With 2025 well on its way, how can it be that 2023 feels like 11 years ago, but 2020 could have happened yesterday?
It’s a sentiment I hear among a lot of my friends; I feel it too. And according to surgeon, author, and lecturer Dr Karan Rajan, we’re not alone.
In a recent TikTok, the doctor Stitched a video claiming that 2020 “feels like a groundhog year” (based on a Reddit thread about the same topic, which seems to have been deleted).
“This is gonna get trippy,” Dr Rajan started his follow-up.
“Your brain measures time in experiences,” Dr Rajan explained.
“Imagine you did the same thing every single day ― very little new moments and experiences here. Your brain has no time stamps to cling onto, so it collapses all of these identical days, weeks, months, and years into single moments,” he added.
Indeed a 2023 paper is one of many to link new and/or memorable experiences to our sense of time perception ― to stop the years “rushing by,” it helps to try different things.
“This is also why you’re more likely to remember the emotionally charged moments of your life, or the ones that broke the norm ― birthdays, funerals, wins, losses, adventures you’ve been on,” Dr Rajan continued.
Even if you haven’t been sticking to a mundane routine post-lockdown, chances are the rules of the pandemic (which transformed so many people’s lives) stick in your head more than the years afterwards.
The doctor said that your brain plays the “highlight reel” of your life, so you remember things that had the most impact on you.
He pointed to an experiment which found participants thought time went 36% slower when they were falling from a height than they did when watching others experience the same thing.
But “time dilation,” which you might have experienced, say, when watching that football you kicked as a kid seemingly take four hours to crash into the window you knew it’s hit, doesn’t only happen thanks to stressful circumstances.
Taking a new route to work always feels four times longer than your usual way, doesn’t it? Well, Dr Karan says you can get the same effect from learning new things and enjoying different experiences.
“For more lasting memories, seek out novelty. Novel experiences force your brain to collect more clips for the highlight reel of your life,” he said.
@dr.karanr Time warp. Welcome to life as a millenial!
♬ original sound - Dr Karan Raj
