There is a familiar adult experience in which January seems to become June with almost no intervening space. The calendar records six months. Memory returns a handful of scenes and the impression that the year has somehow been abbreviated.
That feeling is not evidence that a person is “losing their mind”. But the explanation in the headline needs refinement. Researchers have not shown that people who feel time accelerating have simply stopped creating temporal landmarks. The phrase brings together two related but distinct ideas: temporal landmarks in behavioural science, and event boundaries in research on perception, memory and the brain.
Both matter. Neither is a complete account of why years seem to pass faster.
Temporal landmarks are dates with psychological meaning
A temporal landmark is a date or transition that separates one mental period from another. A birthday, the start of a week, a new month, a holiday or the first day in a new job can create a sense of “before” and “after”.
The best-known work on the concept is the “fresh start effect” described by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis in Management Science. Across three archival studies, searches for “diet”, gym visits and commitments to goals rose after landmarks such as a new week, month, year, semester, birthday or holiday.
That research was about motivation. It did not test whether people who create more landmarks later remember a year as longer. Calling every unfamiliar outing a temporal landmark also stretches the term. A different route home or a first visit to a neighbourhood may create contextual change, but it does not necessarily divide life into a named chapter.
Event boundaries are the closer match for remembered time
Continuous experience is not stored as an undivided stream. Changes in location, activity, goals, people or narrative can mark the end of one event and the beginning of another. Researchers commonly call these transitions event boundaries.
This distinction helps explain a time-perception paradox. A repetitive afternoon can feel slow while it is happening, yet seem to have occupied very little time when recalled. A varied trip may pass quickly in the moment but feel long and full in memory.
Dinah Avni-Babad and Ilana Ritov compared routine and non-routine conditions in four experiments and two field studies. Their 2003 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General found that routine periods were remembered as shorter. When people knew in advance that they would judge duration, however, one experiment produced the reverse pattern. Attention to time while an event unfolds is not the same as reconstructing its length afterwards.
More recent work gives event structure a central role. A 2025 study in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review asked participants to watch videos of daily events and later recall their structure, content and duration, both immediately and after seven days. Remembered duration for whole events tracked the number of subevents recalled, while gist accuracy and detailed content did not have the same effect.
This is one study, not settled consensus. It does, however, fit a wider body of work in which contextual boundaries organise memory and influence retrospective duration.
The neuroscience finding is real, but narrower than the headline
A recent brain-imaging paper adds an intriguing result. Selma Lugtmeijer and colleagues analysed functional MRI data from 577 adults aged 18 to 88 in the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience cohort. Participants watched an eight-minute edit of Alfred Hitchcock’s Bang! You’re Dead.
The 2025 study in Communications Biology used a data-driven method to identify transitions between relatively stable patterns of brain activity. Neural states became longer with increasing age, particularly in visual and ventromedial prefrontal regions. Successive states were therefore less temporally differentiated.
What the paper did not do is equally important. Participants were not asked whether their lives felt faster. They did not spend a year creating more or fewer landmarks. For its main analysis, the study averaged brain data within 34 age groups because single-participant data was too noisy to estimate the number and location of neural state boundaries reliably.
The researchers proposed that fewer neural states within the same period might contribute to time feeling faster with age. They also wrote that this hypothesis needs future testing. Coarse event segmentation remained intact: the correspondence between neural state changes and perceived major event boundaries changed little with age.
The study therefore provides a possible neural mechanism, not evidence that a person can diagnose the source of a fast-feeling year from their calendar.
Age explains less than the popular story suggests
The belief that time accelerates with age has some empirical support, but it is neither uniform nor large enough to settle the mechanism.
Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff asked 499 people aged 14 to 94 about the passage of time. Their 2005 study in Perceptual and Motor Skills found age-related associations in present and retrospective judgements, but the effects accounted for no more than 10 per cent of the variance. The authors described the evidence as controversial and urged caution about the method.
In a later study of 868 participants, Steve Janssen, Makiko Naka and William Friedman found no age effect for the perceived speed of the previous week, month or year. An age difference appeared for the previous decade. The paper in Time & Society also linked greater recalled time pressure with a faster-feeling decade.
Age, routine, attention, memory, emotion and time pressure can all enter the judgement. “The brain stopped making landmarks” is too clean an explanation for a question that the research has not reduced to one cause.
What small disruptions can realistically do
The evidence supports a modest practical idea. A period containing distinguishable events may leave more structure for memory to retrieve. A new activity, a change of setting, a meaningful gathering or a clearly marked project can give a week features that differentiate it from the weeks around it.
That is not a command to pursue constant novelty. Repetition can carry skill, stability, care and pleasure. A life made memorable only through disruption would be exhausting, and novelty itself is not proof of meaning.
Temporal landmarks offer a different tool. Naming the start or end of a period, keeping a brief record, returning to a seasonal ritual or pausing after a project can make transitions more explicit. The fresh-start studies support the motivational value of meaningful dates. Event-boundary research supports the role of segmentation in memory. Neither literature guarantees that these practices will make a year feel slower.
The defensible conclusion is not that time acceleration reveals a failing mind, nor that a new restaurant will repair the calendar. Remembered time is partly constructed from change. When months contain few retrievable divisions, they can collapse together. Giving experience some edges may not slow the clock, but it can leave the past with more shape.
