In addition, according to Scientific American, “our brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period. This is also the case when we’re bored time can seem to drag endlessly.” This might well contribute to the childhood perception of slow time, since kids have to spend so many of their days in the classroom, an environment that strikes most of them as expressly designed to induce boredom. “Just as ‘a watched pot never boils,’ when we are concentrating on an event, time occasionally appears to pass more slowly than usual. “Individual perceptions of time are strongly influenced by our level of focus, physical state and mood,” write The Independent‘s Muireann Irish and Claire O’Callaghan. As our timeline lengthens, our perception of certain fixed units on that timeline - a minute, a year, a decade - shortens.īut there are other factors in play as well. Mysterious as this apparent change in the speed of time may at first seem, it actually makes a kind of intuitive sense: one day represents, at the age of fifty, a tenth of the proportion of the time we’ve experienced so far than it does at the age of five. No matter what age we’ve attained, we can think back to childhood and feel just how agonizingly long it then took for Christmas to come, for the school day to end, for a tray of cookies to come out of the oven.