Friday: Hili dialogue

January 16, 2015 • 4:31 am

It’s Friday already? How time passes when you’re a geezer in statu nascendi. I have a theory, which is mine, that time seems to pass more quickly when you’re older, because you experience each unit of time relative to all the time you’ve had in your life, and that the fraction decreases with age. I always thought someone should test this by asking people of different ages to judge when a minute (or five minutes) have passed—without counting. According to my theory, the actual time corresponding to a perceived minute should drop with age. That’s an easy experiment, but I don’t think anyone’s done it.

But I digress. In Dobrzyn, Hili is engaged in Serious Business that preempts her duties on the website:

A: Hili—editorial meeting!
Hili: Later: now I have more important things to do.
Paa (1)
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, zebranie redakcyjne.
Hili: Później, teraz mam ważniejsze sprawy.

67 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I can’t remember where I read it, and don’t have time to look up references, but I think someone has done the ‘time passing’ experiment you suggest, and most people perceive time passing at the same rate. The current theory is that time perception when you look backwards on your life, is related to how many new memories you make. I.e. a youngster makes loads of new memories (because everything is ‘new’), so they perceive their history as being longer than an oldie, who made fewer new memories (because much of life is ‘the same’ year on year).

    1. Definitely confirms my experience. I remember as a kid the two months between the start of school and Hallowe’en (and the subsequent holidays) felt like an eternity! Now, the span between holidays feels like a blink. The explanation makes a lot of sense.

  2. you experience each unit of time relative to all the time you’ve had

    Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like banana.

  3. “What beast is it that hath her tail between her eyes? It is a cat when she licketh her arse.”
    That is a genuine mediaeval joke!

    1. People of the Middle Ages may have had cruel practices but their humour and outlook on life was often dead on.

    2. Reminds me of one of my favourite jokes.
      A man is looking out his kitchen window at his dog who is licking himself.
      “I wish I could do that.”
      His wife looks at him, then at the dog then back at him.
      “Well, he is your dog. Maybe if you pet him first.”

      2. Lewis Grizzard told that in the form of a conversation between a U of GA fan and a GA Tech fan, observing the U of GA mascot, a bulldog, “grooming” himself on the football field 50-yard line.

        “Boy, I wish I could do that.”

        “Ralph, that dog’ll bite yew!”

  4. Don’t post photos ‘of that nature’ of ladies! Especially a dignified and beautiful lady like little Hili.
    As though she were a mere d*g 😛

      1. In the Appalachian South the alacrity with which something is done is described as, “Quicker than a cat can lick its ass!”

  8. I seem to recall hearing about the perception of time passing on a little atoms podcast interview about a book……Got it! it was with Claudia Hammon on her bok Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception.

  10. I find my memories are clouded and time seems to pass more quickly when I’m doing routine things that make up my day: drive to work, work, drive home, feed fish, feed dog, eat.

    One event is indistinguishable from the other and often the way I remember things is if the weather was not (happened in Spring or Summer) or Cold (Fall, Winter) or how dark it was (Summer or Winter). I often can’t recall if I’ve fed my fish because one fish feeding looks like all the others when I recall the memory.

    There must be a mediaevil poem about this.

    1. Mirie it is while sumer y-last
      With fugheles son
      Oc nu neheth windes blast
      And weder strong.
      Ei, ei! What this nicht is long
      And ich with wel michel wrong
      Soregh and murne and fast.

        1. Merry it is while summer lasts
          With foul’s song
          But now draw nigh winds’ blasts
          And weather strong.
          Ei, ei! What, this night is long
          And I being done much wrong
          Sorrow and mourn & fast.

          2. Am reminded of Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins While You Are Young,” if I have the title right.

            “Gather ye roses while ye may,
            For old Summer is a-flying,
            For that rose which blooms today
            Tomorrow will be dying”

            Or something in that ballpark.

          3. To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time (had to look it up…I seem to remember a slightly different title)

      2. Fits northern Ontario to a tee. Summers are short and merry; winters are long with plenty of icy wind.

        1. I thought seriously about buying a house in Thunder Bay – 80x the land, 2x the home, 1/4 the price of my house in L.A. at the time (I always think I want to stay in the places I visit – have not moved to Hawai’i or Scotland, either).

          2. Thunder Bay is gorgeous at any time of year but it helps if you love winter sports.
            .
            It really, really helps. No, actually it’s necessary. As we say around Bancroft where I live; It’s four months of winter and eight months of tough sledding.

  11. The only time time ever slowed down for me was when I took 2 years off and traveled around the world by bicycle. It was wonderful.

  12. One theory I’ve heard is that novel activities seem to take longer. Since everything is novel when you’re young, time goes slower. As you age, novelty decreases, and hence time seems to speed. Thus travel, new jobs, and parenthood all seem to take longer.

    1. When I go to a new place, the trip there seems longer than the trip back.
      For efficiency, redundant memories are compressed in the brain.

  13. I have long had the same idea as Jerry, time seeming to go more quickly, the longer one has lived. If you have seen 60 summers come and go, each summer seems short, compared to during childhood.

    But I agree with others here, and have read about this too (can’t cite sources), that time spent routinely without novelty, can be a blur. The brain doesn’t need to pay much attention. But travel into new territory, geographically or I think in other ways too, time stretches out. The brain has a lot to pay attention to.

      1. I made it through the second week of the course. Any moment now week #3 will start with the a set of video lectures available. Fascinating stuff. This is my first time taking a MOOC, and I’m very impressed with how nicely this course is put together.

        1. Oops! I forgot to change my name to my real name. I started out as Tess. On a different device this time. Corrected it now.

        2. I still have to do the last practice problem and the 2nd problem set/quiz. Great lectures and interesting problems. Are you alternating between Tess and Marilee w an a?

  14. Your subjective sense of time flow slows when you move into a new environment. Try moving to Australia for example. Subjective time speedup may be as simple as falling into repetitive habits.

  15. When I was in the third grade, back in the early 1960s, my parents subscribed to a book series for me, the Life Science Library (one of those then-ubiquitous Time-Life publications). One of the volumes was titled Time, by Samuel A. Goudsmit & Robert Claiborne, and it mentioned a study in which people of varying ages were asked to mark out certain key events on a line representing their lifetime. The youngest was seven, the oldest was around 80. It was found that the older a person was, the more correctly proportional the marks were. It was interesting to note that the sen-year-old was the only person to put “last year” before “first grade”. I no longer have the book, or I’d give a page reference. The LC number is QB209.G6 1980 (sorry, I don’t do Dewey)

  16. Great article on time perception experiments & why time speeds up as we get older (he thinks it has to do with the detail of memory – as you age, your brain screens out more detail, because those details are no longer novel. Consequently, you perceive less time passing.)

    On the other end of the spectrum: “In one story, a man is thrown off his motorcycle after colliding with a car. As he’s sliding across the road, perhaps to his death, he hears his helmet bouncing against the asphalt. The sound has a catchy rhythm, he thinks, and he finds himself composing a little ditty to it in his head.”

    The Possibilian
    What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain.
    By Burkhard Bilger

  17. I would guess on the time issue it is primarily the awareness of time. When young you seldom think about time because you have so much of it. The older you get time plays a much larger roll or at least the thought of it.

    I guess the less you have the more you think about it. Anyway, nearly everyone sees it flying by as they age. When you retire, stop wearing a watch.

  19. I recently read somewhere that our memories are kinda like that too. We only seem to become more forgetful as we age (barring anything like dementia) because we have a lot more memories to sort through to get to the thing we’re trying to recall.

      1. My hard drive is okay, I just need more RAM and maybe a fancy SSD instead of the hard drive.

  20. For me, time seems to slow down when I’ve extremely focused on something. Like the time I was in the midst of a car accident. Time slowed way down, and I just kept calm and breathed and focused and was able to safely steer so as not to collide with other cars.

    1. Me, too. And focus works both ways – when I’m in a flow with my work or practicing guitar, I can find hours have gone by in what feels like minutes. Too lazy to Google it but I imagine it’s adrenaline vs dopamine (or some such) contributing to one time experience vs the other.

  21. I’m of Jerry’s generation, and my subjective sense of time passing in the present corresponds very closely to real time. When I set a tea timer for five minutes, I consistently find myself drawn back to the kitchen about ten seconds before it goes off. Similarly, when I need to wake up early and set an alarm (which I normally don’t use), I almost always wake up spontaneously about five minutes before the alarm goes off.

    But as others have noted, the perceived distance of past events is a different phenomenon with more latitude for subjective distortion.

  22. In Richard Feynmann’s final book, he tells a fascinating story about how he tested his own theories about what factors affect the rate of passage of subjective time, by experimenting on himself. (pdf excerpt)

    “Well, it all seemed like a lot of baloney to me-there were so many things that could go wrong in his long chain of reasoning. But it was an interesting question: what does determine the ‘time sense’? When you’re trying to count at an even rate, what does that rate depend on? And what could you do to yourself to change it? I decided to investigate.”

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