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Comment by Qem | Hacker News Reader

My hypothesis is a bit different. Instead of logarithimic time perception, informational time perception. Children have brains with high plasticity and huge new information acquisition (learning) rates. Those rates drop as plasticity decreases when one gets older. Those "bitrates" of new information flowing into long-term memory act as sand flowing through a hourglass. A fixed amount of sand represents a fixed amount of subjective time. When those rates drop, we feel time runs faster, because now the same amount of sand (subjective time, information) stretches over more clocktime.

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I think you're onto something, but I don't think it has to do with plasticity, but novelty.

Consider the brain as a giant recording device with very good compression based recognizing patterns from previous data. So the first time you eat an apple, it stores a lot of data because it's a new experience. The next time, it stores something more like "like the last apple, but a little more tart".

I think our perception of time (at the macro scale) is roughly a perception of how much new data our compression-oriented brain is storing. It's the sensation of accumulated novelty.

With this in mind, the length of one’s life is not chronological (by a clock) but the integral of the novel information they experience.

So a monotonous 60 year existence is a fraction of the perceived duration of 60 years of a wild and adventurous, constantly reading, learning new languages, making new deep human connections - existence.

Right. Which means making the most of your life is only partially about longevity, but also about getting out there and doing new things.

I wonder how something like ayahuasca or dmt would impact this. People have described these substances as having a type of mental “reset” quality. If they do impact time perception, I’m assuming it’s only temporary…

While I can't speak to these substances, regarding the temporariness of it:

Irrespective of whether or not the effect, or lasting effects, dwindle and can thus be considered "temporary", there's something too be said about the act of the reset itself.

That is, whether or not the effects feel like they're fading, the memory of what it was like when it was new is still a massive data point and can be recalled.

In short, you can still remember that feeling of the reset and recall a time when your brain felt new and refreshed.

I think everyone intuitively understands this too. If you spend the next 3 months sitting in your boring office job that you've done 1000 days before, those 3 months may disappear entirely from your memory. Compared to taking the next 3 months and traveling to some strange land far away from home, and I bet those 3 months will stick out in your mind until your dying days.

Controversial take: isn’t this a strong point in favor of having as many romantic partners as possible during one’s life?

It really does not work like that, you start mixing everything and everyone up in a depressing blob after a while. I can't even remember the names of people i thought I loved or at least cared about. Compared with my last five years in a serious, committed relationship, its a night and day difference. To the next five years, and the ten after that hopefully.

No? Because then the norm is just passing from one person to another.

Thats the same thing, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)?w...

Well yes some of us do believe in the Shannon basis for Quantum Gravity.

Which would imply that if an 80 year old from birth went out there and learnt new things and did new things every day, years would pass like a turtle, however hours and days would zoom by.

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