Pandemic Time Shifts and Storage Space

From late 2020 to mid-2022, as the Covid pandemic dragged on, I had some version of this conversation with numerous friends:

“2019 feels like it was just a few months ago.”

“Yeah, I know it was a year or two ago, but it’s like time compressed.”

Did you experience this, too? Each day seemed long and often boring, but through the rearview mirror, the pandemic years feel oddly compressed?

My parents say something similar: time seems to speed up when you’re older. Part of it is that five years out of seventy is 5/70 = 1/14 (7%) of your life, whereas five years out of twenty is 5/20 = 1/4 (25%) of your life. But maybe that’s not all.

Maybe scenery and storage play a role. (Expectations and the nature of surprises also seem involved: negative surprises seem to shorten perceptions of time on a short-term scale, according to a recent Nature Neuroscience paper.¹ Maybe that also holds true for longer-term scales?)

Hypothesis: Scenery Counts

But let’s talk about scenery and storage for now, in an exploratory way. I had this conversation at dinner the other day: what if more changes of scenery require more storage space in the brain, whereas similar memories perhaps get flattened and compressed into less storage space? We know the brain has a mechanism for compressing memories (original paper in Neuron here). And, logically speaking, we might not need to remember as many details of every day, if every day is mostly similar to every other day. Whereas if we’re moving through different environments each day, meeting different and sometimes new people, having novel conversations, those details might take up more storage space. So, could “storage space used” in the brain affect our subjective perceptions of time in retrospect?

That could be hopeful, in many ways, for many aging or older people. If the perception of time speeding up with age could be mitigated by upping the scenery and novelty factors, then life could seem longer and more fulfilling.

I remember how time seemed to stretch on forever when I was a kid. A 90-minute car ride felt interminable (and I’m not looking to go back to those days! There’s a happy medium, and that’s not it). Summer was long and full of adventure. And, yes, school days dragged in the classroom.

Those long hours and days did seem to speed up as I got more experience in life, as classroom sessions became old hat and not everything was entirely new. Was I using less storage space in my brain for familiar versus new experiences, making something like incremental updates, and did that change in storage space allocation affect my perceptions of time?

And did my pandemic boredom, and the unprecedented similarity of my days then, warp my perception of time because novelty went way down and I was using less storage space? Could increasing novelty/interestingness as a controllable variable reduce aging-related perceptions of time speeding up?

Maybe. I don’t know. There are some cool courses (I started this one years ago!) and I feel inspired to dig in to existing research to see if this hypothesis might be roughly right, so I’d be interested to hear your thoughts and any pointers to papers, books, interesting data on this topic. When has time seemed to compress in your life, in retrospect? Have you managed to avoid the sensation of years rushing by in older age?

1. Toren, Ido; Aberg, Kristoffer C.; and Rony Paz. “Prediction errors bidirectionally bias time perception.” Nature Neuroscience, August 24, 2020.