Question: how does your brain get smarter :)) x?????

Joseph Devlin answered on 25 Mar 2010:

Technically, your level of intelligence doesn’t change throughout your lifetime but that seems a kind of sterile, boring answer. So in RL, the answer seems to be through learning. From the day you’re born to the final of your life you’ll be learning new things the whole time. The rate of learning slows down as you get older as there just isn’t as much new in your world and this is why time seems to get quicker as you age.

When you’re a child, a sunny summer day can last forever and still you hope it never ends. But when you’re a bit older, you find yourself wondering how your child could be going to university already and who’s the grey-haired guy in mirror? (Ok, maybe that’s just me…)

So why does this happen? It has to do with the way our minds store memories. When we’re young, our lives are filled with tons of novelty — trees we’ve never seen, new flavors of ice cream, goals we’ve yet to score… And novel experiences (particularly those with strong emotional content, good or bad) are ones which get stored in one’s memory most easily. So for a child, a week might be a long time because it is filled with dozens and dozens of memorable events.

As adults, we still have the same number of experiences in a week’s time but they are generally less new to us and therefore less important when we look back on them. Another day at in the office, another episode of Scrubs — we’ve seen a lot of those and therefore they don’t stand out in our memories as clearly. Instead, when we look back on the last year we may only have a few highlights come mind — things like our summer vacation, the Xmas party where the boss started pole dancing, etc. And when we’re older still, even the holidays and Xmas parties start to run together. We can still recall the events, but they aren’t as salient as when we were younger. As a result, time seems to pass so much more quickly because our memory has fewer highlights in the same time window.

Memory also affects our perception of future time. Young children cannot conceive planning a year ahead because far too much happens (and changes) for them. For adults, surprisingly little can change in any given year so it just doesn’t seem that long a time. In a sense, you’ve gotten smarter because you predict your environment better as you learn more.