The Power of Time Perception

by Jean Paul Zogby

  Another possible cause for this optimistic planning bias has to do with our future time perspective. Imagine yourself tanning on a nice sandy beach, sipping a cold drink or reading a book. Do you see yourself looking at the sea from inside your skin? Or do you see your body lying on the sand from an outside point of view? When we think about the future, we generally adopt one of these two visual perspectives: the first-person perspective where you imagine things unfolding as if you were actually carrying them out, or the third-person perspective, in which you see yourself from outside performing the events as they unfold. In the first-person perspective, you are actually acting the future scenario in your mind, while in the third-person perspective, you actually “see” yourself moving around in an imagined future scenario, much like a camera was following you. Research has confirmed that planning a future activity using a third-person rather than a first-person imagery produces a more accurate estimate for completion. 149 However, two thirds of people tend to adopt a first-person perspective, and this is where the problem lies. This is because people who imagine a future task from a first-person perspective are more inclined to focus on planning and less inclined to consider the obstacles. As a result, they generate less realistic predictions. While people who use third-person perspective play out the scenario from an observer’s point of view and are more likely to imagine potential obstacles, which leads to more realistic scenarios.

  Recap

  In brief, mental time travel is our only way to experience time in the past and future. We use our memories from the past to imagine the future and construct the story of our life. We visit the future every time we anticipate things to come. Anticipation creates time distortions that depend on the expected outcome. If the future events are expected to end with a loss, time will run faster, whereas time will run slowly when future events are expected to end with a gain. The experience of future time also depends on how our expectations are met. Time will run faster when the outcome exceeds our expectations. We also saw the difference between fantasies and positive expectations and how it is important to ground those in reality to foster the kind of motivation that can bring them about.

  We also looked at the planning fallacy and how it creates an optimistic bias in our future time perception. Psychologists recommend that we break down or “unpack” a task into a number of very detailed steps needed to complete it. Whether you are getting ready for a date, finishing your holiday shopping, completing an essay, or preparing food, you will be more likely to meet your deadline by breaking it down into small steps. The greater the segmentation, the more accurate your prediction of how long the task will take. Psychologists also recommend using the third-person perspective when you are imagining your future plans. This will enable you to envision any potential hurdles and produce realistic predictions. But more importantly, consult the past. This involves predicting how long it will take to get something done based on past experiences. Remembering past experiences will lead to more realistic plans and is the secret ingredient for success. In general, adding 20 percent more time to any estimate you come up is considered wise!

  It is now time to look at one of the most commonly reported distortions in how we perceive the passing of time: the experience that time seems to fly by as we grow older. Let’s move on to the effects of ageing on how we experience the speed of time.

  Chapter 12

  Time Slipping Away

  The Effect of Age

  Never grow old, my little Briton. It really isn’t worth the effort

  ― Richard Blake

  Those were the Days

  In the book’s preface, I talked about how we all remember a time in our childhood when summer vacations seemed to be long, when weeks and months never seemed to end. Now, months rush by at a seemingly accelerating pace and you look back and wonder, “Is it New Years already?” As we grow older, every year seems to pass more quickly than the previous one, so that the time that is left available for us to live our lives appears to diminish.

  It is true that time seems to speed up as we age. Statistically speaking, and depending on where you live, if you are in your 30s, you will have around 40 more years to live, as, according to scientists, the average human life expectancy is 71 years. This might seem like plenty of time but, at the rate at which time is speeding up, you do not want to be surprised when you reach the end and exclaim: “What?! Already?!” In order to avoid this, we need to look at ways to slow the apparent speed of time. But first, let us explore the fundamental reasons behind this effect and, using everything we have learned so far, explore how best to mitigate it.

  Researchers have been investigating the effect of age on time perception for more than a century. Several studies have shown that people feel time moving faster now as compared to when they were younger. In one study, researchers asked participants to tap their hand at a speed that felt comfortable, which allowed scientists to measure the interval between taps and determine the individual’s “internal tempo.” The “comfortable” tapping speed is normally related to the brain’s internal clock speed, so it gives an indication about the perceived speed of time. They found that elderly participants had slower tapping speeds than younger ones, which meant that their “internal clocks” ran slower than those of younger people. 150, 151, 152

  Similarly, researchers conducted an experiment with two groups of volunteers: people in their 20s and others in their 60s. The participants were asked to estimate, by silently counting, when three minutes of time had elapsed. The study found that the internal clock of people in their 60s seemed to be running 20 percent slower than it was in the young people. A slower internal clock, as we saw earlier, leads to the experience that time flew. 153 If, for instance, an elderly person was engaged in an activity that lasted one hour of real time, his internal clock, running 20 percent slower, would measure only 48 minutes when that one-hour activity is over. At that rate, a 24-hour day would feel like only 19 hours of experienced time. Five hours would subjectively be “lost” from every day, creating the feeling that time flew.

  If you are interested in finding the speed of time for people of your age, check out the Speed of Time test at http://www.subscribepage.com/speed-of-time-test

  These experiments had the drawback of testing only short durations (seconds, minutes, and hours) and their results could not be generalized to apply to time distortions for longer periods, e.g. days, months, or years. Much larger studies were needed to address this issue. In 2005, psychologists interviewed 499 German and Austrian individuals ranging from 14 to 94 years old, asking them how quickly time seemed to pass during the previous week, month, year, and decade. They found that the biggest difference was for the 10-year interval, where older people reported that the last decade had passed more quickly than the younger group did. 154 A similar experiment was conducted in 2013, in which 868 Japanese participants between the ages of 16 and 80 years old, were asked how quickly the previous 10 years had passed. They similarly found that older adults perceived time as passing quickly, compared to younger adults and, the older one is, the faster time appeared to pass. The elderly individuals also reported experiencing more time pressure compared to when they were younger, as if there was not enough time to complete all the things they wanted to do. 155 Let us now look at what causes this effect.

  Routine and Living in the Past

  There are several reasons, both psychological and physiological, behind why time seems to speed up as we age. As we have seen, we remember the duration of an event by the amount of information and number of memories that we can recall from that event. A time interval will appear to be longer if it is rich with interesting memories.

  In his famous 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology, William James argues that “the shortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of the memory’s content and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view.” He suggested that “emptiness, monotony, and familiarity are what make time shrivel up.” When we were younge
r, everything was new so we paid more attention to the world around us. There were so many experiences to discover, interesting things to observe, and a whole world to explore. This non-stop supply of novelty meant that our young brains were constantly on high alert. A toddler’s inquisitive brain, their natural curiosity, and appetite for learning come naturally. Children are known for their innocent sense of wonder and intensity of perception. Their brains are constantly bombarded with new information that needs to be processed and new tasks that need to be learned, all of which requires a significant amount of brainpower. During that phase, the child’s brain is working overtime and the brain processing speed is running in high gear. Everything they see, smell, hear, or taste is new. This heightened alertness causes time to stretch in those moments. Moreover, when all of those fascinating memories are recalled, that period will appear stretched retrospectively, as if time ran slowly.

  The amount of novelty continues to increase as the child grows into a teen. Between the ages of 15 and 25, there is more freedom and new experiences to explore. There are more “firsts” and these memories are usually densely packed. There is a first love, first kiss, first alcoholic drink, first sexual relationship, and first time away from home. Psychologists refer to that period as the “reminiscent bump.” These rich memories are easily remembered because they occur during our formative years when a person’s identity is being consolidated. These novel experiences create so many memory markers that that period of time will appear to have taken longer than it actually did. Time will seem to have been running slowly.

  This goes on until the late twenties when people start to settle down. In our thirties, our lifestyle starts to become more organized and predictable. We may find a steady job, establish a family with the usual home chores and a rhythm that repeats itself week after week. The amount of new experiences decreases and things become much more familiar. There is less novelty and we slowly lose that childish sense of wonder. We gradually stop paying conscious attention to the things around us—the town we live in, the buildings, streets, and our route to work. Our brain ignores most of the familiar things and ceases to notice the small details that make one day different from another. With fewer unique memories being recorded, the period of time will be experienced as being shorter. As a result, a year of childhood that is full of rich memories will seem longer than a year of adulthood. When you feel that the years are flying by, routine and monotony are the culprits. It is like when you go to sleep and wake up eight hours later and feel the whole night was just a couple of seconds long, because your brain has stopped processing new memories. A couple of decades will feel the same way if your brain spends that time in a routine that is devoid of novel experiences.

  Another factor that leads to the speeding up of time as we grow older has to do with time perspectives. Recall that time appears to slow down when anticipating a positive future. Well, this can also explain why time speeds up as we age. Children live mostly in the future. Their whole lives are still ahead of them. They are eager to grow up and are constantly anticipating something, even though they will later long for their childhood. Young girls pretend to put on make-up as if they are grown-up women already. Young students are eager to graduate from high school or college, get their first car, their first job, and become independent. This heightened attention to future approaching events causes time to slow down, as we saw in the previous chapter. That period will, therefore, inevitably appear to be stretched. In contrast, as we grow older, we slowly start to live in the past, recalling accomplishments and misfortunes from our younger years. The greater portion of our life now lies behind us and life’s most important milestones, such as school graduation, first job, marriage, and having children, are no longer anticipated events but have instead been transformed into past memories. With fewer things to anticipate and a relatively less optimistic future, time speeds up. President Theodore Roosevelt once said, “The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.”

  “When you feel that the years are flying by, routine and monotony are the culprits”

  Fading Memories

  Another reason time runs faster as we age is a phenomenon called “forward telescoping.” We have all bumped into an old friend who we have not seen for years but it seems like just yesterday when we were last with them. You visit an old friend, expecting his son to be a toddler, only to find out he has been in school for a few years now and you wonder how time flew. This is called “forward telescoping” and is the tendency to recall events as being more recent than they really are. It is like looking at an object through a telescope and getting the impression that it is much closer than it really is.

  One plausible explanation for this was proposed by psychologist Norman Bradburm and is called the “clarity of memory” hypothesis. As memories fade over time, they become unclear and we assume that they happened a long time ago. However, not all memories fade in the same way. Negative memories fade faster because of our psychological coping mechanism. In contrast, we talk about positive memories and relive them regularly, so they are reinforced in our mind. As a result, negative memories lose their edge over time and fade faster, but positive ones persist. The clarity of these positive memories compared to the fading negative ones is what makes them appear more recent than they really are. This is the reason we remember the birth of our child, the year we graduated, or got married, as if was only yesterday.

  An Aging Brain

  One of the unavoidable facts of life is that our brains are going to deteriorate as we grow older. This is another physiological factor behind why getting older affects our time perception. An ageing brain also goes through physical changes, such as a drop in the levels of dopamine neurotransmitters and the gradual deterioration of the central nervous system. Neurotransmitters, as we saw earlier, are the means by which brain cells communicate with each other, and they play a critical role in time perception. 156 When they are abundant in the brain, information processing is quick and the internal clock runs faster. However, neurotransmitters start to decline over the course of a normal lifespan, causing the brain’s internal clock to run slower, so time durations shrink in our mind and time appears to fly.

  Likewise, as we grow older, the reduced sensitivity of our central nervous system results in a slower brain processing speed and higher memory loss. We notice that it takes us longer to solve problems or make decisions now than when it did when we were young. This is the result of wear and tear on all the axon wires that connect our brain regions together. The slow transfer of information along the axon lines impedes processing speed. This has been demonstrated in Flicker Fusion experiments which found that our ability to distinguish a fast flickering light source diminishes with age. 157 Children can distinguish flickering lights at higher frequencies than older people. This ability continues to improve with the development and maturation of their central nervous system and reaches a peak between the age of 16 and 20 years old. After that, it starts to decline, indicating a slower speed in processing information which gives the impression that time must have been running at a faster pace. 158

  Squeezing Out More Time

  Another reason why time feels like it is running faster as we age is due to time pressure from deadlines and the increased responsibilities that accompany adulthood. As we move away from life’s beginning and start approaching life’s end, we become more aware of the shrinking amount of time remaining. With more commitments and loose ends to tie up, we get the feeling that there is “so much to do and so little time.” This affects the planning and implementing of long-term goals that may not be achieved before our time runs out. 159 We become motivated to complete these goals as fast as possible, which results in a feeling that we are running out of time.

  William Penn, the founder of the state of Pennsylvania, described it best when he said, “Time is what we want most, b
ut what we use worst.” As we move through life, from the optimistic prospects of ignorant youth to the more serious and restrained expectations of adulthood, we all come to a point where we have to ask ourselves one of the toughest questions, “Is that it? Is that all there is?”

  When we were young, we did not care about wasting time, because we thought time was infinite. As children, we expected things to get better when we grew up. But upon reaching adulthood, we started acquiring the complex roles of husband or wife or professional. Middle age is characterized by overlapping roles that create a sense of “chronic emergency,” where we feel constant pressure to perform them in a routine fashion. A typical middle-aged woman in her 30s or 40s is a mother, a wife, and a professional, all at the same time. She has to switch constantly between these roles over the course of a typical day. This chronic urgency creates the perception that time is running faster, as we struggle to be all things to all people. Then, all of a sudden, we realize that half of our life is over and we do not really have much to show for it. Midlife crisis kicks in and we feel that we have so much that we still want to do but not enough time to do it in. To quote from Haruki Murakami’s novel Dance, Dance, Dance, “Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.” Our dreams take a hit with the harsh realization of the amount of time we have to spend to achieve them, compared to the diminishing time remaining.