We’ve all heard the saying, “Time sure is flying by.” But is it really?
As children when none of us had a care in the world, time always seemed to go by slowly. Christmas, birthdays, and summer vacation never seemed to come fast enough and time always seemed to be inching along. But as adults as we’ve continued to age, time has always seemed to be slipping away. Why is that?
As people get older, “they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are,” says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University. But scientists have their theories, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Like your first kiss.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine says: “Have you noticed that when you recall your first kisses, early birthdays, your earliest summer vacations, they seem to be in slow motion? I know when I look back on a childhood summer, it seems to have lasted forever.” He continued: “The more memory you have of something, you think, ‘Wow, that really took a long time!’ Of course, you can see this in everyday life, when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there. But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you’re not really writing it down anymore. There’s nothing novel about it.”
So, it appears that because the brain records new experiences differently, time always seems to be fleeting. But is time really flying by? Not really.
