Wenn ein Artikel im European Review mit den unten gestellten Fragen beginnt, dann liest man ihn die Zusammenfassung:
Why does it feel that the time passes faster as we get older? What is the physical basis for the impression that some days are slower than others? Why do we tend to focus on the unusual (the surprise), not on the ever present?
Why the Days Seem Shorter as We Get Older
Und dann wird es richtig gut:
The sensory inputs that travel into the human body to become mental images – ‘reflections’ of reality in the human mind – are intermittent. They occur at certain time intervals, and must travel the body length scale with a certain speed. […] During life, the body length scale increases in proportion with the body mass raised to the power 1/3, and, like all growth phenomena, the body mass increases over time in S-curve fashion, […] slow – fast – slow.
The length traveled by inputs from external sensors to the cortex […] increases with age. The reason is that the complexity of the flow path needed by one signal to reach one point on the cortex increases as the brain grows and the complexity of the tree-shaped flow paths increase.
Mir gefällt diese Vorstellung und mich fasziniert die Grafik (Figure 3), die es so leicht erklärbar erscheinen lässt, warum wir, je älter wir werden, das Vergehen von Zeit schneller wahrnehmen.