Sunday, March 25, 2012

"Monotony Collapses Time. Novelty Unfolds It"

Psychologists have done experiments which show that packing more events into your life stretches out your experience of time (see this podcast).

In one experiment a psychologist locked himself up for two months in complete isolation. When he was pulled out he had only one month of entries in his journal.

In effect he had lost a month. Time as he experienced it halved.

Collecting as many memories as possible is not too bad a goal. One day does not become indistinguishable from the next; years don't have rhetorical postscripts about where they went.

I wonder how much time is expanded by taking vacations; living in new places and doing new things? Is there a limit to expansion?

Learning how to retell memories well and remembering to jot them down may be good habits also. Then again I am not a fan of sentimentality. Maximising 'future memory' is the way to go.

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