TIME TESTS
How does your age and your sense of mortality affect how you perceive time? Here are two tests that evaluate how you estimate how much time has passed and how your age affects what you remember. Click on the links below to see whether the theories work for you.
TRY THESE TESTS
HOW LONG IS FIVE SECONDS?
This is a test of age. Statistically, younger people count seconds faster than older people. So younger people are more likely to underestimate the length of a minute - say, that a minute is up at 55 seconds or so. Older people overestimate it, counting a minute in perhaps 65 seconds.
Note: this is subject to great variation; the shorter the duration - say 5 seconds - the more accurate people are likely to be.
THE 'CLOSENESS TO DEATH' TEST
Which images did you remember? A study at Stanford revealed that proximity to death affects the way we see the world. What seems to be happening is that when you get closer to death you begin to switch off or edit out images which are disturbing. When you have your whole life in front of you there's a greater tendency to take on board problematic imagery. It's not directly age-related, but 'closeness to death' related: so young people who know they have a terminal disease will respond in the same way as an old person.
Note: this is not a memory game: it isn't about trying to remember all the pictures, it's about looking and then recalling which ones stuck in your mind most vividly.
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