How we perceive time: stop it slipping away by doing new things | Hacker News Reader

How we perceive time: stop it slipping away by doing new things

blog.bufferapp.com

114 pointsLightning21 comments

There's some solid advice in the article.

However, childhood summers don't seem long primarily because you're doing new things, but rather because of relative perception of time. When you're two years old, one summer spans 1/8 of your life. Unless you live in the UK.

The larger our past gets the smaller our present feels.

The Eagleman Stag is one of my favorite animated shorts. http://vimeo.com/41756240

> one summer spans 1/8 of your life. Unless you live in the UK.

currently summer stretches to nearly 8 minutes.

Can you link to something where this scientific concept is from?

I've only ever seen this in the cute not scientific video linked elsewhere here, and have taken it as false. A nice cute plot for a story but not true.

I'd be interested to see something backing it up.

Unfortunately I can't. It's not a scientific concept, just something that seems intuitively correct to me (haven't seen the video before, came up with the same concept independently, as I imagine many others did). Could you try to explain why you consider it false?

The only thing I can back it up with is a personal anecdote - when I was five, twenty minutes in a tram seemed like ages, despite having taken that same ride many times.

I first came across this idea in this NPR article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/09/29/130221453/how-to-li...

I haven't been very successful in applying the suggestions. I tend to repeat the same few activities (building software, bike riding, spending time with the 10 or so people closest to me) because I really enjoy those things. I'm not convinced that having time pass quickly is at odds with feeling content with one's life.

You ever go away from work for a few weeks, and when you come back people say "huh, you're back already", but it's been a month?

When everything is the same week-in week-out, we don't seem to record it the same. From a sanity point of view this may be a good thing...

In the past year I've lived and worked on 3 continents, done a long road trip, now settled in a new city and established a home there, had a few different jobs, met many new people and had a window into some very different worlds. This is very different from pervious years of mine, as I lived in the city I was born in for my entire life.

It's the only year I haven't looked back and thought, "Wow, it's been a year, already?" I actually look back and think about just how much I've done in a year. The passage of time still stings in a way that it always will, but I've figured out that the key to avoiding pure regret is having a host of varying experiences to look back upon.

I left my job and drove from Alaska to Argentina.

Afterward, I dropped in at my old workplace to go to lunch with friends still there. A few people said "You're done already - it feels like you left a month ago."

It was 2 years.

Sounds like an amazing adventure. I've been planning to do the journey the other way up for some years, but haven't made it happen yet.

I did drive the whole coast of Australia over the course of six months a couple of years back, that was an amazing time, and I'm determined to throw things like that into life as often as possible.

I wonder if this is the reason why during psychedelic trips time seems to last much longer. The vast amount of completely new information causes the brain to slow time down.

Not quite. The amount of new experience in that trip is so much that if you perceived it at your normal rate in your daily life, it would seem like it took a lot longer. It's like filming something with a high-speed camera and then later playing it back on your TV at slower speed. Things didn't go slower during the actual filming but when the recording is played, you have more information.

This is also a similar thesis to what Joshua Foer writes about in Moonwalking with Einstein. One key takeaway is that whenever you're in a new environment, or doing something new, take time to appreciate your present surroundings, not worrying about the past or future. This way you can help extend the sense of time as well.

<quote>

Dunbar, unlike Yossarian, accepts the fact that death comes for everyone, and has committed himself to a somewhat unorthodox theory and practice of life extension: the cultivation of boredom. The men Yossarian despises and heaps imaginary violence upon, such as Clevinger with his accusations of “antisocial aggressions” (19), are welcomed by his laconic friend. “Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it” (38), Heller explains, and “Dunbar liked Clevinger because Clevinger annoyed him and made the time go slow” (19)—activities that he insist literally count eleven-times-seventeen years to the hour. </quote>

http://thescattering.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/boredom-makes-...

For the most part this all made sense to me, but it also seemed to contradict experiences I've had. For example, whenever I have work days that consist of the same type of meaningless coding it seems to drag on forever, but give me an interesting or complex (or new) problem that I can really sink my teeth into and the day goes by in a flash.

Also, National Geographic's show Brain Games did an episode about our perception of time. It had a lot of this info in it; it even showed the experiment of displaying familiar pictures with the occasional unfamiliar picture mixed in. http://braingames.nationalgeographic.com/episode/2/

I listened to a recent discussion on NPR (forget which program) which drew a distinction between the perception of time as it passes and the perception of time looking back. For example, after a year of doing the same thing over and over, you can look back and wonder where all the time went (even though it felt like it took an eternity while you were experiencing it). Whereas after a year of doing interesting/different things, the time may seem to pass quicker, but thinking back on the year, time seems to have passed much more slowly because there are more markers in your memory.

This view appears to contradict the old adage: "Time flies when you're having fun." Unless they're referring to the things you might try to learn that are no fun.

Time in the small flies when you are having fun, time in the large passes more quickly with routine. At least that's how I perceive it.

> When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

You can see your eyes move if you use the front cam of a mobile phone, because the stuff on screen is usually a bit laggy.

I think the article generally makes intuitive sense. The only thing I'd say though is that thing about 'new' stuff. If I'm really concentrating on something new, 4 or 5 hours can go by, and it felt like it went by really quickly.

I think I've read this somewhere. In fact, I'm sure I have. However, I completely agree with the author as this is something that I've experienced myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com