Sten Odenwald

The pace at which time passes between when you're young and when you're old is very different.

And it all has to do with novel things being presented to your senses.

Well, hello, Mike.

Thank you for having me.

Sure.

Well, to be honest with you, we really don't know what time is.

And yes, there's part of it that's a subjective experience.

But what we found out is that there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and we're just starting to understand what the pieces are.

Well, the thing is that it's all linked into the second law of thermodynamics, which is about entropy.

Basically, things get more complicated from simpler things.

And so the Big Bang actually had very, very low entropy, very little confusion, as you would call it.

But now we live in a universe that has an awful lot of complexity.

So entropy increases and time is intimately related to that particular experience.

That's one way of looking at it.

It's not terribly helpful because I think most of us don't really have a gut feeling for what entropy is.

So we're just throwing one imponderable after the other.

And that doesn't feel very satisfying.

I kind of like to take a step back.

First of all, the way that the brain works, the brain only exists and only perceives now.

And that now lasts about 100 milliseconds.