With regards to point #2, do you feel the same if you put yourself into some completely novel situation. I.e. let's say you've never been diving, you go diving for half an hour, does it pass by in the blink of an eye or does it take as long as you once remembered?
Is your perception of time because you're just so used to most things you do in your daily life that you don't notice the details, or is it some innate change in the brain as we get older?
It's just personal observations, pop-psychology...so YMMV.
But I like to travel overseas. I find that the stranger the environment, the more enjoyable. I think it's because the details, the things I can't readily filter out all come flooding in again.
A week in Seoul is a totally different kind of experience for me than a week in NYC. Even though they have lots of superficial similarities.
But I also notice that my brain seems to spend more time subconsciously analogizing what I'm seeing rather than learning things new from whole cloth like when I was young. It's like the filtering mechanism is working overdrive and knows it can't just toss things away (it can't make a value judgement) so its first pass is to try to find similarities so it can start to make these judgments.
"So this kind of place is like a department store, but also like a fleamarket..." my inner monologue goes.
After a few days in a new country, I'm usually just mentally exhausted and look for some familiarity, something I don't have to work for.
After a week or two, I'm usually comfortable enough in a place this feeling goes away and everything starts to look "normal" again. Meaning my filter is locally tuned and working at normal efficiency.
Is your perception of time because you're just so used to most things you do in your daily life that you don't notice the details, or is it some innate change in the brain as we get older?