Physics explains why time passes faster as you age

Mind time and clock time are two totally different things. They flow at varying rates.

The chronological passage of the hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars is a steady, measurable phenomenon. Yet our perception of time shifts constantly, depending on the activities we’re engaged in, our age, and even how much rest we get. An upcoming paper in the journal European Review by Duke University mechanical engineering professor Adrian Bejan, explains the physics behind changing senses of time and reveals why the years seem to fly by the older we get. (The paper, sent to Quartz by its author, has been peer-reviewed, edited, and has been approved for publication but a date has not yet been set.)

Bejan is obsessed with flow and, basically, believes physics principles can explain everything. He has written extensively about how the principles of flow in physics dictate and explain the movement of abstract concepts, like economics. Last year, he won the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal for “his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions…and for constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems.”

In his latest paper, he examines the mechanics of the human mind and how these relate to our understanding of time, providing a physical explanation for our changing mental perception as we age.

The mind’s eye

According to Bejan—who reviewed previous studies in a range of fields on time, vision, cognition, and mental processing to reach his conclusion—time as we experience it represents perceived changes in mental stimuli. It’s related to what we see. As physical mental-image processing time and the rapidity of images we take in changes, so does our perception of time. And in some sense, each of us has our own “mind time” unrelated to the passing of hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars, which is affected by the amount of rest we get and other factors. Bejan is the first person to look at time’s passage through this particular lens, he tells Quartz, but his conclusions rest on findings by other scientists who have studied physical and mental process related to the passage of time.

These changes in stimuli give us a sense of time’s passage. He writes:

The present is different from the past because the mental viewing has changed, not because somebody’s clock rings. The “clock time” that unites all the live flow systems, animate and inanimate, is measurable. The day-night period lasts 24 hours on all watches, wall clocks and bell towers. Yet, physical time is not mind time. The time that you perceive is not the same as the time perceived by another.

Time is happening in the mind’s eye. It is related to the number of mental images the brain encounters and organizes and the state of our brains as we age. When we get older, the rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases because of several transforming physical features, including vision, brain complexity, and later in life, degradation of the pathways that transmit information. And this shift in image processing leads to the sense of time speeding up.

Full article: Quartz

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