The scientific reason years get faster as we get older – and how to slow them down
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Ever feel like time seems to be speeding up as you age? The key could be to shake up your routine, writes Helen Coffey. As I sit here, contemplating the fact that we’re about to enter the year of our lord 2025, I feel a bone-deep weariness settle upon my ageing frame. Perhaps it’s hitting that quarter-century mark, but the very notion of “2025” – twenty twenty-five! – sounds absurd. It can’t possibly be a real year, happening in real time – it’s the stuff of time-travelling tales; films set in a space-age future; dystopian novels that paint a bleak picture of societal breakdown in decades to come. It can’t possibly be happening now.
Yet the calendar doesn’t lie. It is about to turn 2025, whether I believe it temporally possible or not. The passage of time seems to be playing pesky tricks – for surely the pandemic was a mere couple of years ago? The London Olympics were five years ago, weren’t they? And the millennium was a decade ago, tops – I’m certain of it….
One side of the equation in explaining this phenomenon is physiological. Remember as a kid when the summer holidays felt elastic, a never-ending wad of chewing gum that kept on extending as hours melted away on lazy afternoons? There’s an actual science behind that. “The brain receives fewer images than it was trained to receive when young,” argues Bejan. He theorises that the rate at which we process visual information slows down as we age; as the size and complexity of the networks of neurons in our brains increase, the electrical signals must travel greater distances, leading to slower signal processing. The result? We perceive fewer “frames-per-second” as we get older, and therefore time feels like it’s passing quicker. It’s like a flipbook – the fewer the number of pictures, the quicker you flick to the end.
