Want to Feel You're Living a Longer, Fuller Life? Neuroscience Says Making Denser Memories Is the Best Way to Slow the Passage of Time
inc.com
Want to Feel You're Living a Longer, Fuller Life? Neuroscience Says Making Denser Memories Is the Best Way to Slow the Passage of Time
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to e
... See moreJoshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to e
... See moreJoshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to e
... See moreJoshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
Joshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and “your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is”—and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted t
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
He recommends using mindfulness to help savour leisure experiences. “It expands your subjective perception of time (i.e., you feel like you have more of it) and enhances memory formation, which means you’ll not only feel like your vacations lasted longer, but you’ll remember them a lot better.”
bbc • The way we view free time is making us less happy
Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.
Joshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older. Perhaps life is lived on a logarithmic time scale, compressed toward the end.