Posted on 12/17/2025 5:05:03 PM PST by Red Badger
Photo by Jordan Benton from Pexels
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How is it December already? What happened to 2025? And how did we suddenly jump from eating Easter eggs to putting up Christmas trees?
To understand why our perception of time seems to bend and warp, we need to dig into how our brains tell time in the first place.
The term “time perception” is actually a bit of a misnomer, because time itself isn’t “out there” to be perceived.
When we perceive a color, a sound, a flavor or a touch, specialized sensory organs detect something in the environment: the wavelength of a light particle that enters the eye, the frequency of a sound wave that enters the ear, the presence of different chemicals in the mouth and nose, or the pressure of an object against our skin.
But there is no parallel for time – no “time particle” for the brain to detect.
How Brains Deal With Time
Our brains don’t perceive time – they infer it. Like the ticking of a clock, the brain estimates the passage of time by keeping track of change.
But unlike a clock, the brain does not have regular ticks to count. To infer how much time has passed, the brain simply adds up how much happened. If you fill a time interval with exciting stuff, it seems to last longer. In the lab, a briefly presented flickering image seems to last longer than a static image of the same duration.
This is also why witnesses of highly intense events (such as car accidents) frequently report that time seems to slow down. Indeed, in one well-known study, research participants fell backwards into a net from a height of more than 30 meters.
When they were subsequently asked to estimate the duration of their terrifying experience, they reported durations more than a third longer than when they judged someone else’s fall.
The intense arousal of the first-hand experience amplifies attention, in turn causing the brain to store dense, rich memories of events as they unfold.
Afterwards, when it needs to estimate how much time passed during the event, this unusually dense recollection of unfolding events causes the brain to overestimate how much time passed.
The more you pay attention to time itself, the more slowly it seems to pass. (Photo by Jaelynn Castillo on Unsplash)
Time…Flies?
To understand what happened to November and the rest of 2025, we also need to distinguish between telling time retrospectively (how much time has passed) versus prospectively (how fast time is passing now).
As every child knows, time spent waiting at the dentist passes much more slowly than time spent playing with a new toy. But why?
Again, a key part of the story is how much is happening – and, specifically, what you’re paying attention to. The more you pay attention to time itself, the more slowly it seems to pass.
The old adage states that time flies when you’re having fun, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be fun. Whatever you’re attending to just needs to distract you from the passage of time. Keep your mind engaged, whether it’s work or play, and time will slip away.
But try staring at a clock for even five minutes, and you will feel how endless that seems, unless you let your mind wander. Boredom slows time right down.
Routine Makes the Years Fly By
This disconnect between prospective and retrospective time perception also explains the saying “the days are long but the years are short,” a phenomenon which tends to increase as we age.
When we are young, lots of things are new: we go to school for the first time, enter a first relationship, start our first job. All these novel events form a rich store of memories that the brain later looks back on to conclude that a lot has happened, so a lot of time must have passed.
Conversely, when we get older, a lot of our daily tasks become more routine: bring the kids to school, go to work, cook dinner. As some previously novel parts of our day become routine, they become less interesting. Boring jobs cause time to slow down, creating the impression that the days crawl.
Paradoxically though, because these routine tasks are less exciting and novel, they leave weaker and less vivid memory traces. When our older brain therefore looks back to infer how much time has passed since the start of the year, it concludes that not much has happened, so it doesn’t feel very long ago.
Of course, this is at odds with our conscious knowledge that it’s already December, and we are left wondering how the year flew by.
How Do I Slow Down Time, Then?
Slowing down time as you’re experiencing it is very easy, although completely dissatisfying: just get bored. Go wait at red traffic lights. Count to ten thousand in your head. Watch paint dry, as they say.
On the other hand, slowing down retrospective time is a little more difficult. Essentially, you need to make sure that come December, you have a year’s worth of memories to show for it.
One way to do this is to prevent memories from fading, and the best way to do that is to rehash them. Write things down in a diary or journal. Look back and reminisce. Keep your memories alive, and you’ll keep your past alive.
The other way to ensure you’ve got a year’s worth of memories at year’s end takes a little more initiative, but is a lot more inspiring. Because the best way to prevent the year from feeling like it flew by, is to fill it with lots of exciting memories of new, unique experiences. So explore. Go adventuring. Do something crazy – something you’ll never forget.
Your internal clock will thank you for it.
Hinze Hogendoorn, Professor, Visual Time Perception, Queensland University of Technology. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Road Safety Action Grants Program.
Yeah, no kidding! My 50’s and 60’s blew by in a heartbeat.
I have a personal theory that our “chemical” internal clocks slow down as age so time seems to progress faster the older we get.
My youngest turned 40 in August, talk about a wake up call on how fast time flies.
A year or two ago, I was working in my garden, on a slope. The wheelbarrow I was using had 2 cubit feet bag of soil in it. The wheelbarrow tumped over on me. (For those of you not familiar with the Southern phrase “tump over” it means when something is turned over and dumped. I’ve had to explain this to my Yankee husband many times, and he understands it now.) But I digress.
Anyway, my legs were totally trapped underneath the wheelbarrow. I couldn’t move. However, I discovered that my hands were free, and I could reach my cell phone. I texted my husband who was inside our house. Alas, no luck. He was working and dealing with his own problems. It felt like I was under that wheelbarrow for a half an hour.
Somehow, I decided he wasn’t going to come rescue me, and that the only way for me to get out was to do it myself. That 2 cu. ft. bag of soil wasn’t easy to move from the position I was in. I gritted it out though, and finally got one leg out. Then I had a better position and could move the wheelbarrow a little. When I finally got out from underneath it, I checked how much time had really elapsed. 8 minutes. Not 30.
To a 5-year old, year is 20% of their life. To a 50- year old, a year is just 2% of their life.
That’s why the older you get, the more swiftly the years pass.
When I was a kid, Christmas seemed to take forever to come.
Now it seems Christmas comes every other month or two.
Because now I’m buying the presents!..............
Ping
Watch a Kamala Harris speech.
It will seem like forever.
Try being 14, having your whole endless life ahead of you and waking up one morning at 74. Happened to me.
I believe...
By jove you got it!
I have two really weird relationships with time.
In my part of the world, when I know the date and can see the sun, I can usually get the correct time within 15 minutes, often down below 5 minutes. I developed that as a kid in the woods. I know the trajectory of the sun during the day depending on the time of year, and be really accurate in using it as a clock.
Separately, I can be away from a clock for a long time, and also usually (>50%) get the time right within 15 minutes. For example, if the last time I looked at a clock was 9 pm when I went to bed, I can wake up at a random hour of the night and guess the time right within 15 minutes over half the time. 4:37 am +\- :15.
Weird!
I used to have that sort of relationship with geography, where I have ever stood. I could re-hike a week’s long trek in Nepal 20 years later in my brain nearly rock for rock and tree for tree. I could perpendicularly cross a path I’d been on before, and know it as I stepped across it. But that disappeared at about age 50.
But heck if I can remember someone’s name, birthday, my license plate number, credit card number, etc. My memory overall is just middling.
As good a definition of time as any. Now horseflies on the other hand…
There is a mystical/psychic/emotional/psychological way of expanding or contracting time. It is subjective to the point of being personal, and is enhanced with practice.
The mood for contracting time is to *feel*, to tell yourself, that you are *not* in a hurry, and that “I have all the time in the world”. Conversely, the *feeling* that you have to rush, rush, rush, the mood of haste, expands time to the point where there will be “time to spare”, and even be way early.
If it was just from your perspective, it would be one thing, but with practice, it seems to alter reality to agree with you.
The importance of practice is important both to observe the effects, and to become better at it.
Ever read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”?............
The old adage...I can vividly remember things in my youth but not what I ate for dinner last Friday.
Probably 50 years ago
To refresh your memory, it’s a story about a man named Billy Pilgrim that is an involuntary Time Traveler.
He pops in and out of different times of his life but not in sequence.
He was a soldier and POW in WWII. He would be in the POW camp on day and wake up in his life 10 years ahead or 30 or or 40 or backwards. He had no control over it.
The title, Slaughterhouse Five, was the name of the building that the POWs were kept in at one point, being moved from place to place due to the war............
Lol- dont git me a-started ‘bout them horseyflies, and minges, and black flies lol
Check the battery on your laptop. Each time my battery died, it reset the computers internal time to the year 2011. I keep thinking about what I could change if it were really 14 years ago.
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