A Little Unfamiliar

There is a quick way to turn a pleasure into work: make it compulsory.

Visit somewhere new. Learn a new skill. Find a fresh experience every day. At first these suggestions sound generous. Soon they can become a second job, with your life as the product and an imaginary future version of you waiting to inspect the results. Did this weekend produce enough memories? Will this month look thin beside the last one?

You may recognize the trap before falling into it. You would like time to feel less elusive. You do not necessarily want a busier calendar, a larger bill, or a new reason to feel that you are doing ordinary life badly. If the proposed remedy requires resources you do not have, it can become another way of naming the problem.

So let us make a smaller opening. There may be one thing you are genuinely curious about that lies close to a life you can manage. You have passed a public garden without entering. A familiar meal has an ingredient you have never learned to use. You would like to understand the sound of an instrument well enough to pick it out. The change can be small. Its importance begins with what it offers you, rather than what it will supposedly do to your internal clock.

When you have some room to choose, give curiosity a manageable place. Notice whether that choice brings interest or gives an occasion a shape you can later recognize. No fixed number of new experiences will guarantee that December feels farther from January.

Where one thing becomes another

Suppose you spend part of an afternoon preparing a short talk. You decide what you want to say, arrange the points, and try them aloud. Later you work on the opening. The afternoon contains several stages even if you never leave the room. A change in what you are trying to do can matter more to the structure of the experience than a change of scenery.

Researchers use the term event boundary for a point that separates one perceived event from another. You can think of it as a break in the answer to “What is happening now?” Some boundaries are easy to name. A class ends. A visitor arrives. Others depend on the task and the person. A shift from gathering ideas to rehearsing may feel like a clear change to the person doing the work, while an observer sees only someone sitting at a desk.

Novelty and a boundary are related possibilities, not interchangeable words. You can meet something unfamiliar inside an ongoing event. You can also cross a clear boundary into an activity you have done hundreds of times. Ending a work session and starting dinner requires no unprecedented food. The day changes direction anyway.

This matters for the advice to collect more firsts. A first visit may contain clear changes and distinct scenes. So may a well-known activity whose stages you understand. Conversely, a stream of unfamiliar things can be hard to organize. The number of new objects you encounter is not a reliable measure of how many separate experiences you will later recover.

Take a small exhibition. You could hurry past every object, each one new to you, and leave with a general sense of having been there. Or you could stay with one object long enough to understand what puzzles you about it. Counting objects leaves out what you did with them.

The same weakness appears when people equate a full schedule with a full life. A calendar can divide an afternoon into six appointments. That proves six appointments were scheduled. It does not establish how the afternoon felt, what you understood, or which parts remained distinct afterward. The experience has to be examined at the level at which it was lived.

Changes can alter remembered distance

In a study led by Olga Lositsky, people listened to a roughly twenty-five-minute radio story before learning that they would judge time between clips from it. For pairs of clips separated by two minutes in the story, more intervening event boundaries were associated with longer later duration estimates. The boundaries were identified by a separate group. The study connected remembered time with the structure of a narrative people had heard, without warning them to time it.¹

That is an appealing result for this book. Equal intervals did not have to seem equal in memory. Yet the useful claim has a clear border. Two minutes within a radio story are not two months of living. Listening to a story is also different from acting in the world, choosing what to do, and returning to the memory over many years.

Another experiment, by Youssef Ezzyat and Lila Davachi, presented items against scene backgrounds. Items at equal actual distances were later more often judged close together when they shared a context than when a context boundary lay between them. These were judgments of temporal closeness, rather than estimates of how fast life was passing. Repeated testing also meant that participants could anticipate timing questions after the first block.²

Two different experiments can quietly become one sweeping story if we drop these details. One person has been surprised by a question about time. Another has learned that time will be tested. A judgment that two items occurred far apart is not the same response as “the afternoon dragged.” Both are interesting. Keeping their names attached lets us learn from them without making them say more than they do.

There is a practical insight here, though it remains an inference: making an experience distinct may be more relevant to later remembering than merely filling it. If you wanted to try that thought in your own life, you could begin with a clear change in purpose. An aimless extra errand may offer less than a visit you wanted to make and had time to meet. The value of the visit would first be the encounter itself. A possible memory benefit would be an additional reason to care.

Even then, distinct from what? A visit to a garden may stand apart from your usual afternoon indoors. If you work outdoors among plants, its distinctiveness may lie elsewhere, perhaps in learning how a particular bed was planted. “New” belongs to a relationship between a person and an experience. A brochure cannot assign it in advance.

The awkward result we need

If boundaries always expanded time, this would be an easier chapter to write. The evidence does not permit that rule.

Brynn Sherman and colleagues asked people to judge the duration of colored squares. Some squares kept one color; others changed color during the interval. In these brief, prospective timing tasks, intervals containing a color change were judged shorter. The behavioral tasks used durations from half a second to five seconds; an imaging task used two to eight seconds. Here, a boundary was associated with compression rather than expansion.³

Prospective versus retrospective procedure alone does not explain the contrast with longer-term studies. The task and available memory matter too. A judgment made just after a display still draws on what has just happened. That uncertainty invites more precise questions about what each experiment asked people to do.

This is the moment at which an attractive piece of advice must accept a smaller job. Event boundaries do not function like coins dropped into a machine that dispenses more remembered time. They can change how information is organized and used. Different tasks can reveal different effects.

For your own afternoon, the lesson is not to imitate a colored-square experiment. It is to resist a promise that has skipped over it. A claim that every change adds to the length of memory would need to explain why some changes produce the opposite result. It would also need evidence at the scale of the promised benefit. A finding about seconds cannot bear a conclusion about years merely because both use a clock.

A more recent study by Winny Yue and colleagues adds another distinction. Participants watched eighty-second videos of everyday activities, divided into smaller events. They later estimated durations and recalled contents, both immediately and seven days afterward. The remembered number of smaller events was related to estimates for the whole video. Details within a smaller event played a different role, with effects depending on when memory was tested. There was no single rule in which every remembered detail enlarged every estimate.⁴

Think of this as a warning against treating memory as a bag whose weight tells us how long a period will feel. Organization matters. What you are asked to judge matters. When you are asked matters. The studies do not supply a household formula, but they help us reject a poor one.

And rejecting a poor formula is useful. It frees us from adding unnecessary activity simply to raise a count. You can choose a change because it interests you, with curiosity about what may remain, rather than a belief that each addition must pay a fixed return in remembered hours.

Small enough to enter

A manageable change has an advantage that does not require a scientific claim: you are able to do it without dismantling the rest of the day.

Suppose you want to enter that public garden. The proposal may be as simple as going when you have a little time and a safe, accessible way to reach it. You do not have to make the visit part of a grand project. You can look at one corner, decide you like it, or decide you do not. If the weather turns or you are tired, you can leave.

For someone else, the whole garden is too much. A plant on a windowsill may be the available beginning. For another person, plants hold no appeal at all. The relevant change might involve a short story in an unfamiliar genre or trying to understand how a household object works.

There is a difference between choosing a smaller version of an interest and choosing a token activity to satisfy a demand for novelty. The smaller version still contains something you want. The token is performed so that you can claim to have varied the day. One can be enough. The other may leave you with an obligation that has no reason to exist.

An example makes the difference clearer. If you want to understand birdsong, learning one call may open a real question. If you dislike birds and prefer quiet, assigning yourself the same exercise is unlikely to become more considerate because it costs nothing. Cheap advice can still ask for effort you would rather spend elsewhere.

A chosen experiment should also have a way out. You might give an unfamiliar activity one brief try, then decide whether to return. No memory theory obliges you to finish a hobby you dislike. Nor must you keep raising the difficulty every time it begins to feel comfortable. Sometimes comfort is evidence that you have found something you want in your life.

The point of a small beginning is room to discover your response. Perhaps the activity is enjoyable. Perhaps the first attempt is frustrating but the question still interests you. Perhaps it is simply wrong for you. All three outcomes tell you more than a rule that declares novelty good before you have met it.

Enough attention to have an encounter

It is possible to arrange something unfamiliar and remain concerned mainly with whether it is working.

You enter the garden and begin checking yourself. Does time feel slower? Is this memorable yet? Have I looked closely enough? The visit becomes an inspection of your response. The flowers now have the additional task of proving a theory.

I would release them from that duty. During the visit, let the visit be the reason you are there. If a question catches you, follow it. If you prefer to sit, sit. You can consider what the experience gave you afterward, when the consideration no longer has to compete with every moment of it.

This does not require a special state of mind or continuous absorption. You may worry about a bill while looking at a leaf. You may be distracted, then return. An ordinary encounter can contain interruptions and still be an encounter. Requiring perfect presence would put the threshold back out of reach.

Choice also includes the choice to prepare. A little information may help you enjoy an unfamiliar place, especially when uncertainty is a burden. Checking accessibility, knowing how long the journey will take, or learning one thing you want to look for does not spoil the experiment. Surprise is only one possible source of interest. Understanding can be another. We sometimes talk as if the only genuine experience is the one that takes us wholly unprepared. That is a romantic demand to make of someone with limited time, health, or money. You can reduce unwanted uncertainty while preserving a question you want to pursue. A planned visit can contain discovery. A familiar home can contain an unfamiliar thought.

What you cannot do is order your future memory to retain exactly the desired amount. You can make an occasion available, take part in it, and perhaps give it a clear place in the course of a day. Whether it remains vivid years later is beyond a guarantee. This limit is worth admitting before we invest too much in the guarantee.

The right to return

There is one more cost to endless novelty: it can prevent a second encounter.

If each new interest must be replaced by a newer one, you may leave just as you have learned enough to enjoy coming back. The first attempt at a skill is often occupied by basic instructions. A later attempt can let you do more. Keeping the activity would reduce the number of firsts on your calendar while increasing what you are capable of experiencing within it.

That is a choice a memory-centered life should be able to make. Otherwise the pursuit of memorable time would become hostile to patience. It would reward arriving and discourage belonging. It would treat a place as used up once you had been there.

A life with room for discovery can contain returns. You might visit the same garden through different weather. You might keep learning the one call until you can recognize it without effort. You might decide the brief visit was enough and spend your next free hour at home. None of those choices can be ranked by counting how much novelty each contains.

Here is the standard I would propose instead. Let a change earn its place through some present good: interest, enjoyment, a chance to understand, the satisfaction of trying something you wanted to try. Ask whether its cost fits your actual circumstances. Allow later memory to be part of the picture without giving it control of the whole picture.

This standard leaves space for an uneventful result. The garden may be small. Nothing extraordinary may happen. You may remember one patch of shade, or only that you were glad to have gone. There is no need to turn the outing into a turning point.

When you leave, the route home can be the one you know.

Sources and notes