Since The Jazz Singer in 1927 - in order to accommodate sound - we’ve filmed and played back movies at 24 frames per second.
Time speed up movie#
In the early days of cinema, movie cameras captured images at 16 frames per second. Obviously, the sense of motion in films is produced by rapidly flashing a sequence of changing images before our eyes that causes our brains to see a cohesive moving event. To understand Bejan’s concept, it helps to understand the old-movie phenomenon. Image source: Imperial War Museums Old movies
In this excerpt from Peter Jackson’s WWI movie “They Shall Not Grow Old,” the playback speed changes from 24 fps to the original 16 fps at the same moment the black-and-white contrast is corrected, and everyone is revealed to be moving at a normal speed. Hence, the clock time they encompass seems to have gone by faster than older memories. When we play our back memories at our habitual mind-time rate, they seem sped up to us, much like how old movies appear (the reason why they appear so will be explained shortly). Since it takes longer to capture images and memory when we’re older, for a number of reasons, the same length of clock time results in fewer images. In his just-published paper, “ Why the Days Seem Shorter as We Get Older,” he links the phenomenon to the idea that visual images and the manner in which we process them are the language in which we store and retrieve memories.Ĭonsidering it an issue of physics, he suggests that we more rapidly capture and remember visual data when we’re young and that this sets our personal “mind time” playback rate.
It’s not the only theory, mind you, but an interesting one. Mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan of Duke University has an interesting theory regarding the strange phenomenon by which time seems to speed up as we age.
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