Time goes by so slowly...

As we were driving home my wife said that time seems to be flying by, which is good because we are waiting for my daughter to come home for a visit. As our sense, that time was going faster meant that she would be here sooner. But it also meant that when she was here the time would go faster as well.

I know that as I get older time seems to be slip sliding away. Why does time seem to slow down when you’re young and speed up as you get older? There is a theory that claims this phenomenon is because when you’re younger, each year comprises a larger percentage of your total lifespan and thus feels more sizeable; one year is 1/14 of your life when you’re fourteen, but only 1/40 when you’re 40. That’s a fun theory, but there’s an actual neural cause for how our perception of time changes over time.

Time, according to our scientists, is a fixed dimension. Time can be broken into minutes, seconds, and nanoseconds, and can be objectively measured. However many of us have internal clocks which often do an excellent job of tracking time; if I asked you to guess the time right now, you’d probably be pretty close.

Depending on where we are and what we are doing, time may seem to contract or expand, speed up or slow down. In contrast to our other senses like touch and taste, which are located in specific parts of our brains, our sense of time is woven throughout our neural matter. We understand time as a concept and since it is an overriding concept, our perception of time is tied up with our emotions and memories. 

Time is an abstract construction of our brain. We love stories and we love stories that are linear, that is they have a beginning, middle and an end. So as events unfold around us or to us, we sift through and our brain tries to put the best most interesting and useful story of what is happening. One of the ways our brain does this is by editing and lengthening or shortening events to fit the story we are creating.