This short Scientific American article tackles something that’s been on my mind of late:<\/p>\n
I regularly look back and feel that another year has zoomed by, yet at the same time I can remember stretches of time as a teenager that seemed to go on much much longer. Why is that?<\/p>\n
This article posits that<\/p>\n
\n“… our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I doubt that it’s something like a numerical counter (“5 new memories over the last hour… check.”). But I could believe that it’s a function of the compressibility of experience. I imagine that repetitive experiences are highly compressible, which is why I can’t individually remember brushing my teeth every day for the last month. But new memories would by construction not be compressible: they represent new information that your brain has opted to preserve at higher fidelity (maybe because they are useful, or surprising, or trauma-inducing). <\/p>\n
New memories also capture moments of learning. So those long stretches that bunch up into a sense of time that’s been skipped over… do they also represent periods of non-learning? The horror! Or even worse – learning that has since been forgotten? Well, maybe not; memories aren’t always well anchored in time, so you might retain the information but have forgotten when you learned it. Whew!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This short Scientific American article tackles something that’s been on my mind of late: Why does time seem to speed up with age? I regularly look back and feel that another year has zoomed by, yet at the same time I can remember stretches of time as a teenager that seemed to go on much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4753"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4753"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4759,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4753\/revisions\/4759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}