Happy 70 REC

[flyer4ever]

Happy 70th Birthday Bobby Clarke, greatest of all Flyers.

[OccamsRazor]

4 hours ago, flyer4ever said:

Happy 70th Birthday Bobby Clarke, greatest of all Flyers.

 

At first i thought that was to me.........those are my initials....but hey wait i'm not 70!!!!!!!!

[Howie58]

Yes, I saw this birthday in today's paper this morning. It is interesting to think how much time has elapsed since his playing days. Time really does march on...and it gets faster with age.  

 

 

[mojo1917]

17 hours ago, Howie58 said:

Time really does march on...and it gets faster with age.

I've been thinking about this a little bit recently.

Is it because as we age we experience fewer new things ?

Is it a function of our brains compressing the memories of the daily banality ?

 

It is interesting to me, where I see this phenomena manifest itself all the time is in pop culture references. Caddyshack draws blank stares from younger generations. I can still quote Carl's Dali Llama speech but no one under 35 gets it... Seinfeld was now almost 20 years ago, masters of our domain, serenity now... those are now dated too. To me they feel like 10-15 years ago.

 

RE: REC - living 70 years with type 1 diabetes is an impressive feat. It should not be a surprise, playing in the NHL with type 1 is a huge long shot and not only was REC an NHL player, he was the best NHL player in the history of his team. pretty amazing actually.

 

 

 

[elmatus]

1 hour ago, mojo1917 said:

I've been thinking about this a little bit recently.

Is it because as we age we experience fewer new things ?

Is it a function of our brains compressing the memories of the daily banality ?

 

To a large extent, that's exactly right. It's not so much that we experience fewer new things; we simply don't process them as completely as younger minds tend to. Our brains are designed to create filters based on prior knowledge and experiences. The more filters we have, the more we tend to ignore new information; the more information we ignore due to these filters, the more we feel life is just a narrow set of circumstances washing over our heads very quickly.

 

Taken another way, young brains are built to soak up as much info as possible. When they do, it builds on to their existing neural network, creating new connections in the brain. At the same time, information deemed useless or less important to their lives is set aside, almost like an archive. It's not necessarily all gone, but our ability to recall that information easily becomes very limited. It's primary use at that point is simply to build upon and simplify the processing of new information we receive. 

 

You can see this process in action whenever you try to learn something new, especially if it's something physical. At first you need to consciously remember to do certain things, but eventually they become a matter of muscle memory. When that happens, our perception is that time speeds up, cause we're not focusing on smaller steps and instead on bigger pictures. In essence, we stop learning new, smaller things at such a high rate.

 

Here's a bonus too: One thing that sets humans apart from other animals is our ability to learn from each other. Not that no other animals do this, but generally we do it significantly more than others do. The evolutionary benefit to this is that we don't need to experience things on an individual level. This allows us to process information in a collective sense and benefit from each other's company. Our evolutionary dominance has a huge amount to do with the fact we're social animals. Though really the opposite is more important. We've evolved to become social animals in large part because of the benefits of collective information processing.

 

But I digress... go Flyers!

Edited August 14, 2019 by elmatus

[Howie58]

Mojo and Elmatus:

 

I tell students they're on their way up, and I'm on my way out.  With age comes urgency. Maybe that leads to a sense of speed.

Yes, age gives experience and sensitivity. But....5 weeks after prostate surgery....fragility and problems.  But we are here to impart to the future.

 

The O and B showed courage drafting Clarkie.  It payed off.  

 

Peace,

Howie