Why do older people seem to experience time passing more quickly?
Alison Edwards
Lydney, Gloucestershire, UK
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At age 5, one year was only about a third of the life you remembered, and the three days leading up to Christmas seemed interminable. At 30, a year, now 1/30th of your life, wasn’t very noticeable, though every day after your due date felt like a month; at 85, a year is a drop in the ocean, but you become conscious of your gravestone rushing towards you at speed, and of the winds of time blowing your hair out behind you.
Robin Adams
Kintbury, Berkshire, UK
Now in my mid-90s, I can certainly confirm this effect, which I ascribe to each day being a smaller fraction of one’s total life experience, and thus appearing shorter.
Perception of time intervals also changes. To me, the new millennium started just the other day, whereas, when I was a young man, the similar interval back to the first world war seemed an age. Memories of the second world war are fresh to me, but to young people today it is as far back as the Crimean war was to the younger me – almost medieval.
Karen Dillon
Via email
The older you become, the more time you have experienced. As you experience more of something, the more used to it you become. This is combined with the lesser quantity of time markers that an adult experiences. A school-aged child has school terms, birthday parties and regular holidays to break time into smaller chunks. As we enter the workforce, ends of term and the subsequent holidays evaporate.
Mike Follows
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK
According to a 2016 experiment, when people were asked to estimate when 2 minutes had elapsed, the average over-50-year-old stopped their clock half a minute after the average 30-year-old, implying that oldies perceive time passing more quickly.
Several biological hypotheses have been proposed. In the 1930s, neuroscientist Hudson Hoagland conducted a series of experiments showing that our perception of time speeds up as our body temperature falls, which occurs due to a slowing metabolism as we grow older. There is a suggestion that mice have shorter lives due to racing through their allocation of heartbeats much faster than we do. Yet perhaps they perceive having a long and fulfilling life, as their high heart rate means mice have a high body temperature.
In experiments in the 1960s, the psychologist Robert Ornstein discovered that people perceived time slowing down when they were asked to engage with more complex images or sound recordings. The more information we need to process, the slower time passes. Conversely, as we get older, novel experiences with lots of new information to process become less common and life appears to speed up as we increasingly run on autopilot.
In a , Adrian Bejan at Duke University in North Carolina suggested that the size and complexity of neural networks in our brains increase with age, so electrical signals take longer to travel the bigger distances. He also speculates that damage to our nerves increases the resistance to the flow of electrical signals, slowing them down. As we aren’t conscious of a change in the rate of data transfer, we perceive a fall in the transfer rate as an acceleration in the passage of time.
My feeling is that we experience remembered time differently to how we experience it in the here and now. Time might pass quickly when we are enjoying an activity, but it might be remembered as taking longer because it has been recorded in higher definition, so it takes more time for us to retrieve the richer detail.
If I am typical, then time passes more quickly when we are totally focused on an activity and enter a kind of transcendental state. Conversely, time drags when we are bored, as when we lived through the covid-19 lockdowns. With the benefit of hindsight, however, the time spent at home seems fleeting.
Philosophers like would have us believe that time is unreal, in which case our perceptions of it changing pace are an illusion.
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