It will only take a minute, so indulge me and give this a try. Start a stop watch, close your eyes, relax, and without counting in your head, try to stop it after one minute.
How did you do?
We count seconds between lightning and thunder to see if a storm is getting closer, but when else do we keep track of seconds?
Sports teams hold time outs and the play gets stopped. Often in the final minutes and seconds of games like American Football and basketball, these stoppages can make a few seconds take an eternity to play out.
And on the other hand, we roll our eyes and get frustrated when a web page takes 3 seconds to load… forgetting the days of dial-up when a page with a simple image would take 15-45 seconds, and a large file might fail to load after several minutes.
Our relationship to time is changing. We used to hear and even feel the sound of a clock or a watch second-hand ticking. Now a second is an unfelt moment that sweeps by on a stop watch that also measures tenths and hundredths of a second just as easily as seconds.
How does the concept of time differ for people today, when they are never alone and bored? Do kids ever feel bored the way I did, when they are entertained and/or connected to other kids through their phones? On demand friends, on demand videos, on demand games must surely alter their perception of time. Does boredom come faster or slower to someone with such a different experience growing up?
At 52, the years seem to go quicker than they did when I was 26 or 13. Is that because a year of my life now is relatively less of my total life than when I was younger? Or are there external factors influencing my perception?
I’m reminded of this poem:
If you want to know the value of one year, just ask a student who failed a course.
If you want to know the value of one month, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.
If you want to know the value of one hour, ask the lovers waiting to meet.
If you want to know the value of one minute, ask the person who just missed the bus.
If you want to know the value of one second, ask the person who just escaped death in a car accident.
And if you want to know the value of one-hundredth of a second, ask the athlete who won a silver medal in the Olympics. ~ Marc Levy
I understand that our perception of time differs due to our experience. An hour of boredom feels like it lasts considerably longer than an hour socializing with friends. But beyond that does it feel to you, like it does to me, that time moves much more quickly now?
Commentary by Stephen Downes
Time isn’t real. Or, perhaps I should say, insofar as time is real, it is nothing like what we think it is. Oh, I know I have cited J.E. McTaggert on this in the past. But it’s not just a question of ontology. As a recent BBC report makes clear, we create the past (and use much the same tools to create the future). “As we lay down memories, we alter them to make sense of what’s happened. Every time we recall a memory, we reconstruct the events in our mind and even change them to fit in.” Our memories aren’t a recording of past events. Rather, they’re a resource we create in order to predict the future. That’s why our memories are selective, creative, and imaginative. So what should we say in response to Dave Truss here? Time doesn’t pass faster or slower depending on age. It’s your perspective that’s altering that perception. A fear of loss, perhaps, that makes each moment seem as though it’s fleeting.
Shared by Joe Truss on LinkedIn:
The fluid time of nature…
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/no-not-just-time-speeds-get-older/
“Focusing on visual perception, Bejan posits that slower processing times result in us perceiving fewer ‘frames-per-second’ – more actual time passes between the perception of each new mental image. This is what leads to time passing more rapidly. When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images. Like a slow-motion camera that captures thousands of images per second, time appears to pass more slowly.”