Why Time Feels Like It Speeds Up as We Age, According to Neuroscience

If you’ve ever wondered why childhood summers stretched forever while adulthood sprints by, you’re not alone — and neuroscience may finally have an answer.

A new study that probed inside the aging brain reveals that our internal sense of time may speed up not because some internal clocks tick differently, but because our brains stop noticing as many changes. Led by Selma Lugtmeijer of the University of Birmingham, the research team found that “neural states” — patterns of brain activity that represent distinct moments or events — become longer and less differentiated with age.

In simpler terms, the older we get, the fewer mental “cuts” our brains make in the movie of our lives.

A Hitchcock Experiment Inside the Brain

The experiment’s design was cinematic in both scope and spirit. Using data from 577 participants aged 18 to 88 in the Cambridge Center for Aging and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) project, researchers reanalyzed brain scans taken while participants watched an eight-minute clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Bang! You’re Dead.

Each viewer’s brain activity was recorded with fMRI, capturing moment-by-moment changes as suspense built onscreen. Then, the team applied a machine learning algorithm called Greedy State Boundary Search, essentially a pattern detector for when the brain transitions between stable activity states. These transitions represent when the brain “decides” that something new is happening.

The findings were striking: younger brains flipped between neural states more often, while older brains lingered longer in each state. In visual and prefrontal regions (areas tied to perception and memory), the shift was particularly strong.

“This suggests that longer [and therefore fewer] neural states within the same period may contribute to older adults experiencing time as passing more quickly,” the authors wrote in their new study.

When the Brain’s Film Reel Slows Down

The researchers link this effect to neural dedifferentiation, a process in which the brain’s specialized responses — for faces, objects, or scenes — become less distinct with age. And it might explain why months or even years can seem to vanish in hindsight. Imagine a film where the camera slowly loses focus: the edges between one scene and the next begin to blur. Older adults’ brains, they suggest, might process continuous experiences with fewer clear breaks, creating the illusion that time is rushing by.

Neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trento, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Live Science that the findings “look very plausible” because they connect a subjective human experience to measurable neural patterns.

There’s more to the story. Joanna Szadura, a linguist at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, pointed out that humans live by two time scales: one objective and one internal. A year feels immense to a five-year-old because it’s 20% of their life so far — but to a fifty-year-old, it’s a mere 2%. “The perception of time depends on not only the number of neural ‘events’ in the brain but also the internal nonlinear way in which we measure time,” she told Live Science.

Ignacio Polti, a neuroscientist at Norway’s Kavli Institute, explains it this way: “Time, as illustrated by the clock, is a construct. When the brain measures time, it does so based on the amount of change it perceives.” New experiences — learning a skill, traveling, falling in love — stretch our internal timelines because they generate more change and more memory. Routines, by contrast, blur together.

Can We Make Time Feel Slower?

The Cam-CAN findings suggest that older adults experience fewer neural events per unit of time, but the overlap between brain-state changes and real-world “event boundaries” remains stable. That means our brains still recognize the major plot points, just not all the smaller edits in between.

In the study, this alignment was strongest in brain regions linked to attention and memory, such as the medial prefrontal cortex and insular gyrus. Yet the regions most affected by aging, especially the visual cortex, showed slower transitions, suggesting that perceptual details fade first.

“Coarse event segmentation largely remains stable across the lifespan,” the authors conclude, “but aging is associated with neural temporal dedifferentiation, or a blurring of time.”

If the brain’s editing pace determines how fast life feels, is there any way to change it? Co-author Linda Geerligs of Radboud University offered one hopeful answer: “Learning new things, traveling, and engaging in novel activities may help make time feel more expansive in retrospect,” she said. “Maybe even more important though, are meaningful social interactions and activities that bring joy.”

In other words, time doesn’t just fly when you’re having fun — it slows down too, if you’re truly paying attention.

Our Sense of Time

Our sense of time depends on how we experience it — moment by moment or in retrospect.

Imagine taking a weeklong trip to sun-dripped Alicante. While you’re there, everything feels new: the food, the streets, the language. You’re so absorbed that the days seem to vanish. But when you look back on the trip, it feels full and expansive, packed with memories. Contrast that with the return journey — a three-hour flight delay that drags on forever as you stare at the clock. In the moment, excitement compresses time; boredom stretches it. Later, though, it’s the novel experiences that fill the pages of memory, making that week in Alicante feel rich and long.

As neuroscientists peel back the layers of perception, they’re finding that our sense of time is less like a clock and more like a story our brains are telling — one that changes its pacing as we age. The reel keeps running, but the cuts get farther apart. Until one day, we realize we’ve watched the whole thing at double speed.

The findings appeared in the journal Communications Biology.