Have you ever marveled at how the last 10 years seem to have passed in a flash or wondered why you still feel mentally anchored in a recent version of yourself, regardless of your age? This phenomenon isn’t just nostalgia or denial—it’s rooted in how our brains encode, store, and compress memory. Whether you are 20 or 70, your recollection of the “recent past” often holds a uniform texture, making it feel like time hasn’t truly changed you. The brain’s memory compression mechanisms allow us to perceive time fluidly, which paradoxically helps explain why people often “don’t feel their age.”

Rather than storing memories as a linear reel of experiences, the brain condenses events into abstract snapshots, a process that is often called memory compression. Instead of exact playback, our memories function more like a story we reconstruct with each recall. This is especially true for episodic memory—our timeline of lived experiences—which undergoes temporal smoothing and gist extraction (Schacter &........

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