKby5fKAhVDLA8KHT_oByQQtwIIIzAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DBTOODPf-iuc&usg=AFQjCNHxfuSesM_7wmEI_Qw1Ngs9EOykxw&sig2=vxfoAw0s2sFqEDNzShiE0g ...and as always - thanks for watching. — Matas Vaitkevicius, Jan 07 '16 at 11:24

score 11 · Answer 1 · edited Jul 08 '11 at 02:20

There have been studies that show that our sense of time changes with situations and with age. This is a study done where people were dropped from a height:

Stetson and co believe that people lay down richer, denser memories when they experience shocking events. These ‘flashbulb memories’ include emotional content, which involves the brain’s emotional centre – the amygdala. As these memories are played back, their unusual richness could fool the brain into thinking that the recorded events took up more time than was actually the case.

You can also check out more from one of the authors on time perception.

Also, from another article about Eagleman:

One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

Do we perceive time to pass faster as we age?

1 Answers1