The Logarithmic Time Perception Hypothesis

My hypothesis is a bit different. Instead of logarithimic time perception, informational time perception. Children have brains with high plasticity and huge new information acquisition (learning) rates. Those rates drop as plasticity decreases when one gets older. Those "bitrates" of new information flowing into long-term memory act as sand flowing through a hourglass. A fixed amount of sand represents a fixed amount of subjective time. When those rates drop, we feel time runs faster, because now the same amount of sand (subjective time, information) stretches over more clocktime.

I think you're onto something, but I don't think it has to do with plasticity, but novelty.

Consider the brain as a giant recording device with very good compression based recognizing patterns from previous data. So the first time you eat an apple, it stores a lot of data because it's a new experience. The next time, it stores something more like "like the last apple, but a little more tart".

I think our perception of time (at the macro scale) is roughly a perception of how much new data our compression-oriented brain is storing. It's the sensation of accumulated novelty.

Thats the same thing, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)?w...

I think everyone intuitively understands this too. If you spend the next 3 months sitting in your boring office job that you've done 1000 days before, those 3 months may disappear entirely from your memory. Compared to taking the next 3 months and traveling to some strange land far away from home, and I bet those 3 months will stick out in your mind until your dying days.

With this in mind, the length of one’s life is not chronological (by a clock) but the integral of the novel information they experience.

So a monotonous 60 year existence is a fraction of the perceived duration of 60 years of a wild and adventurous, constantly reading, learning new languages, making new deep human connections - existence.

Controversial take: isn’t this a strong point in favor of having as many romantic partners as possible during one’s life?

Well yes some of us do believe in the Shannon basis for Quantum Gravity.

No? Because then the norm is just passing from one person to another.

I wonder how something like ayahuasca or dmt would impact this. People have described these substances as having a type of mental “reset” quality. If they do impact time perception, I’m assuming it’s only temporary…

It really does not work like that, you start mixing everything and everyone up in a depressing blob after a while. I can't even remember the names of people i thought I loved or at least cared about. Compared with my last five years in a serious, committed relationship, its a night and day difference. To the next five years, and the ten after that hopefully.