Perception

Hi, I’m new here; I thought I’d give this a try. I find myself thinking about things quite a bit and other than the bewildering “what exactly am I” question, I like smaller versions of that such as specific experiences.

I have noticed as most people do…that our perception of time seems to change as we age. Typically, as one gets older, time seems to speed up. Days, weeks, months, and years go by quicker. Why do you think this is? I have come up with a few possible explanations, but nothing that makes me want to pat myself on the back over:

  1. As we age, our memories begin to falter. Our brains slow down in forming neural connections and we simply are forgetting more of our experience as we age. That is why time seems to go faster - we are forgetting that it even passed.

  2. Let’s say you were to create a pile of leaves. If you add the leaves on one at a time, the 2nd one will double the size of the pile and the 3rd one will increase it by 50%. When you get to the 1000th leaf, it is insignificant to the overall pile. In the same way, as we age, our frame of reference increases in scope and our perception of finite increments of time adjusts.

  3. Our brains develop better filters as time goes on. Year after year of living makes the brain try to compensate for the tremendous amount of information we take in by filtering out the unimportant. As we get better at this, we are merely perceiving how much “junk” our brains are throwing out rather than time speeding up.

  4. A biological clock is ticking and this change in perception is a biproduct of our natural life cycles approaching their ends. Hormone balances change and perhaps our sense of time is one of those things that breaks down first.

Those are my main thoughts…does anyone agree with one or more of them or have their own?

This explanation makes the most sense to me.

What about Einstein’s take on time:

Well I think the speed of time isn’t because our brain is becoming more aware of it, but rather aware of ourselves. Because as we age our mind becomes more cultivated with the great information that comes to us everyday. The brain develops and becomes more analytical to the information it recieves. As a child we were just receptive and we mimiced, copied, or repeated what we heard or saw. As we age we analyze and evaluate whether this is correct, incorrect, appropiate, or inappropiate to say or do. Our lives also become more occupied with more learning or work, and we cease to be children who were dependant on our parents and lead a more responsible life. So our lives become more full of work and ordeals that we forget to notice time and it just seems to fly. Perhaps this is my thought, but I still remember as a little kid staring into the clock awaiting time to play or do things a child would normally do, and time seemed to slow down at times. Now it seems that even a day isn’t enough for me, but there is more to do. So essentially it’s more of how much activity goes about in your life, than it really being your brain becoming more perceptive. Anywho, those are my thoughts.

:sunglasses: I agree that when you are younger more things are new to you so your
perception in hightened, you are more aware or what you notice. As you get older your priorities change so what you look for in life also changes.
You may for example, when you are younger notice a butterfly on a leaf
so much so that it intrigues you to think more about its very existence.
When you are older you may still notice the butterfly but its existence is
more understood and so less considered. The meaning of things is what
holds perception togeather, in that what we see is either taken as something more or disregarded. The issue of time again becomes problematic as we age for it has more significance to us the older we become. Thus being more sought after and when things become more of
an issue to us then they become more precious.
In my consideration time is something that has no ‘rigid designator’ so
an hour in one possible world could be 10 mins in another. Lets say that Olin Downes sat and viewed Wagners opera, his physical presence and mental presence throughout the experience would have been in different
places. His mental engulfed within the significance of the opera the music the story the visuals, the whole experience. At the same time his physical presence would have just been a body sat on row whatever seat number ?.

so time is as once was said “of no significance” because it is the meaning within that time that has the significance. Isn’t it strange that we only justify time by perception and not by meaning.

I don’t wear a watch but I do have the time :smiley:

Yoda

Maybe the noticing of the passage of time has to do with the minds focus.

I feel as I have got older my mind has become more focused on the things I do, less easily distracted, unlike most children who seem easily distracted.

I think of times when reading, drawing or even playing a PC game, when time seems to have flown by.

On the other hand, when I first started meditating, my mind was easily distracted from the task in hand and the 30 mins of meditation seem to take ages.

When waiting a phone call or someone to arrive, the mind is not focused on anything particular, no activity, and time seems to drag.

The mind is not focused on the stove, it is anywhere but on the stove. Yet the mind is intensly focused on the pretty girl.

As we age we focus more, and are not so easily distracted.
That is what I reckon anyway.

MentulZen.

It’s not about the time you spend focused, it’s about whether you miss the time spent unfocused.

I would say mainly the proportionality of the affair with the 60th year mattering little compared to the 10th. also 3 a little bit, that is, we filter out more things as we get older. 4 fascinates me, perhaps our sense of time does change as we get older. different animals certainly have different senses of time, so the theory is not that far fetched.

I think up until you’re really mature (into retirement) you’re actually spending time doing more and more things. Because of this your mind can only handle a small amount of information so it forgets the unimportant things until years seem shorter and shorter.

perception is a reflective mirror that mists and clears and colors our life and memories to the desire upon which we feel we have the most to gain…our focus shifts with our desires…

raven

Welcome to the forum ravenh. And how does that relate to time as in the original post?