218 General Discussion 



boy to regard a week as much longer than would the fifty-five-year-old 

 man. 



Bartleti: I think the truth is that anticipated time and remembered 

 time — if we mean by time a time span as measured by a clock or some- 

 thing of that kind — appears longer to the young and shorter to the old; 

 but experienced time, that is the span within which we live, appears 

 shorter to the young and longer to the old. To a young child, what to an 

 old man is a small period of anticipated time seems long, or a small 

 period of remembered time may seem long; but to the old man what is a 

 relatively short period of lived time may seem to be long relative to 

 what it is in the case of the child. However, usually this is held to be 

 dependent upon the number of items that fill up an interval. You can 

 do this experimentally, if you like; if you have an interval which is 

 started by a sound and terminated by another sound, and if you fill this 

 with a series of sounds, then the apparent length of the interval is 

 dependent to a large extent on the number of sounds that are used to 

 fill up the interval. If you don't fill it up at all, then it always seems a 

 much longer interval. I think that is true for all ages, but in general the 

 intervals in a young life are less fully filled up than they are in the older 

 fife, until you get to retiring age, when time then may appear to go more 

 slowly. 



Leivis: I think it has been found that people's subjective impression of 

 how time is passing is not related in any recognizable way to their actual 

 judgment of how much time has passed between two specified intervals. 



Bartlett: Yes, that is the case. 



