TIME really does zip past faster as you get older, psychologists have shown. They have found that people over 60 tend to think that events happened much longer ago than they really did.
To study how the perception of time varies with age, Susan Crawley, a postgraduate student at Goldsmith's College in London, and her colleague Linda Pring asked people aged between 18 and 77 to date events that hit the headlines. These included the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
Volunteers younger than 60 dated the events surprisingly accurately, although they tended to remember events as occurring slightly more recently than they actually did. But the over-60 group placed some events up to 50 per cent too far back, even though they recalled them as vividly as younger people.
"Some events they were able to date spot on," ...
