Most of us have heard a parent or grandparent lament, “Time goes by faster every year,” as they shake their heads at how quickly July 4 seems to arrive. For a twelve-year-old, however, time feels different. The wait for summer vacation can seem endless, and a single school day might drag on like a traffic jam in the August heat. This gap between a child’s long afternoon and an adult’s lightning-fast month isn’t just anecdotal; it’s rooted in how our brain’s perception of time changes, altering the way it measures the moments that make up our lives.
First vs. Fresh Experiences
Children fill their days with firsts: a first dive into the pool, a first attempt at long division, a first sleepover away from home. These fresh experiences bombard the brain with new images to file away, stretching the subjective length of a single afternoon. In contrast, adults often replay familiar routines. With fewer novel snapshots to store, the days collapse into something more akin to a highlight reel than a feature film.
According to psychologist Marc Wittmann at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (IGPP), the sensation that time accelerates is closely linked to how much new material our brains record each day. He notes, “Newness” holds the key to this phenomenon, as memory and time perception sit on the same neural bench; when one slows, the other shrinks.
The Human Brain and Time Perception
Whenever the brain encounters something it has never processed before, a quick surge of attention flags the event as worth keeping. The more flags raised, the thicker the memory log becomes, and the longer that span later feels. Children, still new to nearly everything, throw flags left and right. A lunchroom joke, a new word in science class, or a game of tag – each registers as its own small chapter.
Adults often glide through copy-and-paste days that differ only by the date on the calendar. With fewer chapters recorded, the book of any given week reads as a short story. Research using immersive virtual reality in 2024 revealed that older volunteers underestimated simple time intervals by roughly 15 percent, highlighting how novelty sharpens the inner clock.
Brain Processing Speed Linked with Time
Every sensation must travel from eye or ear to cortex. In youngsters, these neural highways are short and well-paved. As bodies grow, the routes lengthen, and though the conduction speed remains quick, it can’t match its earlier zip. Add the natural age-related slowing of signal processing, and the brain starts sampling the world less often each second.
This sampling shows up in the eyes. Our eyes jerk from point to point in rapid saccades, pausing in brief fixations while the brain grabs a visual frame. Young, rested eyes squeeze in more fixations per minute. Older or fatigued eyes lag, offering the brain fewer still frames to stitch together. With a thinner film strip, the projection of the day speeds along.
Sleep and Alertness
A single night of good sleep can pull the brake on runaway days. When neurons are well-rested, they fire faster, notice more, and form clearer memories. Athletes know the flip side: stepping onto the field after too little shut-eye makes the whole match blur. The plays happen, but the mind records only a highlight or two before the final whistle.
Chronic fatigue magnifies the effect. Continually short-changing rest lowers baseline alertness, trimming snapshots day after day. Over months, life can feel like it’s slipping through the cracks, not because the clock sped up but because the recorder slowed down. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter tied to motivation and time estimation, also dips with sleep debt, further warping the sense of duration.
Social Media and Lost Time Perception
Endless feeds promise variety, yet most algorithms serve look-alike posts. Swipe through video after video of the same dance trend, and the brain barely registers a change. Hours evaporate while the memory log remains nearly blank. Compound that with the blue-light-induced bedtime delay, and you have a double punch: fewer snapshots captured and fewer hours slept.
Cutting back on passive scrolling or swapping it for an activity with genuine novelty – trying a new recipe, learning a chord on guitar – feeds the brain more distinct moments. Those moments stretch subjective time, turning a blur of an evening into something that feels full.
With Age Comes Responsibility
Beyond slower processing, adults juggle long lists of responsibilities. Focus narrows to tasks at hand – emails, errands, budgets – scanning less of the environment for new input. Novelty drops, and subjective days shorten. A 2023 survey comparing young adults with retirees found that the older group reported the year as “rushing by” nearly twice as often, linking the feeling to the predictability of daily routines rather than to health issues.
Even so, not every senior feels the rush. Researchers tracking so-called “super-agers” note that those who keep learning new skills and staying socially engaged maintain sharper senses of time, along with stronger memory performance. Variety keeps the brain’s camera clicking.
Use Your Brain to Slow Time Perception
Here’s the good news – the tools to lengthen your days fit into ordinary life. Go to bed on a schedule that honors the seven-to-nine-hour rule. Plan at least one activity each week that forces you out of autopilot: a different jogging route, a museum you’ve never visited, a new language app. While doing it, pay close attention to sights, sounds, and textures. Engagement packs extra snapshots into the mental album.
Stay curious daily. Swap a lunchtime scroll for a short walk and notice five things you’ve never clocked before – a mural, a bird call, the scent of a bakery vent. Those micro-discoveries add pages to the flipbook, expanding the subjective afternoon. Over time, the habit can “thicken” the memory book that tells the story of a year, making December feel like it belongs twelve full months away, right where the calendar says it should be.
The full study was published in the journal European Review.
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