Memory / Curiosity
Why new experiences
seem to slow down time
Why can a week somewhere unfamiliar
feel bigger in memory than an ordinary month?
A weekend somewhere new can feel
strangely large in memory.
A whole month at home can disappear.
It may have something to do with how memory
divides up experience.
When days are familiar, there are fewer obvious markers.
The same route. The same rooms.
The same sequence of things.
But somewhere new gives us more little beginnings
and endings.
A different street.
A restaurant we haven't seen before.
A wrong turn.
A conversation.
A view we want to remember.
Looking back, there is simply more to separate
one moment from the next.
And here is the curious part:
the day itself may not have felt slow at all.
It might even have flown by.
But afterwards, it can feel bigger.
Maybe some days feel longer
because memory has
more places to stop.
Try it
Do one small thing
differently today.
Take another street. Sit somewhere you don't
usually sit. Go into a shop you've walked past
a hundred times.
Tonight, see whether the day feels a little bigger
when you look back at it.
Behind the thought
Our memory of an experience can influence
how long that experience seems to have lasted.
Research on retrospective time suggests that contextual
change — and the boundaries we remember between events —
can affect judgments of duration.
Based in part on work by
Richard Block and Dan Zakay
on retrospective duration, and more recent research on
event boundaries and remembered duration
.
