Think back to a summer from when you were seven or eight years old. The days felt endless. Waiting for a birthday, a holiday, or the end of the school day could feel like an eternity. But as we grow older, months seem to disappear in the blink of an eye, and entire years pass before it’s even realized. Why does this happen?
Contrary to what many people believe, time itself is not exactly speeding up! Instead, the way our brains perceive and remember time changes throughout life. Neuroscience suggests that our experiences, memories, attention, and how dopamine levels all influence how quickly time appears to pass.
Your brain does not have a clock! Unlike a stopwatch, the brain does not have the ability to measure time with a single internal clock. Instead, time perception emerges from lots of your brain systems working together. Areas like the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum, and hippocampus all help contribute to how we are able to estimate the passage of time.
Because these systems rely on attention and memory, our sense of time can be highly subjective. A boring class may feel so much longer than a fun afternoon with friends, even if both are lasting the same amount of time.
The Power Of Novelty
One of the strongest explanations for why time seems to speed up with age involves something called novelty. When we are young, many experiences are new. The first day of school, learning how to ride a bike, meeting up with new friends, or visiting unfamiliar places for the first time all require your brain to pay close attention.
Novel experiences are able to create these rich memories! The hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory formation, records these events in greater detail. When we later look back on those periods, they seem longer because our brains stored so much information from them.
As we continue to grow older, daily life becomes increasingly systematic, and routine. We attend similar classes, follow schedules, and repeat activities. Because these experiences require less attention and produce fewer distinctive memories, they can feel compressed when we look back on them.
Why Would a Routine Make Time Fly?
Imagine two weeks of your life. During week one, you travel somewhere new, meet different people, try new foods and activities you’ve never done before. During the other week, you follow your normal routine every day.
In the moment, the exciting week may actually feel busy and fast. However, when you remember it a couple months later, it often feels longer because it contains more memorable events. Dissimilarly, the routine week may seem to have blurred in with everything else because fewer unique memories were made.
This phenomenon helps to explain why childhood often feels so expansive while adulthood feels more compressed.
Dopamine and Attention
Another factor is dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in motivation, reward, and learning. Novel experiences as a kid often trigger dopamine release, which increases attention and helps to strengthen memory formation.
When we are fully engaged and paying attention, the brain collects more info about a certain experience. The more info that is encoded into memory, the richer the period appears when we reflect on it later.
This may be a reason why trying new hobbies and learning new skills can make life feel fuller and more memorable.
Slow Down Time?!
So while we can’t exactly stop the clock, neuroscience suggests we may be able to influence our perception of time. Research points to a couple of strategies
These activities encourage your brain to form more detailed memories, making life feel richer and more expansive and thoughtful.
Looking Through the Lens!
The feeling that time speeds up as we age is not an illusion. It is a reflection of how our brain processes experiences. Our memories shape our perception of the past and the richness of those memories influence how long periods of our life seem to have lasted.
Perhaps the secret to making life feel longer and richer is not adding more years, but filling those years you have with novelty, curiosity, and meaningful experiences.
By understanding how the brain perceives time, we have some kind of insight into one of the most universal human experiences, which is the feeling that time is moving a little too fast!