Times Flies Past Ever Quicker

Why does time fly past when we're older? As a child, a year was an eternity. Waiting for another birthday was too long to bear, you measured your age in quarter and half years and the summer holidays went on forever. But when you've been around for a while, annual events whoosh past you and before you know it, a decade or two have disappeared. Why so?

My latest New Scientist magazine explains how the brain seems to use the amount of energy spent recording events to estimate time. And it takes more energy processing novel events. Youngsters experiencing life for the the first time are fully occupied taking in novel and stimulating events, soaking up all the detail and making sense of it. But when you've settled into a routine, there's no need to  pay attention to the same extents. You can nearly run on autopilot.

When you think back over the past year, it's likely very similar to the previous year and the year before that. There's no point remembering details of a thousand nearly identical commutes to work, a thousand trips to the supermarket, a daily watering of the garden, and countless evenings spent sitting in a favourite chair watching tv. And so looking backwards, there aren't many memorable events in the recent past to fill your time.

Your colleague heads to Europe for a month, returning chock full of thousands of new memories. You're surprised they're back so soon because in the same time nothing worth recording has happened to you.

So what have we learnt from this? The good news is that doing a prolonged stretch in prison won't feel too long when you think backwards. And for my non-criminal readers, the best way to prolong your life is to vary your routine and pack in different things. If you're stuck in Groundhog Day then you're speeding through life too quickly.