Is this why time speeds up as we age?

Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think

• Recent memories run in our brains like sped-up old movies.
• In childhood, we capture images in our memory much more quickly.
• The complexities of grownup neural pathways are no match for the direct routes of young brains.

Mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan of Duke University has an interesting theory regarding the strange phenomenon by which time seems to speed up as we age.

It’s not the only theory, mind you, but an interesting one. In his just-published paper, “Why the Days Seem Shorter as We Get Older,” he links the phenomenon to the idea that visual images and the manner in which we process them are the language in which we store and retrieve memories.

Considering it an issue of physics, he suggests that we more rapidly capture and remember visual data when we’re young and that this sets our personal “mind time” playback rate. Since it takes longer to capture images and memory when we’re older, for a number of reasons, the same length of clock time results in fewer images. When we play our back memories at our habitual mind-time rate, they seem sped up to us, much like how old movies appear (the reason why they appear so will be explained shortly). Hence, the clock time they encompass seems to have gone by faster than older memories.

“The human mind senses time changing when the perceived images change. Days seemed to last longer in your youth because the young mind receives more images during one day than the same mind in old age.“

Old movies

To understand Bejan’s concept, it helps to understand the old-movie phenomenon. Obviously, the sense of motion in films is produced by rapidly flashing a sequence of changing images before our eyes that causes our brains to see a cohesive moving event. In the early days of cinema, movie cameras captured images at 16 frames per second.

Since The Jazz Singer in 1927 — in order to accommodate sound — we’ve filmed and played back movies at 24 frames per second. This means that when we play a second of an old 16 fps film, it goes by in just two-thirds…

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