It was a glorious Independence Day weekend. The fireworks were boffo, I re-watched Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy for about the 60th time, and had steaks on the barbecue, per a long-standing tradition.
Sometime about halfway through the weekend, it hit me: summer is almost halfway over.
How is that possible? It was just Memorial Day, wasn't it? And before you know it, it will be Labor Day and summer will be gone.
It wasn't like this when we were kids. Then, summer lasted what seemed like forever. My earliest recollections of summer involve endless sunny days playing outside with friends, soft summer nights lit up by fireflies, and a moon so big you could almost touch it.
I'm just getting old, right? That's part of it. In fact, the passage of time is felt differently by people of different ages. It's a neurological phenomenon that makes summers seem endless when we're kids, and as we get older, time speeds up as we hurtle toward the end of our days.
“The brain receives fewer images than it was trained to receive when young,” argues Adrian Bejan, engineering professor and author of Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies.
"The rate at which we process visual information slows down as we age; as the size and complexity of the networks of neurons in our brains increase, the electrical signals must travel greater distances, leading to slower signal processing," writes Helen Coffee in The Independent.
When you're a child, everything you experience is new and for the first time. That causes us to store such memories as something special. "In addition to how novel a summer feels to a child who has only experienced a handful of them, there’s the fact that a child’s brain is still developing. So not only is the child processing new experiences, but they’re processing them through a rapidly changing brain," writes Coffee.
Perception researcher Dr. Marc Wittmann says the mechanics of memory play a big role in how we perceive the passage of time.
When we look back on a period of time, our sense of how long it lasted comes down to how many moments we actually remember from it. Novel experiences—firsts, surprises, anything that catches the brain off guard—are the moments most likely to stick. In childhood, those moments are everywhere. Almost everything is happening for the first time.
“Everything seems new in childhood: the first ride on a pony, the first trip to the circus, the first vacation at the beach—everything is a first,” Wittmann, a research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, and author of Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time, tells Popular Science. “So that causes us to store the memory as something special.”
In addition to how novel a summer feels to a child who has only experienced a handful of them, there’s the fact that a child’s brain is still developing. So not only is the child processing new experiences, but they’re processing them through a rapidly changing brain.
“Each year is a completely new year for a child and adolescent,” says Wittmann. “There are so many bodily and mental changes happening. Each year, the child is a new person.”
Whitman points out that at some point, childhood ends. "Development plateaus, the brain stabilizes, and the world stops feeling quite so new. We’ve seen summers before; we know how they go," writes Coffee.
In another study, Whitman found something counterintuitive about memory and aging.
In a recent study accepted for publication in the journal Memory & Cognition, Wittmann and colleagues tracked memory and time perception across adults ranging in age from their 20s to their 90s. What they found was not what they expected: Older adults didn’t describe their memories as fainter or less vivid. If anything, the opposite was true. The memories they did retain felt richer and more emotionally resonant than those of younger adults.
What was declining was something far more subtle: the ability to encode the unremarkable moments of daily life. Wittmann attributes this to cognitive decline, a process that can begin as early as our thirties.
“From 30 years on, we already have a slight decline, and then at 50 and 60 we decline even more, and, in very old age, we have a steep decline,” Wittmann says. “And this seems to correlate exactly with this feeling that the last ten years have passed so quickly.”
Whitman thinks that one way to stretch the passage of time is to make a conscious effort to experience new things, make new friends, and maintain social bonds. “Emotions are basically the glue for memory,” says Wittmann. “If something is very emotional, it will last your whole life.”
Most of us look back with longing on those "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer." What I miss most is the long days spent with my family and friends, doing things together and enjoying each other's company.
