Cirrus@Austlit

'Years ago, I read a book by Douwe Draaisma, a professor of history and psychology at the University of Groningen, called Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older (CUP, 2004). Draaisma recounts early explorations of this phenomena, including the French philosopher Paul Janet's 1877 proposal of a mathematical relationship between the proportion of life lived and the speed at which it seems to move. By this equation, a ten-year-old child perceives a year's passage as relatively slow because it represents a greater proportion of the total time they've lived (one tenth) compared with the same duration experienced by a fifty-year-old (2 per cent of their life). The philosopher and pioneering American psychologist William James (brother of Henry) echoes this in distinguishing between the novel and exciting experiences of youth —'intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn out' — and those of later life, where `the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse'. No matter the theory, Draaisma concludes, our experience of time is explained by the operations of consciousness.' (Introduction)