> > but, yeah... being young, time seems to go by very slowly, and just sitting > around fiddling with something, one accomplishes a lot of stuff in a > relatively short period of time. > > as one gets older though, time goes by ever faster, and one can observe > that less and less happens in a given period of time. then one sees many > older people, and what one sees doesn't look all that promising. > > sadly, as is seemingly the case that a lot of potentially ones' potentially > most productive years are squandered away doing things like schoolwork and > similar, and by the time one generally gets done with all this, ones' mind > has already become somewhat dulled due to age. >
>From the insights into how the human neocortex "learns" information gained from the research (not mine) in Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) machine learning model, I would contest the idea that "less happens in a give period of time as you get older." If you explore HTM, it illustrates that as inputs are generated, they are evaluated in the context of the predictions that the network is making at any given time. As a young person, the neocortex knows nothing, so all the predictions are most often wrong. When there is dissonance between prediction and input, a sort of *interrupt* happens ( which gives us awareness of time ) and learning of a new pattern eventually occurs. As we get older, less and less of the world becomes *novel*, so our neocortical predictions are more and more correct, generating less and less interrupts. One could argue that our perception of time is the number of these interrupts occurring in an interval of proper time. The concept of *flow* for example, when one loses track of time being fully immersed in a problem, could be simply the fact that you are so engaged and knowledgable in an area that your mind is able to successfully isolate itself from interrupt generating input and process information at peak efficiency. I would go even as far as saying that the "productivity" described in "productive years" is more of an "exposure to novel input" than actual productivity. Perhaps another way of stating what you're perceiving could be that you have more and more *friction* of learned patterns to overcome as you try to adapt to novel input as you get older.
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