With age, many adults recognize themselves in these phrases: “Another important birthday. It’s hard to believe that the last one was so long ago already” or “When did we have our last class reunion? Nine years ago? Wasn’t it just seven years ago?”, reports the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. The years seem to get shorter, while it is mainly our memory that changes.
Psychologist Marc Wittmann, from the Institut für Grenzgebiete in der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP), questioned almost 500 people aged 14 to 94 about the speed of their past ten years. “From around the age of 30, our cognitive abilities decline. he explains, quoted by Tagesspiegel. When attention declines and mental flexibility declines, the brain encodes fewer distinct cues and the period of memory appears shorter.
Time and memory that change with age
Psychologists distinguish between prospective time, felt at the moment, and retrospective time, subsequently reconstructed. A boring afternoon seems endless while it lasts, then disappears from our story. A vacation day full of new things seems to go by quickly at the moment, but leaves a lot of chapters in memory, so it seems long when you think about it months later.
According to the Event Segmentation Theorythe brain divides the flow of everyday life into events, like film scenes. With age, routine increases and “automatic pilot” sets in: same journeys, same tasks, same faces. The fewer marked transitions there are, the fewer points of reference autobiographical memory has, and ten years of similar weeks fit into few distinct memories.
Brain aging and neuroscience
A study from the Cambridge Center for Aging and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN), published in 2025 in the journal Communications Biologyfollowed 577 people aged 18 to 88 while they watched an 8-minute film using functional MRI. Using the Greedy State Boundary Search (GSBS) algorithm, researchers found that neural states lasted longer with age, especially in the visual cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).
These results support Event Segmentation Theory: if neuronal states change less often, the brain draws fewer “boundaries” between scenes. The same objective period then contains fewer internal chapters, which makes the film of past years shorter when the memory replays it.
Internal clock, dopamine and lived time
In 2016, an Arq Neuro-Psiquiatr study asked 233 people to mentally count 120 seconds: 15-29 year olds reached an average of 114.9 s, 30-49 year olds 96.0 s and 50-89 year olds 86.6 s, a reduction of around 24.6% among the oldest. The authors link this shortening to dopamine, the basal ganglia and the hippocampal-prefrontal axis, which regulate the internal clock linked to memory. Introducing something new, writing down your days or photographing key moments creates more benchmarks and gives depth to the time lived.