Why Time Seems to Slip Away Faster as We Age
Why Time Seems to Slip Away Faster as We Age
That Strange Feeling of Speeding Time
It’s one of those quiet, universal experiences: you blink, and somehow a year has passed. When you were a kid, summer vacations felt endless whole lifetimes stretched between school years. Now, entire seasons seem to dissolve in what feels like weeks. People often joke that time speeds up with age, but what if that’s not just perception? What if something inside our brains really does make time move differently as we grow older?
A new study may have gotten us a little closer to understanding that unnerving sensation the sense that each year goes by faster than the last. And, interestingly enough, Alfred Hitchcock helped.
The Hitchcock Experiment
Researchers from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam CAN) pulled together brain scans from 577 volunteers ranging from 18 to 88 years old. Each of them had watched the same eight minute clip from the classic TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents an episode called “Bang! You’re Dead.”
It wasn’t a random choice. This particular clip has a peculiar effect on people’s brains: no matter who’s watching, it tends to synchronize their neural activity in similar ways. It’s suspenseful, tightly paced, and full of subtle emotional beats. That makes it perfect for scientists who want to study how the brain segments, or “chunks,” unfolding events in real time.
While the participants watched, functional MRI (fMRI) scans tracked how their brain activity changed moment by moment essentially capturing a kind of “movie” of their neurons firing as the story unfolded.
A Brain’s Way of Marking Time
The researchers then applied a rather charmingly named algorithm: Greedy State Boundary Search (GSBS). Think of it as a tool that tries to find the transitions between different patterns of brain activity those moments when the mind switches gears, interprets something new, or reacts to a change in the narrative. The “greedy” part simply means the algorithm identifies these changes continuously, without worrying about how they fit into the bigger story arc.
And what they found was striking. In older participants, these transitions happened less frequently. Their brains moved from one state of activity to another more slowly and stayed in the same state for longer stretches.
In contrast, younger participants’ brains shifted states more often processing a greater number of “mental moments” during the same eight minute clip.
The Science of Why Time Feels Faster
At first glance, that might sound abstract. But here’s the connection: our sense of time is closely tied to how many distinct experiences or “events” our brain registers. Aristotle actually proposed something similar over two thousand years ago that time feels longer when it’s filled with more noticeable changes or happenings.
If our brains process fewer distinct events in a given period, it might feel like less time has passed, even if the clock says otherwise. The new study seems to back that up on a neurological level.
In other words, as we age, our brains may literally record life in fewer frames per second. Like watching a movie that’s been slightly sped up you’re still seeing the whole story, but with fewer details between each scene.
Fewer Mental “Edits,” Faster Years
Imagine you’re editing a video. A young brain might cut the footage into dozens of short, dynamic clips every sound, movement, and flash of color gets logged as a separate moment. An older brain, on the other hand, might take in that same footage but slice it into fewer segments. The content’s still there, but it’s more continuous, less fragmented.
That difference could explain why, when you’re older, a day or a week feels like it goes by faster. Your brain isn’t marking as many “new beginnings” those small neural milestones that stretch your perception of time when you’re young.
The Cambridge team suggested that these longer lasting brain states could be a key reason older adults experience time as moving more quickly. Fewer neural transitions mean fewer “events” get logged, which might compress our sense of duration.
It’s not just about memory or attention, but something deeper the rhythm of the brain itself.
A Subtle Kind of Drift
Interestingly, this finding aligns with a broader idea in neuroscience: that memories aren’t static. They drift and reshape over time, like ink spreading through water. The same applies to our perception of time. The older we get, the more our brains seem to smooth out the edges experiences blur together, and our internal sense of duration softens.
You can probably feel this in daily life. Think of a child’s birthday party. For a five year old, it’s a major event every decoration, every sound, every taste is new and vivid. For a forty year old parent, it’s familiar territory: you’ve done this before, maybe dozens of times. The novelty the brain’s sense of “something new is happening” is what stretches time out. Without that novelty, the moments flow by more seamlessly, almost unnoticed.
Could We Slow Down the Feeling?
That raises an interesting question: if time feels faster because our brains log fewer distinct events, can we reverse that feeling? Could we make life feel slower again not in a depressing way, but in a richer one?
Some psychologists suggest that novelty is key. When we travel somewhere new, start learning a skill, or break a routine, we create more memorable “events” in our minds. Those moments stand out and, in retrospect, make time feel fuller.
It’s why a single week abroad can feel longer than three months of everyday life. Your brain is busier capturing and categorizing new details. So perhaps the trick to slowing down time isn’t mystical at all it’s just about giving your brain more to notice.
A Word of Caution
Of course, this study isn’t the final word on why time perception changes with age. The human experience of time is maddeningly complex, influenced by attention, emotion, memory, and countless other factors. Watching a Hitchcock clip inside a scanner tells us something but not everything about how our internal clocks work.
Still, what makes this research compelling is how it ties a timeless philosophical question to something tangible in the brain. It gives shape to that elusive feeling we all share that the older we get, the faster life seems to slip away.
The Subtle Beauty in It
Maybe that’s the bittersweet side of growing older. Our brains, in their efficiency, filter out the noise and smooth the edges of time. We see less novelty but perhaps more meaning. Maybe we don’t need each second to feel long, as long as it feels full.
So, yes time does seem to move faster as we age. But maybe that’s not entirely a loss. Maybe it’s just the brain’s way of saying, you’ve seen enough of the world to know how quickly it moves.
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