Kimaya Khurana - Week 14 - Wasn't It Just Yesterday?
Lately, I’ve been having flashbacks to freshman or sophomore year.
As college decisions are coming out and I’m seeing the stories of people’s baby pictures with the college they have gotten into, it brings me back to my childhood and makes me realize just how fast time is flying.
It seems like just yesterday when we were getting the course request form in 8th grade for the courses we wanted to take.
Or even in freshman year for sophomore year, and then in junior year.
Time works funny this way.
This phenomenon is often called time compression or the memory content hypothesis, in which the brain stores fewer memories, making years feel shorter, and nostalgic memories act as triggers, making it seem like it was just “yesterday.”
To clarify, when we look back, our sense of how long ago something was or how long something existed isn’t based on an actual clock, but rather on how many events we can remember.
If there are fewer, the entire period feels much shorter.
Nostalgic triggers, such as photos or announcements, additionally reactivate these memories and collapse them into a matter of just a few days.
One scientific explanation for this is that as we age, we develop more routines throughout the day. Because the brain eventually stops doing this, there are fewer of these “markers.”
When we are younger, almost everything is new to us, whether it is friends, classes, or environments.
But as we grow accustomed to this and, in a way, life becomes more predictable, we become more efficient and stop storing them in detail. This leads to “fewer memories,” and time feels as if it is speeding up.
Perceptually, we can also think of it as that when we are 10, one year is 10% of what we have previously experienced. But when we are the age we are now, 16 or 17, it is a much smaller portion and also feels shorter.
I find this concept so interesting because in the past, in a class where we are counting down the seconds to end, or feeling like we are waiting “forever” for a test result to come out, it feels like forever in that span of time, but know feels like it went by so fast.
Anyways, it is partially comforting that time hasn't actually sped up, our brains have just evolved, and the way we experience things is different.
For me at least, this is going to serve as a reminder to seek out new experiences and break regular routines.
Your blog this week reminded me of a sensation I remember feeling for the first time sometime in the middle of last year. I was in the new buildings, on the first floor, late-morning light streaming through the two floor-to-ceiling windows as I stepped out of my biology classroom. I had a sharp realization then—I did not look up at the clock during class, not even once. The class was boring, sure, but it flew by just as fast as an interesting class period would. I experienced what you said in your blog first-hand, in real time; I could not remember things, even in the moment, so time seemed to shrink in on itself. It’s a strange kind of dissociation, I think.
ReplyDeleteBut enough about me. The point you included in your blog about time feeling shorter because the ratio of our life we have lived and the speed at which we age progressively gets smaller and smaller makes a lot of logical sense, but it sort-of contradicts the idea that the amount of things you remember from a period of time correlates to the speed at which you perceive time to be moving in retrospect. I want to propose my own theory, supported by no science or any real facts but just by observation, that there is a point in life we reach where this time speed disparity evens out in terms of the lived-to-life-speed ratio and instead begins to rely purely on how many noteworthy events happen. Like you said, when we are children, “everything is new to us” and we have lived so little, but by the time we reach adulthood we would have likely seen most new things we will ever see despite having so much time left ahead of us (in the best-case scenario). So, it looks more like a logarithmic graph, with time on the x-axis and perceived time speed acceleration on the y-axis.
…I apologize for veering off into math, we have enough of that this week as is. This topic has evidently intrigued me, good job on your blog!
As someone with the memory of a rock, I can definitely testify that, even after sixteen years on this planet, I am still struggling to comprehend that time actually passes, and that things change with time. Though it’s fairly obvious (just look at a clock!), I find myself apprehensive of what I should be doing with such little time. When I was younger, the years felt so much longer—what happened? I begin to think about how this very moment will pass in the blink of an eye, and I’ll be remembering this moment ten years from now regretting that I wasn’t doing more. It’s funny, really, because I can’t imagine things changing. But I also can’t imagine things staying the same.
ReplyDeleteTime adds complexity to life. Unfortunately—and fortunately—this is probably never going to change. It’s good to embrace challenge and nuance, but yearning for days past is equally as justified. I believe that, as humans with consciousness, it’s against our nature to stagnate. I think about times that seem to be “just yesterday,” but I also feel an unexplainable hope for the future. Maybe I want time to fly. The future is now, after all.
Hello Kimaya! It is really intriguing that our perception of time is dependent on our brain. In your previous blog, you mentioned that the brain makes mistakes and that could lead to Deja Vu. Perhaps, this compressing and contracting of time is the purposeful "mistakes" that our brain does to get through the day. In my favorite space epic, Interstellar, they go more realistically into time dilation. Cooper was stuck on a different planet next to a black hole, and according the Einstein's theory of general relativity, time will be compressed so every hour on that planet will be 7 years on Earth. It was a really tense scene and it showed how precious our time is.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing
Hi Kimaya, thank you for deciding to write about this topic this week, as I know it has been occupying a lot of our minds lately! It is absolutely insane to think that about one year from now, we will have known the outcome of everything that we are currently striving for right now. And while a year initially seems like a large amount of time, it’s been hitting me that these months are going to run away from us so much quicker than we could possibly imagine. There is so much to worry about (and enjoy, hopefully) in the next year that I know we are going to look back on our junior year AP exams like they were “just yesterday,” as you said. This also makes sense when considering your explanation that our sense of time can be measured by the number of events we are able to remember.
ReplyDeleteI also immensely relate to how you describe the feeling of waiting “forever” for a result or outcome you really want to happen. One example I can think of is summer vacation from the perspective of us as little, carefree children versus now as busy high schoolers. When we were in elementary school, I literally used to count down the days until school would start, wishing for the day I could return back to my education for the sole reason that the days felt so long and endless. As for the summers we’ve had throughout high school, especially the one before junior year, I genuinely could not tell you where they went. In fact, I have heard so many other people describe the summer of 2025 this way that I’ve been convinced that it really did speed up. However, it is indeed comforting, as you say, to know that time is always moving at the same rate, and we are the ones who are changing. Thank you for sharing!