Is time speeding up?

With another year passed, maybe you're thinking, like I am, "Wow, it's January already" or "that week flew by fast!" I remember being a kid, looking at my watch and thinking that a one second tick seemed to take a while. Now the seconds just slide past. Is there something to this phenomenon? Why, as we get older, do the years seem to go by faster and faster?

Carefully designed experiments suggest there is actually an explanation for this impression. As we age, our biological clocks run slower and, since our clocks are running slower, the world seems to speed up. Depressing as this may be for those of us long past the subjective midpoint of our lives (which turns out to be about 20 for someone who lives to be 80), it could be worse. A recent book describes a man with a brain tumor that affected his biological clock who quit driving and watching television because traffic seemed to be rushing at him at an incomprehensible speed and television nattered on faster than he could follow. Maybe this is why it would've been better for me to learn Spanish as a kid. People wouldn't seem to be talking faster than I could understand!