James M. Broadway and Brittiney Sandoval of the University of California answered this question for Scientific American.
The fewer the memories, the faster the lived life flies by before the inner gaze.
Man perceives time in two ways. The first is perspective, when we estimate the time before an event that should happen in the future, and retrospective. The sense of time is also influenced by what we are doing at this time and what we feel. Any new activity accelerates the perception of time at the moment of the action, but in retrospect the time spent on it will seem longer.
The reason is that our brains only "record" new events, not repeating events. Our judgment of the past is based on the number of new memories. The more you have time to do new things on vacation, the longer it will seem to you later.
The same phenomenon explains why time drags on so much in childhood. Most of the discoveries about the world around us and about ourselves we make in childhood and early adolescence, so in retrospect it seems to the brain that all the longest moments. You can slow down the passage of time by getting new experiences, meeting new people, and acquiring new skills.
Anastasia Shartogasheva
