When Familiarity Collapses Time
(Recent contemplations on thermo dynamics and cognitive neuroscience lectures on “time dimension”)

Many have observed that time appears to be accelerating, particularly in recent years. This shared feeling depends in part on each person’s ability to expand or compress their experience of time. In the age of AI, the growing abundance of established patterns and probabilistic outputs accelerates this effect: information is increasingly familiar and readily available, so it demands less attention than learning something truly new. As a result, fewer meaningful updates are registered, and time appears to pass more quickly.

Subjective time depends on the amount of change one experiences, not on the clock itself. Yet society treats time as a fixed, external standard, creating a paradox: we collectively agree on what time is while ignoring how it is actually lived. This shared conformity veils the fact that time is shaped by the expansion or contraction of consciousness. When experience is rich, uncertain, or attentive, time stretches; when experience is repetitive or compressed into familiar patterns, time collapses. What we call “time passing” is therefore not just a physical measure, it reflects how fully awareness engages with change.

The brain does not measure time directly; it estimates time based on how often its predictions about the world are updated and encoded. When an experience is novel or attention is sharp, consciousness expands, making the experience feel longer. As one gains knowledge and familiarity, the mind groups experiences into well-known patterns, and fewer meaningful updates happen in each moment. Time then feels compressed, even though objective time, as defined by collective agreement, has not changed.

Increasing novelty or sharpening attention stretches the perception of time, while familiarity and expertise extend it. The difference between online time (how long something feels while it is happening) and retrospective time (how long it seems in memory) depends on whether prediction updates are simply processed or also encoded as lasting memories. Expertise lowers uncertainty and reduces prediction errors; focused attention, however, can temporarily undo this effect by increasing perceptual detail.

There is also a parallel with thermodynamics. In physics, the direction of time is defined by irreversible increases in entropy. In cognition, the direction of experienced time reflects irreversible information updates in the brain.

Learning reduces uncertainty, lowering informational entropy from the learner’s perspective and causing time to feel accelerated. Novelty and sustained attention locally increase entropy, slowing the felt passage of time. Subjective time, then, reflects the mind’s internal production of irreversible change—not the movement of matter through space, but transformation within a thinking system.

If time is shaped by attention, novelty, and awareness, then keeping time becomes an individual act rather than a purely social one.

To slow time is not to stop change, but to meet it consciously, depth over repetition, presence over automation. In doing so, one regains agency within time, expanding experience rather than allowing it to collapse into habit.

Perhaps time itself can be understood as the distance between alpha and omega: two points with experience that is subject to time is unfolding in between. As consciousness accelerates, compressing experience and bringing these two points closer together, the distance shrinks. And when alpha and omega unite, it would not be because time ended, as time is merely an illusion, it would be because consciousness returned to its Source.

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