Time is entropy unfolding as things with nonzero temperature do what they do.
Psychological time is your own weights being updated in response to stimuli and internal processing.
When there isn't anything interesting happening, no updates are needed, and you don't perceive much time. That's why there's a logarithmic effect on the "density" of time as you age.
sibling discussions are taking this as human perception. But it’s easier to think of it literally. Time is change. Physical state change. By “nothing interesting” - interpret it literally . if “nothing happens” then there is no time because there is no change, there’s no reference to distinguish each frame of time.
This is actually something I was always confused about. If nothing interesting happens as we get old, it should be boring and as result, slow slog. Yet it feels like time accelerates as I get older.
Myself I believe the opposite. The brain itself is one of the most powerful filters that exists, and it attempts to be lazy and fill things in and compresses away the common. All that time we're not doing anything novel just gets compressed away to almost nothing. When you're a kid and seeing new things, feeling new things, learning new things you can't compress that away.
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I'm only middle age, and this has been the scariest part. Feeling older is hard. But watching it go faster is harder still. like you can more directly see all that is left.
Although part of me thinks some of this is from being substantially busier than ever (work + kids), and hoping maybe it can slow down again, at least a little bit.
Novel experiences take up more processing power and are burned into memory so they're experienced at a slower rate. That's how I understand it anyway.
It's coherent. More newness => more memories per period ~ slower to go through. Less newness => less memories ~ nothing to go through (faster sense of time)
Boring feels slower in the moment, but quicker in hindsight. The minute might be a slog, but the years still fly by.
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