Time seems to slip away as we get older.
One minute, you're celebrating a milestone birthday, and before you've had the chance to process it, another year has already passed.
As a child, weekends felt like an action-packed eternity. But now, you only need to blink on Friday night and you're suddenly stuck in Monday morning traffic.
It's a sensation we've all experienced – the longing to press "pause" on time, to slow it down and savour the moments before they vanish. And this isn't just a feeling; there's science behind it.
"Almost universally, people report that time passes more quickly as they get older," says Prof Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time at Liverpool John Moores University. "It seems to be something we all experience but when we try to capture it in studies it's quite hard to find."
Prof Ogden spoke to the Manchester Evening News as part of our Science Spotlight series. Each week we chat to a different researcher to answer burning science questions. We'll shine a light on the wonders that shape our universe, remarkable technology, and the mysteries of the mind and body.
There are a number of reasons why our perception of time changes as we get older, Prof Ogden says. The most simple of which is that each year becomes a smaller fraction of our total life as we age.
However, Prof Ogden seems to think our memory plays a significant role in this. When we're young everything is new – school, first experiences, new places – which makes time feel rich and expansive.
"Your brain is not constantly processing time so it has to use other indicators to judge how long things last for, and one of those indicators is memory," she explains. "If we've got a period of time where lots of new memories are formed and life is really exciting, our brain understands this as meaning 'if we did lots of things, it must have been a long time'."
As adults, we settle into routines, days blend together, and we create fewer memorable moments, making months or years appear to fly by.
"That could be another reason why we feel as if time is moving really slowly, because when we look back at the year we haven't done as many new things, so our brain tricks us into thinking it must have been a short period of time since last year," Prof Ogden adds.
Some theories also suggest that brain processing speed and age-related changes to memory could also play a role.
"As we get super old, our memory starts to fail, and that could be another reason why we get this sensation of time passing as we get older," says Prof Ogden.
According to Prof Adrian Bejan, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University in the US, time perception depends on the way our eyes and brain send and perceive images. When we're young, this happens quickly, but slows as we age – giving the impression that time itself is speeding up.
"Mind time is not clock time. I perceive the passing of time in my way and that differs from the way which you perceive it. But certainly both ways are not clock time," Prof Bejan said in a TED talk about why time moves more quickly as we age.
He says the brain perceives the passage of time from the time intervals between snapshots captured by the eyes. He uses the laws of physics – which say that the time interval is calculated by the distance travelled by the signal from eye to brain, divided by the speed of that flow – to show that this changes as we get older.
"With increasing age, the length of travel increases and the speed of that flow decreases," he explains, adding that path degradation slows down the speed of biological signals.
This is further slowed down by body growth, which slows down movement from muscles as we get bigger. "You can compare mentally the movement of the legs of the mouse compared to the movement of the legs of the elephant," he explains.
Essentially, his theory states that, in old age, the brain receives fewer signals from the environment per unit of clock time, making it feel as though time is going faster.
A recent study by Prof Ogden at Liverpool John Moores University looked into how people in the UK felt that Christmas came around quicker each year, while those in Iraq felt like Ramadan came sooner.
She also explored how memory might affect this by looking at people's ability to remember things from their past – their retrospective memory – and their ability to remember things they have got to do – a future memory called prospective memory.
"People who were bad at remembering all the things that they had to do were more likely to report that Christmas comes around more quickly," Prof Ogden. "You can kind of see why; if you're not prepared for Christmas then it feels all of a sudden very soon."
As well as memory, Prof Ogden says our emotions can also have an impact on our perception of time.
"Our experience of time is generally really tied up in our emotions. The more emotionally aroused we are the more we experience these distortions to time," she explains. "If you think back to being a child, it's a very emotionally charged experience. Life becomes slightly less emotional on a daily basis as you get older."
In 2021, Prof Ogden looked into how the Covid-19 pandemic affected our sense of time and found that people experienced "mass distortions to time" during lockdowns, which were largely linked to emotions.
"For some people, lockdowns were passing really slowly, and these were generally people who weren't coping well with lockdown – people who were socially isolated, or anxious or stressed," Prof Ogden explains. "And then you've got this other group of people for whom lockdown was passing really quickly, and these were people who were socially satisfied, less anxious and less depressed."
Not only does this tell us that changes to routine – which help us understand where we are in time – can impact our perception of time, but so can disruptions to our social environment.
"Time is our most precious resource. It’s the one thing you rarely have enough of, and when it’s gone, there is no getting it back," she told Liverpool John Moors University.
Lockdown gave us an insight of what it's like to have time taken away from you, which has probably changed the way people feel about time, she told the M.E.N
No matter what underpins the feeling that time speeds up as we age, it's something that we all tend to experience – and Prof Ogden says our sense of time is intrinsically linked to our own satisfaction in life.
Courtesy: manchesterevening.co.uk
Bd-pratidin English/Lutful Hoque
