from Hacker News

Perceived Age

by sdan on 8/9/24, 5:46 PM with 26 comments

  • by andrewla on 8/9/24, 7:06 PM

    I know this is slightly off-topic, but the study referenced for the first graph [1] seems absurdly badly designed. Subjects were divided into arbitrary age groups, but all subjects were given the same task, so why divide at all? Why not give a scatter plot of age vs. perceived seconds? It's so unnecessary -- it's basically just to get an ANOVA -- that it makes me think it is p-hacking to try to find significance rather than actually measuring anything of interest.

    [1] https://www.scielo.br/j/anp/a/d6SvJK5tM6kCFPTmpVj5pSz/?forma...

  • by jackbravo on 8/9/24, 7:27 PM

    The `Make the world sparkle again` episode of the podcast Hidden Brain podcast (https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/making-the-world-sparkle-aga...) talks about the same topic. They interview Tail Sharot a neuroscientist and author of the ` Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There` book.

    Similar advice, learn new things, take smaller (3 dayish) but more frequent vacation instead of longer ones, change your environment.

  • by apitman on 8/9/24, 8:22 PM

    My brother told me a theory many years ago that time perception is based on the number of memories we have and how they're stored.

    Imagine your brain being like a filing cabinet, which is empty to start with. Memories are stored as folders with as much space between them as possible. Time perception is created by the distance between memories. So the more memories you have, the faster time seems to have passed and be passing.

    No research or anything to back it up, just fun for me to think about.

  • by mtsolitary on 8/9/24, 9:04 PM

    The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is basically a fantastic account of this phenomenon.

  • by PaulHoule on 8/9/24, 7:30 PM

    Oddly around 49 I became highly adaptable and became quite willing to put myself in another's hands, radically change the way I do anything at all, etc. It was associated with something that I realized, later, was a mental health crisis.

    After things came to a head, I retreated. One day I read something I'd read many times and not really understood (something I've experienced often when doing research to help friends who were troubled by never got a proper psychodiagnosis) and I got it and finally understood how I was different from other people and why things went the way they have for me.

    Funny though the super flexibility came back (without the delusions) and today I find reinvention easier than I ever did. Now I'm the kind of guy who has an argument with his RSS reader over why soccer sucks compared to the NFL and then I start thinking about feature selection and an ontology of sports articles and then next thing I know I am one of those people who gets up at 9AM on a Saturday to watch the Premier league, goes to MLS games, roots for the Red Bulls, etc.

  • by edelbitter on 8/10/24, 7:36 AM

    That particular result can be explained without any difference in perception.

    If you ask people to count at a certain speed, you measure a skill. One that can be mastered at any age. Of course unprepared participants of younger age are better prepared to tell the difference between 90 and 120 seconds. Their reward for being good at that is much higher. They are much more likely to take a short run and catch the train anyway.

    Split the participants into groups where they carry their watch (wrist, pocket, none) and you can "prove" that certain clocks have the power to create local time dilation.

  • by activatedgeek on 8/9/24, 8:30 PM

    This effect is very interesting.

    Veritasium covered this effect in a video [1] for the interested.

    [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY (2016)

  • by retinaros on 8/10/24, 8:15 PM

    the key reason why half the life ends around 23+ is children.

  • by Fraterkes on 8/9/24, 7:23 PM

    This is a nice piece. But as a random dutch guy, going to the authors about page, seeing that this 22 year old kid has started multiple companies, ai stuff with 500k users, and is writing about all these Large Life Lessons, (and seeing that he grew up in cupertino)... sometimes it realy feels like hackernews is a portal to a completely different world, one that parodies itself occasionally. (Im pretty jealous too of course, wish i had been a bit more productive when i was younger, and i especially wish i had written more)