Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Why Does Time Speed Up As You Age?

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

It’s not just you – time really does seem to pass faster for people as we age. But exactly why remains a mystery, though some of the theories for why life passes by so quickly are make a lot of sense. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome into the short stuff. I should say happy new year and welcome to the short stuff. Huh, Chuck? It's 2020.

It is. We're living in the future. Yes. Well, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there is guest producer JJ over there. And we're all living in the future, 2020. Time's flying. I've got my jet pack, a flying car. Sweet. And yeah, time's flying, Chuck.

Do you know why it's flying? Hold on, you see this pill on my plate? I'm about to add water to it to make it into a Thanksgiving dinner. Oh, I thought it was a pot roast dinner. Yeah, exactly. It always was pot roast, wasn't it? Yeah, it really is.

But Thanksgiving, that's a close second for sure, as far as future food pills go. Okay, I just had it. Delicious. Was it? Did it have any kind of blueberry dessert like Willy Wonka? Yeah, that was a compote. Nice. So you said something, you said time flies or time's flying.

I agreed time's flying. And then I asked you why time is flying? You didn't answer, so I'm gonna answer for you. It's because we're aged. Yes. We're getting old, Chuck. I know, dude. As anyone who has ever gotten old knows,

the older you get, the faster time goes where you're just, you're working, working, working and you lift your head up and all of a sudden it's March and then it's July and then it's the holidays and then it's the next March and then the next July. And then you die. Pretty much, and you start to get a little panicky because you're like, wait a minute, wait a minute,

these years are important. I need to pay attention to them, but everybody knows that when you're grown up, you have so many more responsibilities than when you're a kid, of course time's gonna fly. The thing is, there seems to be objective evidence that time actually does speed up as you age relative to your experience.

Like subjectively, you experience time moving faster as you age and that doesn't quite make sense. Yeah, and there's, this has always been an interesting concept to wrap my head around because it's definitely something that you cannot avoid noticing as you get a little older. Yeah.

There was one study done, I thought this was kind of interesting in the 90s, a psychologist named Peter Mangun, man, mangun. You butchered that. Peter Mangun. There you go. And he had 25 young people between 1924 and then 15 older people between 1680.

I'm sorry, real quick. I also saw that he had some middle-aged people too, but go ahead. I would think so. Yeah. Because that's a big jump. Yeah. To estimate a three-minute time interval

just by counting out loud. Yeah. So he said, hey, you 16-year-old, count out three minutes second by second by going one, 1,000, two, 1,000. Right. And so the younger set averaged three minutes and three seconds.

They kind of nailed it. He went over to the older set, he woke them up. What? And they went, hey, what? Three minutes and 40 seconds is what they averaged. So they were off by 37 seconds from the younger set. And basically thinking that three minutes it elaps. And the thinking here is that,

hey, your brain's internal clock runs slowly if you're older. Right. And this proves it. Right. And that would mean that if your internal clock is running more slowly relative to the actual passage of time, then to you it would seem like time is speeding up

because what you're counting off is way slower than what's actually going on, which would account for why it would seem like time speeds up as we get older because it actually is relative to our own internal clocks. Yeah. And there's a few ideas behind this. One is that our biological internal clocks do slow down,

our metabolism slows down, our breathing, our heartbeat. I listened to my daughter's heartbeat the other day. I put my ear to her chest because she did the same to me. And her heart was going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And we were just hanging out. And she listened to mine and it was like,

beat. And it wheezed and farted between every beat. That's great. Made like a cranky gear sound too. Yeah. And I heard hers and I was like, did you just run a sprint? Like what is going on?

Right. And that really hit me. Like it's different when you're a little kid. Yeah. Kids' metabolisms are way faster. Their bodies are just operating way faster. And then as you age, all of these processes start to kind of level off

and then slow down. It's the ramps or deaths. Basically, exit ramp. That's another way to put it. But the idea behind this is that there's this internal clock, not our circadian rhythm, which is, you know, how we know when to like wake up or eat or that kind of stuff.

This is a separate internal clock that we actually measure time with. And it's theoretical. We've never found it, but they think that it's located in this dry atom in the midbrain and that it uses internal and external cues to measure time. And one of the internal cues that it uses

is something like heartbeat or breaths. And so if you're a kid and you're breathing faster and your heart's beating faster, time seems to pass more slowly because your clock has speeded up. It's the exact opposite of what would happen if those breaths and those heartbeats slow down as you age and your clock slows down.

So it seems like time is speeding rather than going slowly. Yeah, there's another idea. I mean, there's a lot too then. It's probably all of these things combined. Well, yeah, a lot of them do have to do with this brain's internal clock thing. Yeah, absolutely.

Another idea is that a child has so many new experiences every day, you hear about a kid being a sponge and everything is brand new. And as you get to our age and you have a job and you live in a house and you have a certain commute and you do certain things and you're walking the dog, it's like, it's a repetitive, in many cases, it's a repetitive circumstance of doing the same things

over and over and over. So there's no newness there. And so all those new experiences aren't happening to us, like they're happening to children. This one, I wonder if you did a test where you only experienced new things still as an adult as if you were a child, if that would counter the time is flying effect.

You would think it would. I don't know how you would test that, but that theory says absolutely. You have a lot of money probably. Yeah, for sure. Plus also it'd be like, whatever you're doing to test this, I wanna do because that sounds like a lot of fun.

But the idea is that you have all of these, it requires more brain processing to process these novel stimuli rather than just letting life pass you by because it's all familiar. And so kind of in the same way that your heart's beating faster and you're breathing more, it makes your clock run faster

and so time seems to pass more slowly. It's basically the same thing, but rather than heartbeat it's processing new experience. And that also really kind of ties into this other thing that you do notice in addition to time passing more quickly when you age, is that it's easy to just kind of be in a rut as you age too because there are so fewer experiences

that are just brand new to you. Yeah, we've done it all. Seen it, done it. All right, well let's take a break. Let's go do something new. And we'll come back and see how that feels right after this. ["Hey Dude"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["Living Things With Chuck and Chuck"] I feel great, Chuck. I do, too. I feel like a child.

We'll never, never be able to replicate that. We shouldn't even bother telling people about it because I don't think anybody could ever do it. That's right. OK. So, one thing I did want to mention was the notion of, and this is something I've noticed from being a kid to being an adult,

if you drive to a vacation, it always seemed as a kid, like getting to the vacation happened really fast because maybe you were excited about things you were going to do, or no, no, no. It seemed super slow when you were a kid because the anticipation and driving on the way home went super fast. That is reverse for me as an adult,

is when I drive to a vacation, it goes pretty fast because I'm super excited. But on the way home, it's a slog. Right, because you know you're coming back to a recording session with me. Not that, but it's weird. A switch happens at some point. Yeah, and I think that has to do with the same.

Well, some of these theories suggest it has to do with the same thing. You are, actually, that would be kind of new and on its own, huh? Yeah, I think it sort of flies in the face of that a little bit. Yeah, yeah, because, yeah, I don't know what the answer is. I'm not even going to venture, I guess.

All right. What about this guy, Steve Taylor, who wrote a book called Making Time? He has a theory that basically, because we become more familiar with everything as we go by, not only are there fewer experiences, new experiences to be had, but the experiences that we have over and over again become so familiar to us,

they barely even register when they do happen. Right. Which makes time seem to pass even more quickly because we're processing less new information. It kind of ties into that brain processing one. It just kind of really drives home how grim adulthood is. Yeah, and could be aided by the fact that you're not getting as many dopamine hits

because this novel stimuli is not coming along as often. Right, so that all ties back into that brain clock thing again, too, which is the idea that when that part of our midbrain is learning to measure time, as it's doing that, it gets little hits of dopamine to help train it. Well, they found that your hits of dopamine

decrease as you age, which also kind of correlates with the idea that time seems to go faster as we age and our biological clocks seem to start to run slower. So they think that maybe that us getting less dopamine is part of that internal clock slowing down thing. Right, the thing that makes a lot of sense to me, and we're not going to get too in the weeds with what logarithmic scales are.

But let's just say this, if you measure an earthquake on the Richter scale, that's a logarithmic scale, and it's not the same as a linear scale. Right. So if you jump from 10 to 11 on the Richter scale, it's like a 10-fold jump. It's not a 10% jump. Right.

Is that good enough for that? I think so, yeah, it's great. So I think this can apply to life, and this one makes a lot of sense, because if you are a 10-year-old, then you've experienced one year is 10% of your life. So that's a big chunk. Yeah.

But by the time you get to 20, it's only 5%, and we could keep going here, and it just gets more and more depressing as you go. But they basically are saying you should think of it in terms of this logarithmic scale as opposed to a linear scale, because by the time you get to 60, 70, 80 years old, that's a big chunk of your life that's gone by at that point.

Right, and so any new amount of time that goes by is proportional to the increasingly larger amount of time that has gone by. Right. And so if that's how we process and measure the time in our lifetime, then the longer you're alive, the longer it takes to seem like a lot of time has passed by. Like this guy, Christian Yates from University of Bath,

he said the reason why the summer lasted so long or it took so long for a birthday to come and a new one to come is that that year, if you're like five, like you're saying that's like a fifth of your life, one year is a fifth of your life. If you're 50, one year is a 50th of your life. So a year can just start to zip by and zip by and faster and faster the more you age.

And he ended with something. He wrote a good article in the conversation. So shout out to him for that one. But he basically said, for you to experience what seems to you is the same amount of time between the ages of five and 10 would require you to live from age 40 to age 80. It's so depressing. Proportionately speaking, it would be the same

subjective experience of time for you. Yeah, because occasionally I will think like, let's say I got 20 more great years left. And then I think that's not much time, but then I think man from birth to age 20 was forever. Yeah. So I'm good, but that's not how it works. Yeah, cause 20 to 40 seem to zip by a lot faster

than zero to 20. Yeah, absolutely. I think they're on to something with that last one. All right, so I'm thoroughly depressed now. I am too. Let's go celebrate 2020, buddy. Actually, we don't need to be depressed. We need to take this as motivation

to go really pay attention and be grateful for this year. And live life. Let's do it. All right. Short stuff out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.