Summer used to feel so long when we were young, this year it ended so quickly.
Is there a scientific explanation for this?
In: Other
Because time is largely marked by new experiences.
As you get older you have fewer new experiences.
When we’re kids, we’re not fully in charge of our days/choices. Life becomes more mundane as we get older. We begin to rely on routines so the days tend to go by quickly and unremarkably.
It’s as simple as looking at a ratio.
When you’re 5, a year is 20% of your life.
At 10, a year is 10% of your life.
When you’re 25, that same year is 4% of your life.
At 50, a year is 2% of your life, and if you live to be 100 years old, a year is a very fast 1% of your life.
Add in that at 5 and 10, it’s likely that you’re playing all summer, or vacationing, for a quarter of the year. At 25 and 50, you may have 3-4 weeks of vacation to spread through the year.
At the age of ten, five years is half of your lifespan. At the age of fifty, five year is just a tenth of it.
Did you have summer vacation when you were young?
There was a study like 20 years ago. Basically it said this.
If you were 2 and never saw a circle and someone drew 85% of one it might take a while for your brain to figure it out.maybe it wouldn’t.
But then you see a circle and again and again and at 80%, you “see a circle”
When you are young your brian is really focusing and taking in information. When you get older it fills in information with information you’ve already seen a thousand times. It doesn’t form new blocks it just refuses old ones.
Monotony.
When you are older, you end up doing the same shit every day and not having nearly as many new experiences. Your brain likes to be efficient and basically compresses memories that are all very similar, so it feels like much of that time doesn’t really happen at all.
I guess it’s because you are enjoying life – when its going hard , it seems as if the clock’s hands are not moving an inch.
Quoting Einstein’s Statement on Relatively –
” When you sit with a beautiful girl for three Hours it feels like a minute, but if you sit on a hot stove for a minute it feels like three hours and that’s Relativity.”
One reason is that as you get older, one year is smaller and smaller percentage of the entirety of your life.
There are a good few experiments that demonstrate that we perceive time and see more slowly when we are being more fuelled by adrenaline. (One good experiment demonstrated this by using a red digital clock that flickered too quickly for the eye to see the correct time. The human test subjects were dropped along with the clock from a crane to a crash mat. The quick boost of adrenaline and increased heart rates allowed each subject to see the clock correctly on the way down and for a short time after landing.)
I could be hypothesised that children are far more likely to experience elevated heart rates and have more adrenaline boosts from their active play thus making time appear to pass more slowly for them.
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