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6 March 2016

Why is time speeding up

This mystery is finally solved! In my pseudosciency way anyway.

In real time, i.e in the current moment, when you are doing something interesting time seems to fly, Oh 2 hours! where did it go! When you are bored, Time seems to have stopped! Argh! I want this to be over but its only been 5 minutes!! Argh!! 
So If you spent your life doing boring things, would you feel like you lived a very long life? and if you lead an interesting life, would you feel that you lived your life in a flash?? :-)?

Why not?
Completely opposite actually! 

The logic of boring = slow for time works only in the present moment. When we look at how much time has passed by, we are actually looking back. We are actually looking at our past! into our memories! 
How are things stored in our memory? Our brain does not store everything that happens to us into the long term memory,  only significant incidents, significant information, rest all mundane, repetitive - just filtered off! 

When we look back into our past thinking how much time has flown by, we look at the content of our memory in that time frame. How many mile stones we encounter in our memory, determines how slow or fast time seems to have flown for us. In the last five years...If there are many milestones to stop and ponder in the memory, it feels like time took its time, if we lived a clockwork life, our memory feels like we just jumped from 2010 to 2016. Where did time go? Time went by at its own pace, but not much was recorded in the memory! Not like there are gaps in the memory, every day was recorded, but it was optimized, may be it just says, ditto :-D

The difference between what we were, when we were 3 years old and when we were 9! The same 6 year period, how much we changed!, how much each year, each month varied from the one before! Our memories of this time are much richer than later life! If we meassure it in bytes, we get big files! :-)  I am sure the resolution is much higher! It is required isn't it? More data, more resolution,more bytes per day? because we were seeing doing new things which we never encountered before, everything for the first time ever!

 Didnt you feel time fastened once you reached your teens? I feel time started moving faster after my 10th std.  It actually did a little bit. Each year was stored in less number of bytes than before. May be by 15-16 we had seen quite a bit of life.
Once we  reach our  30s, age 30 to age 36 nothing much changes. Is one year of your life very much different from the other? Do we really experience something new, something completely new ? May be not more than once in a few years.  Is there any surprise time flies by so fast?  
Its all an illusion, this mind stuff! 

( You can say you did a lot. vacationed in china, vacationed in Africa.. trekked mount Everest - These are all still same things for the brain, with little variations in the theme )

1 comment:

  1. Actually time becomes memory when it is used doing different things. If you don't do anything ... just sit n laze, read a book, watch TV or lazy, you don't remember how much time you spent. You only remember the story of the book, the movie goes into short term memory of your brain. So time becomes a memory with no specification of duration. Spend the whole year just going to work and back home. There is no much memory of what you did that year. Instead, take a walk on the beach, spend some good time with loved ones. All these stays. Memory stays, Time flies :)

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