TIME really does seem to pass more quickly as you get older.
Last weekend at the annual meeting of the Society for
Neuroscience in Washington DC, researchers reported that elderly
and young people perceive time differently. Peter Mangan, a
psychologist at Clinch Valley College in Wise, Virginia, and his
colleagues asked 25 young people aged between 19 and 24, and 15
older people aged between 60 and 80, to estimate a 3-minute
interval by counting "seconds" using a "1, 1000, 2, 1000, ..."
technique. The young adults did this almost perfectly, averaging
3 minutes 3 seconds. But an average of 3 minutes 40 seconds flew
by before the older people thought that just 3 minutes had
elapsed. It was not that the older adults were simply less
bothered about time, the researchers found, as their volunteers
were university teachers and other people who had not retired
and were used to ... To continue reading this article, subscribe
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