Research Suggests that People Who Feel Time Slipping Away Faster Every Year Aren’t Losing Their Minds, They’ve Just Stopped Creating What Neuroscientists Call Temporal Landmarks, the Small Disruptions to Routine that Give the Brain Something Worth Remembering

Why It Matters

Understanding that perceived time acceleration is a modifiable cognitive pattern, not cognitive decline, helps individuals and organizations design experiences that improve well‑being, productivity, and engagement.

Key Takeaways

• Temporal landmarks are distinct events that structure memory and perception.
• Older brains show fewer neural state transitions, reducing event boundaries.
• Routine compresses subjective time; novelty expands perceived duration.
• Travel, new skills, and small habit changes create more landmarks.
• Perceived speed of time isn’t cognitive decline, but modifiable routine.

Pulse Analysis

The sensation that years fly by is not a mystical glitch; it is rooted in how the brain parses experience. Neuroscientists coined the term “temporal landmark” to describe discrete events that break the monotony of daily life and become anchors in long‑term memory. Early work by Dai, Milkman and Riis linked these landmarks to the “fresh start effect,” showing spikes in diet searches and gym attendance at the turn of weeks, months and years. Event Segmentation Theory, advanced by Jeffrey Zacks, further explains that the brain segments continuous streams into boundaries, which are preferentially encoded and later recalled.

Recent aging studies add a developmental layer to this model. An fMRI analysis of 577 participants from the Cam‑CAN project revealed that younger brains switch between neural states far more often than older brains, especially in visual and prefrontal cortices. This slowdown—known as neural dedifferentiation—means fewer internal event boundaries are created as we age, compressing the mental chapters of a year into a blur. While the proportional theory—that a year feels shorter because it represents a smaller slice of life—has intuitive appeal, empirical data show that reduced novelty and fewer state transitions are the dominant drivers. The good news is that the perceived acceleration of time is partially under our control.

Introducing novelty—traveling to new places, learning a skill, or simply altering a daily route—densifies event boundaries and stretches subjective duration. Even low‑effort interventions, such as dining at a different restaurant or reconnecting with an old friend, trigger the brain’s attention mechanisms that mark a boundary. For businesses, designing work environments that embed varied challenges can combat employee burnout linked to time‑pressure perception. Ultimately, by deliberately seeding temporal landmarks, individuals can reclaim a richer sense of time without drastic life changes.