a post by Paul Ratner for the Big Think blog
When you are young, time often passes quite slowly. Each birthday is a monumental occasion. Long lazy summers seem to never end. We remember trying to make the clock hands move faster with our minds as we sat bored in class. But as we grow older, life seems to speed up. Birthdays aren’t as big a deal. You’d almost rather not even notice them as you feel like you're barreling towards old age. Why does it feel like this? Is time really moving faster somehow?
A research team from the University of Kansas ran a study to understand this phenomenon. They tested the theory, first proposed by philosopher Douglas Hofstadter, that time appears to speed up because we start grouping distinct individual experiences into larger “chunks”. When we are young we have many big moments, experiencing things for the first time. So going to a park could be quite a big deal, with many memorable sensations there. But as you grow older, going to that park offers fewer and fewer new experiences. You start collapsing them into memory “chunks,” putting everything that happened simply under “a walk in the park” - making the span of time feel brief.
Continue reading
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment