Comment by fourthark
2 days ago
> A study asked different age groups to mentally count 120 seconds. People under 30 averaged 115 seconds; those over 50 just 87. That's a 24% reduction in perceived time.
This seems bogus to me. I’m 51; I set a timer on my phone for 2 minutes, put it aside and counted to about 128 before it went off.
Why would your ability to count seconds change over time? A second has always felt a little slow to me, probably because my resting pulse is above 60.
(I think it’s also ambiguously described? Maybe they meant the opposite, in which case it took me about 114 seconds to count to 120.)
> This seems bogus to me.
There is a quote from the show Ted Lasso which I love: "Be curious, not judgemental".
Rather than proudly declare that "this seems bogus", I think it's more productive to ask why your perceived experience may not match with the study. FWIW it only took a few seconds of googling to find the study in question, likely much less time than it took you to write your comment, and then you're free to examine the methods and outcomes of that study:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27097002/
That's fair.
I guess I've had various reasons to count time, and every once in a while check how well I count time, and if I didn't, perhaps I would start to count time faster. Thanks for the reference and clarification.
Seems counter-intuitive to me, because common sense tells us that old people think slower and therefore the world seems fast to them. So why would they be counting faster than actual time?
It also seems to contradict the thesis of the OP, as others pointed out. Years flying by is the opposite of counting time faster than the clock.
Oh well. Time is confusing!
> "Here, we examined the common sensibility encapsulated in the statement: "time goes faster as we get older""
Does anybody ever mean "seconds go by more quickly" by that statement? I've never heard it used that way...
> "Be curious, not judgemental"
Let's define curiosity as seeking knowledge. What is the mechanism that allows for observation if not some minimal amount of judgement? How else does one encode the senses into a coherent thought?
What is the distinction between curiosity and judgement? Is it the amount of judgement? Is the quote asking to dismiss reason and avoid integrating new knowledge with other existing knowledge?