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 colour, a sound, a flavour or a touch, specialised sensory organs detect something in the environment: light entering the eye, sound waves entering the ear, chemicals in the mouth and nose, or pressure against the skin. But there is no equivalent sense for time — no “time particle” for the brain to detect.
Our brains don’t perceive time; they infer it. Like 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, it simply adds up how much happened. If you fill a time interval with exciting or changing events, it seems to last longer. In laboratory studies, for example, a flickering image appears to last longer than a static one of the same duration.
This is also why witnesses of highly intense events often report that time seems to slow down. During moments of fear or danger, attention is amplified, causing the brain to store unusually dense, detailed memories of events as they unfold. Later, when estimating how much time passed, the brain overestimates duration because so much appears to have happened.
To understand what happened to November — and the rest of 2025 — we need to distinguish between telling time retrospectively (how much time has passed) and prospectively (how fast time feels like it is passing now).
As every child knows, time spent waiting at the dentist passes more slowly than time spent playing with a new toy. The key difference is attention. The more you pay attention to time itself, the more slowly it seems to pass.
The old adage says time flies when you’re having fun, but it doesn’t need to be fun. Whatever you’re attending to just needs to distract you from the passage of time. Keep your mind engaged, and time will slip away. Boredom, by contrast, slows time right down.
This disconnect between prospective and retrospective time perception also explains the saying “the days are long but the years are short”, a phenomenon that increases as we age.
As we get older, more of life becomes routine. Routine tasks feel slow in the moment, but they leave weaker memory traces. When the brain later looks back, it finds fewer vivid memories and concludes that the year passed quickly.
So how do you slow time down?
Slowing time as you experience it is easy but unsatisfying: get bored. Wait at traffic lights. Watch the clock.
Slowing time retrospectively is harder, but more rewarding. To avoid a year that feels like it vanished, you need a year’s worth of memories. Write things down. Revisit experiences. And, most importantly, seek out new and distinctive experiences.
Fill your life with moments worth remembering, and time will stop slipping quite so quietly away.
The Conversation