I'm 82 with mobility problems. I am definitely moving slower than I did 10-20 years ago. And time seems to be moving faster maybe because what took 5 (objective) minutes at 72 now takes 10 or more. The whole slowing thing is the bane of my existence. I don't want to spend 10 minutes emptying the dishwasher or folding clothes out of the dryer. I want to zip through the mundane boring stuff of life so I can go read a book. On the other hand, I don't want to live in a pig sty either. So the unread books stack up. Bummer.
Thanks for these ponderings! I think about this too, even more since I've passed fifty. I've come to visualize time as an ocean, or a succession of ponds: each moment holds tremendous depths and when you dive in, that moment can seem to last like forever. But on the surface it has only been one stroke. I love that saying 'The days are long, the years are short'. Parenting provides some really intense, condensed time. The potential to experience time like that is always there (but let's face it, we're often glad we don't have to intensely live EVERY moment)
I always learn something new from your posts Tommy. Keep it up!
It might be in one of the links you put in the article. But I would add pain as a potential weird sensory time-dilation factor. With a chronic illness, when in a lot of pain, time felt excruciatingly slow. As I am slowly getting better, time feels like it is speeding up. It might be that I am just able to do more things. But for instance, doing weight training, always feels like it takes ages...
Also, this might be a dumb question, but do signals between neurons stay at the same speed throughout our life? Or do they slow down? Does the action potential stay at the same velocity?
So neural signaling does slow down, due to mylenization loss. Mylen helps the action potential move quickly down the axon, so when it's lost, the transmission of the action potential slows. It's not right to think of this as the brain just generally slowing down, though, it's more general deterioration as circuits become mistimed and connections weaken (due to loss of the insulation of the mylen sheath). It's one of the major reasons for cognitive decline as we get older https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10812983/
Odd: my wife and I (62 & 57) found that on our recent overseas trips, time seemed to be different than on any previous trip. (She first took me overseas when I was 33.) Only a few days after arriving, our departure seemed like many weeks ago. A week later, it felt like we had been gone for months. It was very strange.
Time perception is such a fascinating subject - it even depends on the time of day because of the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine in your brain/body/bloodstream. And wasn't there a study that showed that if you left someone in a room with no natural light they lost their ability to judge the passage of time almost totally?
You might be thinking of the studies that showed that without natural light, people's circadian rhythms drifted towards 25 hours (e.g. they would sleep on 25 hour cycles instead of 24). More recent studies show even without outside signals, the circadian rhythm is more accurate (e.g. 24.1 or 24.2 hours)
Speaking from the (mostly) retired side, I ‘feeeeeel’ (given all your above quantification of where the feels come from) that time has slowed down. My (n=1) theory is that’s because when I was running all the time, be it with kids or for the grind, I didn’t have time for such contemplations. Now I do. Now I can look back at the totality of the past 60 years, which is something I never had the time for when I was in it. Now I have the time to ponder time.
The decade from 16 to 26 was filled with adventure and was certainly my biggest decade. By contrast, this current decade has shot by with nothing happening that needs remembering (OK, I did emigrate, but apart from that). This is all very sad because I am approaching the end, and if the next decade passes as quickly as the last one, I will be dead in no time.
Great piece, Tommy. Memorable even. Just one question please... If "our heartbeat and breathing...are controlled by rhythmic pulses in our brains," then (how) is it possible for so-called brain dead patients to breathe? Is that only by artificial/machine support or...?
If the further out our cosmos stretch the quicker things move the further out they are would seem to have a correspondence with time seeming to move more quickly the older we get. Perhaps it does speed up just a little each year as we stretch further out in the cosmos.
If the further out our cosmos stretch the quicker things move the further out they are would seem to have a correspondence with time seeming to move more quickly the older we get. Perhaps it does speed up just a little each year as we stretch further out in the cosmos.
It's always the second derivative that kills you. We can adjust to a rate of change of the first order. Growing old means adjusting to the rate of change of the rate of change as far as subjective time goes. This is especially true in terms of perception of political events. Much of the second half of the 20th century seems to me to be slightly dated news. For other generations, it's a confusing jumble of unrelated facts, similarly to how we viewed the 17th century.
We do seem to know how much time has passed when asleep in the darkness, like even if I wake up in the dark, my guess of what time it is is at least within the hour. But when light sleeping in the morning, a few minutes sleeping often feels like hours, so whatever mechanism is keeping track of time during deeper sleep seems to not work during light sleep in the light.
Time vis-a-vis human biology : this 'layman' has a question about it:
Two days ago, I left house at 9:38AM for a hike, and when I returned and looked at the time, it turned out to be 3:39 PM. A couple of weeks earlier, for another idle walk I exited at 2:12PM, and returned at 5:12. Nope, not checking the time to get on target. (I don't even wear a watch, nor do I carry a mobile phone.) I record the times of leaving and arriving regularly, simply in order to keep a good idea where my time goes. And this time-regularity (of a round number of hours) happens to me for years, with a frequency that I find remarkable. Addditionally, when I was younger, in my teens and twenties, I was able to wake up within five minutes of the time I would choose to wake up.
You just said: Unlike computers, we humans don't come with a built-in clock that tracks time precisely.
Oh, so deflating. On the basis of my experiences, my assumption was that we do. So I already had formulated my question: What if any studies hsave been done to investigate the mechanisms of that built-in clock?
On one hand, you're the expert. On the other hand, one can't prove a negative. This is all so disorienting.
I'm 82 with mobility problems. I am definitely moving slower than I did 10-20 years ago. And time seems to be moving faster maybe because what took 5 (objective) minutes at 72 now takes 10 or more. The whole slowing thing is the bane of my existence. I don't want to spend 10 minutes emptying the dishwasher or folding clothes out of the dryer. I want to zip through the mundane boring stuff of life so I can go read a book. On the other hand, I don't want to live in a pig sty either. So the unread books stack up. Bummer.
Thanks for these ponderings! I think about this too, even more since I've passed fifty. I've come to visualize time as an ocean, or a succession of ponds: each moment holds tremendous depths and when you dive in, that moment can seem to last like forever. But on the surface it has only been one stroke. I love that saying 'The days are long, the years are short'. Parenting provides some really intense, condensed time. The potential to experience time like that is always there (but let's face it, we're often glad we don't have to intensely live EVERY moment)
I love that description - time as an ocean ❤️
I always learn something new from your posts Tommy. Keep it up!
It might be in one of the links you put in the article. But I would add pain as a potential weird sensory time-dilation factor. With a chronic illness, when in a lot of pain, time felt excruciatingly slow. As I am slowly getting better, time feels like it is speeding up. It might be that I am just able to do more things. But for instance, doing weight training, always feels like it takes ages...
Also, this might be a dumb question, but do signals between neurons stay at the same speed throughout our life? Or do they slow down? Does the action potential stay at the same velocity?
So neural signaling does slow down, due to mylenization loss. Mylen helps the action potential move quickly down the axon, so when it's lost, the transmission of the action potential slows. It's not right to think of this as the brain just generally slowing down, though, it's more general deterioration as circuits become mistimed and connections weaken (due to loss of the insulation of the mylen sheath). It's one of the major reasons for cognitive decline as we get older https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10812983/
Ty Tommy. Especially the kids part.
Odd: my wife and I (62 & 57) found that on our recent overseas trips, time seemed to be different than on any previous trip. (She first took me overseas when I was 33.) Only a few days after arriving, our departure seemed like many weeks ago. A week later, it felt like we had been gone for months. It was very strange.
Take care.
Time perception is such a fascinating subject - it even depends on the time of day because of the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine in your brain/body/bloodstream. And wasn't there a study that showed that if you left someone in a room with no natural light they lost their ability to judge the passage of time almost totally?
You might be thinking of the studies that showed that without natural light, people's circadian rhythms drifted towards 25 hours (e.g. they would sleep on 25 hour cycles instead of 24). More recent studies show even without outside signals, the circadian rhythm is more accurate (e.g. 24.1 or 24.2 hours)
I don't think so.... I'll post it here if I do come across it again!
I just printed this for my office wall🧡
Speaking from the (mostly) retired side, I ‘feeeeeel’ (given all your above quantification of where the feels come from) that time has slowed down. My (n=1) theory is that’s because when I was running all the time, be it with kids or for the grind, I didn’t have time for such contemplations. Now I do. Now I can look back at the totality of the past 60 years, which is something I never had the time for when I was in it. Now I have the time to ponder time.
That was excellent, Tommy. Thank you.
The decade from 16 to 26 was filled with adventure and was certainly my biggest decade. By contrast, this current decade has shot by with nothing happening that needs remembering (OK, I did emigrate, but apart from that). This is all very sad because I am approaching the end, and if the next decade passes as quickly as the last one, I will be dead in no time.
Great piece, Tommy. Memorable even. Just one question please... If "our heartbeat and breathing...are controlled by rhythmic pulses in our brains," then (how) is it possible for so-called brain dead patients to breathe? Is that only by artificial/machine support or...?
If the further out our cosmos stretch the quicker things move the further out they are would seem to have a correspondence with time seeming to move more quickly the older we get. Perhaps it does speed up just a little each year as we stretch further out in the cosmos.
If the further out our cosmos stretch the quicker things move the further out they are would seem to have a correspondence with time seeming to move more quickly the older we get. Perhaps it does speed up just a little each year as we stretch further out in the cosmos.
It's always the second derivative that kills you. We can adjust to a rate of change of the first order. Growing old means adjusting to the rate of change of the rate of change as far as subjective time goes. This is especially true in terms of perception of political events. Much of the second half of the 20th century seems to me to be slightly dated news. For other generations, it's a confusing jumble of unrelated facts, similarly to how we viewed the 17th century.
We do seem to know how much time has passed when asleep in the darkness, like even if I wake up in the dark, my guess of what time it is is at least within the hour. But when light sleeping in the morning, a few minutes sleeping often feels like hours, so whatever mechanism is keeping track of time during deeper sleep seems to not work during light sleep in the light.
Time vis-a-vis human biology : this 'layman' has a question about it:
Two days ago, I left house at 9:38AM for a hike, and when I returned and looked at the time, it turned out to be 3:39 PM. A couple of weeks earlier, for another idle walk I exited at 2:12PM, and returned at 5:12. Nope, not checking the time to get on target. (I don't even wear a watch, nor do I carry a mobile phone.) I record the times of leaving and arriving regularly, simply in order to keep a good idea where my time goes. And this time-regularity (of a round number of hours) happens to me for years, with a frequency that I find remarkable. Addditionally, when I was younger, in my teens and twenties, I was able to wake up within five minutes of the time I would choose to wake up.
You just said: Unlike computers, we humans don't come with a built-in clock that tracks time precisely.
Oh, so deflating. On the basis of my experiences, my assumption was that we do. So I already had formulated my question: What if any studies hsave been done to investigate the mechanisms of that built-in clock?
On one hand, you're the expert. On the other hand, one can't prove a negative. This is all so disorienting.