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This is just a weird thing I was thinking about.
A lot of grownups, especially people that are much older than I, tell me that as you get older, time goes by much faster. They say a year goes by as if it were just a few days. I myself have noticed something along the same lines. I feel like when I was a kid, time went by much slower. I was doing many things outside having fun, seemed like childhood would never end.
So if you agree with me that time seems to go by faster and faster as you get older, here is my question.
If you were able to live indefinitely, do you think we would lose the notion of time? Would time and our ability to perceive it decrease to such a point where we would completely lose the concept?
 
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I think it would, yes. Or if not to that extreme, after you lived for several thousand years the events of a day or a month or a year would seem totally meaningless in a wider scope. A bad marriage could be shrugged off the same way you and I shrug off having a bad day at the office. Eventually, I don't think one would care about time at all.
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No.
I don't even think the older you get the faster time is perceived to go, it just seems that way looking back. It's the same rose colored glasses effect that drives all nostalgia.
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It's because when you get older, you go into a routine and autopilot more. Tasks that take time and concentration become second nature and go unnoticed.
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I was watching through the wormhole last night and this episode came on:
http://science.discovery.com/tv/through-the-wormhole/episodes/is-time-an-illusion/
There's really a lot in there and it's all very interesting. I'm not going to try to explain everything that happens in it, but there were a few really interesting points.
One was that all of time exists right now. Time is everywhere around us, it's just that, as humans, we can't travel to any other point in time than right now. Think of it like space. There is space all around us, but, as opposed to time, we humans can travel to space and get to different points in it. It's really very interesting to think of the possibilities of coming 'unstuck' in time.
Another point is that we all perceive time differently (I suppose this is the point that will be most relevant to your question). At certain times, we feel as if time is going slower (and at others, that it is going faster). A professor was talking about smoking weed (I swear to god haha), and he was saying that time felt like it was going on forever (really slowly) because there was no memory point in the person's brain for when they got there. Since they don't really remember getting there, or anything before that point, they feel like they've been there a really long time. On the contrary, he was explaining things like a car accident. In a car accident you have a rush of adrenaline and your brain lays down some very dense memories. You remember every little detail, and so it seems as if time is slowing down.
One final thing that I found interesting, but that is probably unrelated, is that everything we experience is actually a few milliseconds in the past. Since it takes time for sound and light (and other things) to travel, by the time the results of something get to our brain it is already done happening. On top of that, it takes a few more milliseconds for our brain to process these messages. So when you see something happen, in reality it actually happened a few milliseconds before your brain presents to you that it happened. We are constantly a tiny bit behind of 'reality.' Very interesting (to me at least).
Sorry if I didn't explain everything perfectly, but I definitely recommend you watch the show if you have a chance. It's very interesting and explains things better than I ever could.
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Yeah I've noticed this effect as well. It does seem like time is going by faster than it did when I was younger. I've always just chalked it up to your frame of reference increasing. A certain amount of time (such as a year) doesn't seem quite as long when you've been through more of them.
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I think it's a relativity thing. If you have experienced X number of days/hours/years already, in comparison to the sum of all those experienced days/hours/years up to now the same amount of time seems shorter.
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might have to do with a change of your brain chemistry. there's certain drugs that can make the time go extremely slow.
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Time is merely a human relative concept, in the universe there is no such thing as time, really. Everything is relative to everything else, and the passage of time is only a descriptor for any relative sequence of events.
If you were to stop the motion of all matter in the Universe, time would not pass, because there would be no relative motion between objects - everything would simply be stationary, and nothing would be happening in sequence.
The adult concept of time passing faster is wrong in the sense that they experience everything in sequence just like everything else. What they're experiencing is purely psychological in that the passage of time seems faster because they observe more events to be monotonous and benign. If you don't care about what's happening around you, you tend not to notice the passage of time, which means that you simply don't notice the relative change in things around you. It's tunnel vision, basically.
tl;dr Adults perceive information differently than younger people and they don't recognize what's going around them as much.
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I think its when you are young youre learn something, every day and all day long. When you get older this stops and becomes much more rare. So, in my thoughts, if you were a lone guy in the wilderness of the deepest forest you could ever imagine and had to survive for 4 weeks or so, it would feel like 2 years.
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On July 01 2011 01:05 lolsixtynine wrote:
after you lived for several thousand years the events of a day or a month or a year would seem totally meaningless in a wider scope.
Cool that you say this. In World of Warcraft there is an Elf library located in the Dire Maul instance in Feralas. When you speak to one of the elves there, he tells you that's he has seen tens of thousands of years and that all the actions of the player are meaningless. Too bad I don't play WoW anymore since I'd LOVE to get that full quote..
Regarding the topic, there is this explanation that as you get older, you have lived longer and that's your reference for time. So one year for a 5 year old equals to 20% of his life. But for someone who is 50 years old, it's only 2%.. Maybe that's why old people are so slow in everything 
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On July 01 2011 01:53 TheGiz wrote:
Time is merely a human relative concept, in the universe there is no such thing as time, really. Everything is relative to everything else, and the passage of time is only a descriptor for any relative sequence of events.
If you were to stop the motion of all matter in the Universe, time would not pass, because there would be no relative motion between objects - everything would simply be stationary, and nothing would be happening in sequence.
The adult concept of time passing faster is wrong in the sense that they experience everything in sequence just like everything else. What they're experiencing is purely psychological in that the passage of time seems faster because they observe more events to be monotonous and benign. If you don't care about what's happening around you, you tend not to notice the passage of time, which means that you simply don't notice the relative change in things around you. It's tunnel vision, basically.
tl;dr Adults perceive information differently than younger people and they don't recognize what's going around them as much.
Why pretend to know about something when you have no understanding of it?
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On July 01 2011 03:06 iamke55 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2011 01:53 TheGiz wrote:
Time is merely a human relative concept, in the universe there is no such thing as time, really. Everything is relative to everything else, and the passage of time is only a descriptor for any relative sequence of events.
If you were to stop the motion of all matter in the Universe, time would not pass, because there would be no relative motion between objects - everything would simply be stationary, and nothing would be happening in sequence.
The adult concept of time passing faster is wrong in the sense that they experience everything in sequence just like everything else. What they're experiencing is purely psychological in that the passage of time seems faster because they observe more events to be monotonous and benign. If you don't care about what's happening around you, you tend not to notice the passage of time, which means that you simply don't notice the relative change in things around you. It's tunnel vision, basically.
tl;dr Adults perceive information differently than younger people and they don't recognize what's going around them as much. Why pretend to know about something when you have no understanding of it?
he actually hit it dead on. a little obscure about the idea of time but he was still on track.
just to put it short, when youre older most of your time is idle.
when youre younger your interests are broad.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Long-term
Psychologists assert that time seems to go faster with age, but the literature on this age-related perception of time remains controversial.[11] One day to an eleven-year-old would be approximately 1/4,000 of their life, while one day to a 55-year-old would be approximately 1/20,000 of their life. This is perhaps why a day would appear much longer to a young child than to an adult.[12] In an experiment comparing a group of subjects aged between 19 and 24 and a group between 60 and 80 asked to estimate when they thought 3 minutes had passed, it was found that the younger group's estimate was on average 3 minutes and 3 seconds, while the older group averaged 3 minutes and 40 seconds,[13] indicating a change in the perception of time with age. People tend to recall recent events as occurring further back in time (backward telescoping) and distant events occurring more recently (forward telescoping).
It has been proposed that the subjective experience of time changes with age due to changes in the individual's biological makeup.
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Time is a man-made concept based upon our average life expectancy. We've made good use of natural phenomena, such as the earth's rotation and translation speeds, to help us keep a constant frame of reference we use to track how much time we have left to live. As you grow older, you become more and more filled with tasks and routines that, for the most part, take our full consciousness to perform or complete. This naturally separates our minds from the notion of time, and as we grow more used to it, we begin to make it a natural part of our minds.
In reality, time doesn't move any faster at all; it's purely a psychological phenomenon.
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![[image loading]](http://blogs.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/files/2010/10/WMAP-age-of-universe-600.jpg)
i think this image is really interesting. its a look at the universe from its creation til the present.
its basically "time", as time only exists along with the universe but when you look at it in that scale, time is not what we normally think of it but actually a representation of distance? something like that i think.. lol
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On July 01 2011 03:06 iamke55 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2011 01:53 TheGiz wrote:
Time is merely a human relative concept, in the universe there is no such thing as time, really. Everything is relative to everything else, and the passage of time is only a descriptor for any relative sequence of events.
If you were to stop the motion of all matter in the Universe, time would not pass, because there would be no relative motion between objects - everything would simply be stationary, and nothing would be happening in sequence.
The adult concept of time passing faster is wrong in the sense that they experience everything in sequence just like everything else. What they're experiencing is purely psychological in that the passage of time seems faster because they observe more events to be monotonous and benign. If you don't care about what's happening around you, you tend not to notice the passage of time, which means that you simply don't notice the relative change in things around you. It's tunnel vision, basically.
tl;dr Adults perceive information differently than younger people and they don't recognize what's going around them as much. Why pretend to know about something when you have no understanding of it?
What are you talking about?
His explanation is very accurate. Why not try and add something of your own to the discussion, other then telling the poor guy he knows nothing about it.
On topic, I don't have much to add myself, but I think if you were to live indefinitely, your sense of of mortality and inevitable death would be gone, and time would probably seem to move slower.
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I agree with the comment that "time being faster for older people" is simply a difference in perception, part of this is from the increasing monotony of events in memory, as well as the psychological trick of nostalgia - when people go "wow time flies," they usually think of a past event in comparison with the present, and that mental sequential ordering places that long ago event right next to the present as if they were immediately linked in order, which is obviously not the case. However, I also think that children are much more present-focused, and that older people's tendency to either look forward or backwards causes them to again shift their perception to ignore the time occurring in the present.
Time won't disappear if humans become immortal - time is nothing but a rate of change, and even if humans don't change, other things will.
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On July 01 2011 01:05 sob3k wrote:
No.
I don't even think the older you get the faster time is perceived to go, it just seems that way looking back. It's the same rose colored glasses effect that drives all nostalgia.
Time does have a perceptive effect when people get older. Some experimenters proved that older people tend to think that a minute goes by, faster than younger people do. Young people are also more accurate. Circadian rhythms also change with age.
I always felt like when you are young, there is more to learn, you haven't lived as long or learned as much, so you tend to be able to recollect more and that makes time seem to pass slower. Children do have a habit of learning things faster than adults.
I think I'd still be able to understand time even if I lived forever.
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My belief on the subject is that as you know more stuff, you tend to forget more as well. When you are a kid, everything is a new experience, and thus you will remember many details from every day.
When you get older, you don't remember as many of the details, making it seem as if less has happened in the same span of time. It's not that time goes by any faster or slower, it's that it feels like less has happened in the same span of time.
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EPT
