Why Time Speeds Up as You Get Older (It Doesn't)

A summer holiday at eight lasted forever; last year vanished. The clock never changed, so what did? This episode follows the research from Paul Janet's elegant 1877 formula (which fails every numerical test) to surveys of thousands of people across four countries that found time is not faster for older adults at all, except when they look back on a decade. The answer turns out to be about memory, not clocks: the remembered length of a year is the number of distinct things you recorded from it, routine erases them, novelty and attention add them, and a 2026 study suggests the recording itself is what weakens with age. 🧠 The weird reasons behind normal things. Chapters 0:00 The summer that lasted forever 0:38 The beautiful formula that fails 1:42 What happens when you actually ask 3:16 Two ways your brain measures time 4:39 Why a year shrinks after it's over 6:14 Where the firsts live 7:40 Is there a clock in the body? 8:37 The busy factor 9:29 How to make more of the year survive Sources & Further Reading • Age effects in perception of time — Psychological Reports (2005) https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.97.3.921-935 • Aging and the speed of time — Acta Psychologica (2010) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2010... • Why does life appear to speed up as people get older? — Time & Society (2013) https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X13478052 • Experience Sampling Methodology reveals similarities in the experience of passage of time in young and elderly adults — Acta Psychologica (2015) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2015... • Paul Janet and changes in the apparent speed of passage of time with aging — Timing & Time Perception (2022) https://doi.org/10.1163/22134468-bja1... • Prospective and retrospective duration judgments: A meta-analytic review — Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (1997) https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209393 • Routine and the perception of time — Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2003) https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.132... • Does time really slow down during a frightening event? — PLoS ONE (2007) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.... • The reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory: Effects of age, gender, education, and culture — Memory (2005) https://doi.org/10.1080/0965821044400... • Memory encoding for new information, not autobiographical memory load, is linked with age-related differences in subjective time passage over the past decade — Memory & Cognition (2026) https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01... • The passage of time during the UK Covid-19 lockdown — PLOS ONE (2020) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.... #TimePerception #Psychology #QuirkBrief