Why Does Time Seem Faster as We Age?

Why does a summer vacation at 10 feel endless, while a whole year at 50 feels like a long weekend? Welcome, dear readers of FreeAstroScience. Today, we’re diving into one of those questions that quietly haunts us when we look at birthdays, school reunions, or our kids growing taller “all of a sudden”.

This article is written by FreeAstroScience only for you. We’ll explore what recent neuroscience says about how the brain slices time, why those slices change with age, and what you can actually do to make your days feel fuller again. If you stay with us until the end, you’ll see that your feeling of “time flying” is not just psychology. It’s also written in neural activity.

What do we really mean when we say “time flies”?

Let’s start with something simple: physical time is steady. One second is always one second. Your watch is innocent here.

But psychological time is not steady at all. Sometimes:

• A boring meeting feels like an hour inside every five minutes.
• A fun weekend feels like five minutes inside two days.

So, what changes? Not the clock. The way your brain segments experience.

We don’t live life as a smooth movie. The brain cuts it into events:

• You enter a room.
• Someone starts speaking.
• The phone rings.
• You change task.

Each “chunk” is a mental event. Our subjective sense of how long something lasted is tied to how many meaningful events we processed.

A very simple way to picture this is:

Conceptual formula for perceived duration:
D_perceived ≈ N_events / t

Where:

• Dperceived = how full or long the period feels
• Nevents = number of distinct, meaningful events
• t = clock time (minutes, hours, days)

If your brain processes many distinct events in a day, the day feels rich and long. If it processes few events, the same physical day shrinks in memory.

So the key question becomes:

Does the brain actually segment fewer events per unit of time as we age?

That’s exactly where the new study comes in.

---

What did the 2025 brain study actually discover?

A big neuroscience team asked: Does the brain’s “event segmentation” change with age?

Who took part, and what did they do?

• Participants: 577 healthy adults
• Age range: 18–88 years
• Task: Lie in an fMRI scanner and watch an 8-minute cut of an Alfred Hitchcock TV episode, Bang! You’re Dead

So everyone saw the same mini-movie. This is great, because we can then ask: Are their brains reacting to the same scenes in the same way, or differently with age?

What are “neural states” and “boundaries”?

The researchers used a method called Greedy State Boundary Search (GSBS). Don’t worry about the name. Focus on the idea:

• At each moment, patterns of activity across many brain voxels form a neural state.
• When that pattern shifts enough, we hit a neural state boundary.

You can imagine it like this:

• A neural state = a still frame of what the brain “thinks” is happening.
• A neural boundary = a hard cut to the next meaningful moment in the internal story.

They did this across thousands of small regions (“searchlights”) covering the entire cortex.

How does age change these neural states?

Here comes the first big result:

With increasing age, neural states become longer in time.

That means fewer neural boundaries per minute of movie. The effect was especially strong in:

• Visual cortex (where we process what we see)
• Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) (linked to emotion, value, schemas, internal narratives)

Across the sample:

• Median state durations ranged roughly from about 5 seconds in fast areas like visual cortex to about 45 seconds in high-level regions like medial frontal gyrus.
• Older adults tended to have significantly longer state durations than younger adults, often by several seconds.

To make this easier to visualize, here’s a small conceptual summary table.

Brain region	Younger adults	Older adults	Key idea
Visual cortex	Short neural states (more frequent changes)	Longer neural states (fewer changes)	Visual events are merged more across time.
vmPFC	Very long states, but still more distinct	Even longer states, less distinct	Narrative and emotional context evolves more slowly.
Event-boundary regions (e.g., dorsomedial PFC)	Neural boundaries often match perceived events	Alignment with events stays similar	Coarse event segmentation remains intact with age.

Qualitative summary based on Lugtmeijer et al., Communications Biology 2025.

The researchers call this pattern temporal dedifferentiation:

• Temporal → in time
• Dedifferentiation → states become less distinct and more blended

So the brain’s “frames” get farther apart, and each frame is less sharply different from the next.

Do older brains still see the same “story beats”?

Here’s the second important result, and it’s surprisingly reassuring:

The overlap between neural state boundaries and perceived event boundaries stays largely intact with age.

In simpler terms:

• When independent participants watched the same movie and pressed a button whenever “one meaningful event ends and another begins”, their event boundaries aligned well with specific brain changes.
• That alignment was still there in older adults. Only very small age differences appeared in a few temporal regions.

So:

• Fine-grained segmentation (little changes) becomes blurrier with age.
• Coarse-grained segmentation (big story beats) stays surprisingly robust.

Your internal editor still knows when “the scene changes”. It’s just less picky about micro-details between scenes.

---

How does this connect to the feeling that time speeds up?

Now we can link the neuroscience to the everyday feeling.

Remember our little conceptual formula?

D_perceived ≈ N_events / t

If neural states become longer and less distinct, then:

• You get fewer distinct neural events (N_events) per hour.
• The brain compresses many moments into one broad, fuzzy state.
• When you look back, there are fewer “anchors” to hang time on.

Focus.it explains this as a reduction in “mental resolution”: as we age, the brain processes fewer events per unit time, so the day feels like it contains less detail.

The new study supports that with hard data:

• Older adults showed longer neural states, especially in visual regions.
• It’s as if the brain is taking fewer snapshots of what passes in front of our eyes.

So, subjectively:

• Youth: High-frequency sampling, many distinct events → rich, long-feeling days.
• Age: Lower-frequency sampling, blurred events → compressed, fast-feeling years.

That’s the “aha” moment:

Our sense that time speeds up isn’t just emotional drama. It mirrors a real change in how the aging brain segments reality into units.

---

Why do neural states get longer and blurrier with age?

The Communications Biology paper discusses several possible mechanisms. None is proven alone, but together they paint a coherent picture.

1. Reduced inhibition and lingering past events

As we age, the brain becomes less efficient at inhibiting information that is no longer relevant. Studies show older adults often keep previous information active longer, instead of cleanly switching to the new thing.

In the movie:

• Younger brain → clearly finishes “event A” and moves to “event B”.
• Older brain → traces of event A leak into event B; the boundary becomes weaker.

The study found:

• Weaker neural boundaries with age, particularly in visual and parietal regions.
• Fewer distinct states in older adults, even when they corrected for noise and variability.

2. Spatial dedifferentiation: things look more similar in the brain

Earlier work shows that in older adults, brain patterns for different objects or categories become less distinct. A face and a different face, or a house and another house, trigger more similar patterns than in younger brains.

When you apply that to time:

• If different stimuli produce similar spatial patterns,
• Then different moments in the movie will also look more similar at the neural level.
• Result: temporal dedifferentiation — the movie of life blurs.

3. Neurochemistry and lifetime experience

The paper highlights two broad ideas from the literature:

• GABA reduction: Aging is associated with lower levels of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA. Reduced inhibition can make neurons less selective, which blurs representations.
• Lifetime experience: The more you’ve seen, the easier it is to fit new experiences into existing schemas. That’s efficient, but it also means fewer surprises — and less neural distinctiveness.

So, paradoxically:

• Experience and wisdom can both enrich your understanding of life
• and make new moments feel less novel, less sharply defined.

The brain becomes amazing at recognizing patterns. But pattern recognition is exactly what makes individual moments fuse together.

---

Can we do anything to slow down our subjective time?

Good news: yes, at least to some extent.

The Focus.it article highlights two big levers that match what we know scientifically:

1. Introduce novelty.
2. Increase mindful attention.

1. Add novelty: give your brain more events to chew on

Novelty forces the brain to create new representations instead of recycling old ones. That likely increases the number of neural boundaries and distinct states.

You can try:

• Traveling to a new place (even a nearby town counts).
• Learning a new language, instrument, or skill.
• Taking a different route to work or on your walk.
• Meeting new people, joining a group, starting a project.

Think of it as raising your brain’s sampling rate again.

2. Pay attention: stretch moments from the inside

Mindful attention, or simply noticing details, can also slow subjective time.

Instead of autopilot:

• Feel textures, smells, and sounds while cooking.
• Notice micro-expressions when someone speaks.
• Track your own emotions as they change through the day.

Focus.it notes that both novelty and awareness increase the amount of information processed, which in turn expands our perception of time.

From our little formula’s perspective:

D_perceived ↑ when N_events ↑ for the same t

You aren’t changing the clock. You’re changing how many meaningful “frames” your brain captures within it.

---

How might this affect memory and the story of our lives?

The authors of the 2025 study connect neural state dynamics to memory:

• Previous research shows that more distinct hippocampal patterns between adjacent events predict better later memory.
• Other work suggests that stronger state boundaries relate to better episodic recall.

So, if:

• Neural states become longer, and
• Boundaries become weaker,

then memories could become:

• Less detailed at the micro level.
• More “gist-based” and schema-driven.

You might still remember the main scenes of your life quite well, but:

• Days can blend into each other.
• It becomes harder to separate which conversation happened on which afternoon.

That’s not necessarily tragic. It can be:

• Efficient: The brain stores useful patterns and discards noise.
• Comforting: Coarse event boundaries remain intact; your narrative structure is safe.

But it also means that if we want vivid memories, we have to feed the brain moments that deserve their own neural state.

---

What questions are scientists still trying to answer?

Even with a 577-person, 18–88 years sample, there are open questions.

Some of the big ones:

• Which boundaries disappear first? Are the lost neural boundaries linked to subtle spatial changes, goal changes, or emotional shifts?

• Can training shift neural state dynamics? If people practice mindfulness, or engage intensively in new learning, does their neural state duration actually change?

• How does this play out outside the lab? Movies are a controlled, convenient stimulus. But real life is messier. We still need to know how these findings extend to everyday activities.

• What about early life and adolescence? The current work spans 18–88. A full life-course model would also include childhood neural dynamics, where everything is new and time feels huge.

Science is still connecting the dots between subjective time, neural segmentation, memory, and identity. But the emerging picture is already quite powerful.

---

So, what should you take away when another year disappears?

Let’s wrap this up together.

We’ve seen that:

• The brain doesn’t experience time as a smooth flow, but as discrete events.
• A large 2025 study found that with age, neural states become longer and less distinct, especially in visual cortex and vmPFC.
• Despite that, coarse event boundaries remain aligned with perceived events, so the big story beats of life stay clear.
• Focus.it’s explanation of “reduced mental resolution” fits neatly with this: fewer processed events per unit time → days and years feel shorter.
• Novelty and mindful attention can boost the number of meaningful events your brain encodes, stretching your subjective time.

So when you feel that “the last five years vanished”, it’s not just nostalgia speaking. Your brain may literally have recorded fewer distinct slices of those years than it did of your teenage summers.

That’s not fate. It’s a signal.

We can choose to:

• Seek more novelty, even in small forms.
• Pay deeper attention to ordinary moments.
• Protect our curiosity like a muscle that keeps the mental clock granular.

At FreeAstroScience we believe that understanding the brain, the cosmos, and the laws of nature is more than an academic hobby. It’s a way of fighting the quiet erosion of meaning. Because, as Goya warned, “the sleep of reason breeds monsters.”

Staying curious, informed, and awake to how our mind works is one way to keep those monsters at bay—especially the one whispering that life is rushing past you and there’s nothing you can do.

This post was written for you by FreeAstroScience.com, which specializes in explaining complex science in simple, human language. Come back anytime you feel time is slipping away. Together, we’ll keep asking questions—and keep your inner clock alive and ticking.

---

Based on: – Focus.it’s article on why time flies as we age – A 2025 Communications Biology study on “temporal dedifferentiation” of neural states across the lifespan