How is it December already? What happened to 2025? And how did we suddenly jump from eating Easter eggs to putting up Christmas trees?
To understand why our perception of time seems to bend and warp, we need to dig into how our brains tell time in the first place.
The term “time perception” is actually a bit of a misnomer, because time itself isn’t “out there” to be perceived.
When we perceive a color, a sound, a flavor, or a touch, specialized sensory organs detect something in the environment: the wavelength of a light particle that enters the eye, the frequency of a sound wave that enters the ear, the presence of different chemicals in the mouth and nose, or the pressure of an object against our skin.
But there is no parallel for time — no “time particle” for the brain to detect.
How brains deal with time
Our brains don’t perceive time — they infer it. Like the ticking of a clock, the brain estimates the passage of time by keeping track of change.
But unlike a clock, the brain does not have regular ticks to count. To infer how much time has passed, the brain simply adds up how much happened. If you fill a time interval with exciting stuff, it seems to last longer. In the lab, a briefly presented flickering image seems to last longer than a static image of the same duration.
This is also why witnesses of highly intense events (such as car accidents) frequently report that time seems to slow down. Indeed, in one well-known study, research participants fell backward into a net from a height of more than 30 meters.
When they were subsequently asked to estimate the duration of their terrifying experience, they reported durations more than a third longer than when they judged someone else’s fall.
The intense arousal of the first-hand experience amplifies attention, in turn causing the brain to store dense, rich memories of events as they unfold.
Afterward, when it needs to estimate how much time passed during the event, this unusually dense recollection of unfolding events causes the brain to overestimate how much time passed.
Time… flies?
To understand what happened to November and the rest of 2025, we also need to distinguish between telling time retrospectively (how much time has passed) versus prospectively (how fast time is passing now).
As every child knows, time spent waiting at the dentist passes much more slowly than time spent playing with a new toy. But why?
Again, a key part of the story is how much is happening — and, specifically, what you’re paying attention to. The more you pay attention to time itself, the more slowly it seems to pass.
The old adage states that time flies when you’re having fun, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be fun. Whatever you’re attending to just needs to distract you from the passage of time. Keep your mind engaged, whether it’s work or play, and time will slip away.
But try staring at a clock for even five minutes, and you will feel how endless that seems, unless you let your mind wander. Boredom slows time right down.
Routine makes the years fly by
This disconnect between prospective and retrospective time perception also explains the saying “the days are long, but the years are short,” a phenomenon that tends to increase as we age.
When we are young, lots of things are new: we go to school for the first time, enter a first relationship, start our first job. All these novel events form a rich store of memories that the brain later looks back on to conclude that a lot has happened, so a lot of time must have passed.
Conversely, when we get older, a lot of our daily tasks become more routine: bring the kids to school, go to work, cook dinner. As some previously novel parts of our day become routine, they become less interesting. Boring jobs cause time to slow down, creating the impression that the days crawl.
Paradoxically, though, because these routine tasks are less exciting and novel, they leave weaker and less vivid memory traces. When our older brain, therefore, looks back to infer how much time has passed since the start of the year, it concludes that not much has happened, so it doesn’t feel very long ago.
Of course, this is at odds with our conscious knowledge that it’s already December, and we are left wondering how the year flew by.
How do I slow down time, then?
Slowing down time as you’re experiencing it is very easy, although completely dissatisfying: just get bored. Go wait at red traffic lights. Count to 10,000 in your head. Watch paint dry, as they say.
On the other hand, slowing down retrospective time is a little more difficult. Essentially, you need to make sure that come December, you have a year’s worth of memories to show for it.
One way to do this is to prevent memories from fading, and the best way to do that is to rehash them. Write things down in a diary or journal. Look back and reminisce. Keep your memories alive, and you’ll keep your past alive.
The other way to ensure you’ve got a year’s worth of memories at year’s end takes a little more initiative, but is a lot more inspiring. Because the best way to prevent the year from feeling like it flew by is to fill it with lots of exciting memories of new, unique experiences. So explore. Go adventuring. Do something crazy — something you’ll never forget.
Your internal clock will thank you for it.
Hinze Hogendoorn, Professor, Visual Time Perception, Queensland University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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