The Psychology of Time.

ANECDOTE: IT could be a matter of working and retirement! I knew this one girl who had a grandpa who was retired and he couldnt wait to die. One day I was walking around the house and I tripped over his oxygen tank and the oxygen plug came loose. Then the old man started gasping, but being the one who couldn't tie my own shoes or tell the left from my right, I fumbled a bit when it came to plugging it into another hole. Unfortunately he died 3 months after that incident! I forgot the point I was trying to make here!

Re: The Psychology of Time.


It's a function of what % of our lives the time represents. When you are three, a year is a third of your lifetime.

I think it probably has something to do with how you work or what you do when you retire. Keeping busy, I think, makes time seem to go quickly, whereas doing very little can seem to make it crawl.

At night I stare at the wall and time moves by slowly. I get it!

I knew you'd figure it out (ya little smartass)!

LOLOLOLOL Your funny!

I have found that as I get older my mind is busier and busier as I have so many more ideas to consider than I did forty years ago. I had plenty of time to consider them as I wished. Now I don't.

Consequently Time has "red shifted" or ideas have "blue shifted"
Another ambiguity .

Red shifted? Blue shifted? Care to enlighten?

Seeing as we have hit the mathematics (red shift etc) we might like to consider the following analysis by Thor May (with apologies to the numerically challenged !)


<<It is a truism that time runs "faster" as we become older. Not only does the future seem to race towards us faster, but the historical past telescopes. Events from our parent's past (and earlier) which seemed unimaginably remote in childhood suddenly have the perspective of a very recent past at fifty years of age.
Many interesting questions emerge from the phenomena of psychological time. What is it's source? There is an obvious relativism involved, but relative to what?
The kind of logarithmic scale involved in psychological time does have its psycho/physiological analogies. Anyone who has taken a hot shower knows that our sense of hot and cold is not directly proportionate to the turn of the tap. My own sense of time is that the past and future is infinite at birth and closes on a double parabolic curve to zero at death. This might be conventionally symbolized by an equation such as:
tp = (((1/*age)*5k)* tc). Let tp be psychological time, tc be chronological time and 5k a constant with the nominal value of five. 5k gives an outcome where chronological time = psychological time for the individual at age 25. This assumes age 25 as the peak of biological maturity.
Let us apply this to a familiar example. I can remember contemplating with horror at age 17 the prospect of a four year university course. No wonder: its reality to me at that time was 58.2 months of grind. Now at fifty such a dalliance would take only 33.9 months of my real personal time. Quite a remission!
At age five, four chronological hours between meals would have the ravenous personal reality of 8.9 hours, while the grazing break for a bibulous fifty year-old only comes to 2.8 hours. >>

Let's say, you have a 2 week vacation. Have you ever noticed that in the beginning, the whole vacation is ahead of you, and it seems like a long time. When you get to the end of the first week, the vacation seems shorter, and the last week gallops to a conclusion. I think that it is the same thing with life.

As a child, you think of your life in short pieces of time, because that is all that you have experienced. The older you get, the faster time goes, first in years, then in decades. I was talking to my husband about something that we had done together. It seemed not so long ago, until I realized that what we were talking about happened 35 years ago!

I find a similar phenomenon when I work out on a treadmill. I am on the treadmill for an hour. The first 20 minutes seems like forever. When I get past the 30 minute mark, I know that I am going to be on less than I have been on already, so the time left seems shorter. By 50 minutes, time whizzes by!

hey I feel like that when Im on the treadmill for 20 minutes. Those 20 minutes feel like forever! Sheesh!

LibertyD, re your post of Aug 21, 9:29

IF time is considered a result of gravity then the wave lengths (frequencies-color) of light vary from one frame of reference to another. This means that the speed of time varies as a direct consequence of "mass".

This means that when we observe light from different galaxies (frames of reference) it is "red shifted" or "blue shifted" as a result of the differing directions and accelerations of gravity and the differences in the "speed of time" involved.

This is much of what Einsteins relativity theories are about.

This has resulted in the Big Bang--Expanding Universe theories of the "beginning". The beginning being regarded as an "Ultimate Question" in philosophical and theological circles.

Try a thread named Universe and Space on A2K for a bit more.
Also search "Red Shift" on the net.

My comment was a "tongue in cheek" reference to the varying speeds of time when expressed in terms of wave lengths of electromagnetic radiation.

Good Luck, M

This red-shifted and blue-shifted stuff is very much understandable however from a different frame of reference looking upon something in correlation with gravity and lightwaves and stuff, it would appear that what you call time does not effect our very own minds. There seems to be a certain kind of conception of time based on our reality in reference to that blue shift and red shift thing so in theory since our minds percieve time differently without regard to what is happening within our reality or how we see that reality from the frame of reference it should be safe to say that our minds our in a different space time continuum. This could be why our conceptions of time differ and what happens to us when we interface within this reality is percieved differently in our minds or red-shifted or blue-shifted. However what is the cause for someone who like me who thinks quickly, does things, quickly yet time seems so long! It depends on what we see from the frame of reference but what exactly is the element at work here that influences the mind's conception of time if not gravity and light waves? And why does our mind's view of time differ exactly? (whole other subject)

Fresco,
A similar phenomenon occurs in cosmology.
" The change in wave length aka red shift is somehow directly related to the speed of time".
I have not worked it out yet but I am going to try it---- Sometime .

Okay, back to my question!

Mechsmith... got it! (really...I think) I think I even got fresco's numerical explanation. Whew!

Thanks!

As to the question---does time accelerate as we get older?----In my case the accelerator is stuck----pedal to the metal and life is a blurrrrrrrrrrrr.

Who has read "Pip" - very interesting book on the psychology of time....

i've read "pip",
vaguely remember it but i think it would be a good one to read again, for me at least, good idea deb.