Speaker 1: So you always hear people say things like I got
Speaker 1: in a car accident and the whole thing seemed to
Speaker 1: happen in slow motion. I saw the hood crumple and
Speaker 1: the rear view mirror fall off, and I was watching
Speaker 1: the other driver's expression. And it's the same thing with
Speaker 1: gunfights or skiing accidents or motorcycle crashes. But from a
Speaker 1: neuroscience perspective, is it true that time slows down? And
Speaker 1: how could you test that? And why does your drive
Speaker 1: to work on the first day seem to take a
Speaker 1: long time, but after a while it takes no time
Speaker 1: at all. And why do the years seem to go
Speaker 1: by faster as we get older? Welcome to inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author
Speaker 1: at Stanford University, and I've spent my whole career studying
Speaker 1: the intersection between how the works and how we experienced life.
Speaker 1: The first time I experienced time slowing down, I was
Speaker 1: eight years old. It was a Saturday, and my brother
Speaker 1: and I left the house to find something to do,
Speaker 1: and on the way out the door, our father warned
Speaker 1: us not to go near the house under construction, and
Speaker 1: so we told him we wouldn't, and being children, we
Speaker 1: of course went straight to the house under construction. So
Speaker 1: we poked around like kids do, and eventually we found
Speaker 1: a ladder and we went up onto the roof, and
Speaker 1: from there one could enjoy a wonderful view of the
Speaker 1: mountains of Albuquerque, New Mexico. And my brother wandered off
Speaker 1: to explore some other part of the roof, and I
Speaker 1: stepped forward to stand at the edge. Now I didn't
Speaker 1: know what tar paper was. I didn't know that it
Speaker 1: was stiff and that it extended past the edge of
Speaker 1: the roof on a center construction. So when I thought
Speaker 1: I was stepping to the roof's edge, I was actually
Speaker 1: stepping on the tar paper, and I began to fall.
Speaker 1: As I fell, I thought about grabbing for the roof's edge,
Speaker 1: but some part of my brain recognized I was too
Speaker 1: late for that. So I found myself in a spread
Speaker 1: eagle position, looking way down to the red brick floor below,
Speaker 1: And as I fell towards what was likely to be
Speaker 1: my death, I was thinking calmly about how similar my
Speaker 1: fall was to that scene in Alice in Wonderland when
Speaker 1: she falls down the rabbit hole. It was totally calm
Speaker 1: and peaceful. I didn't have any fear or panic. I
Speaker 1: was just thinking about a moment from a children's story.
Speaker 1: So it won't surprise you that I lived. But it
Speaker 1: did surprise my parents and the emergency room physicians because
Speaker 1: I'd fallen twelve feet and landed on my face, on
Speaker 1: my nose, and I'd lost consciousness and a lot of blood,
Speaker 1: and I'd shattered all the cartilage in my nose. But
Speaker 1: what stayed with me wasn't anything about that or the pain.
Speaker 1: It was a fascination with what had happened. So fast
Speaker 1: forward seven years later, I'm in high school physics, and
Speaker 1: I learned the formula de equals one half at squared,
Speaker 1: and that allows me to calculate how long the fall took.
Speaker 1: And I realize the fall had only taken point six
Speaker 1: of a second. What that couldn't be right. It seemed
Speaker 1: to have taken so much longer. So fast forward some
Speaker 1: more years and I'd become a neuroscientist, and my graduate
Speaker 1: thesis was a large computational model of a chunk of
Speaker 1: brain tissue and the signaling that happens in there. But
Speaker 1: the experience of my falls mysteriously long, long duration never
Speaker 1: left me. So once I became faculty, I started looking
Speaker 1: into this and I started collecting stories from people. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to start with one from a police officer.
Speaker 1: So one morning, he got radioed that two suspects were
Speaker 1: heading his way in a police car chase and that
Speaker 1: he should position his car in the middle of the
Speaker 1: road to stop them. So he does that, and he
Speaker 1: sees the car coming in from the distance, and he
Speaker 1: stands in the middle of the street and raises his
Speaker 1: hand for them to stop, but they just keep coming,
Speaker 1: and they're coming right at him. So he draws his
Speaker 1: revolver and he points it at the driver with the
Speaker 1: intention of shooting him through the windshield. And the car
Speaker 1: is so close, and for him, it seemed like time
Speaker 1: went into slow motion. And here's how he reports his thoughts. Now,
Speaker 1: wait a second, these are three point fifty seven HaLow points,
Speaker 1: and they should go right through the glass. But since
Speaker 1: the glass is angled, what if it ricochets off the
Speaker 1: glass and kills someone on the second story of that
Speaker 1: house over there. Anyway, he suddenly realizes that the car
Speaker 1: is almost on top of him, so he jumps out
Speaker 1: of the way, and at the same motion he squeezes
Speaker 1: off around at the driver's door, bang, and as the
Speaker 1: car goes by, he then pulls off a second round bang,
Speaker 1: And then as the car is almost all the way
Speaker 1: past him, he feels his finger pull off the third
Speaker 1: shot bang, and he assumes that he'd fired at the
Speaker 1: rear window, but he noticed that the glass hadn't broken,
Speaker 1: and so he starts to worry that maybe he'd missed,
Speaker 1: and maybe he'd shot a bystander down the road, and
Speaker 1: so he immediately is thinking about how his career might
Speaker 1: be over. And so his partner comes running up to him,
Speaker 1: and in the conversation afterwards, he realizes that his partner
Speaker 1: had witnessed a very different event. His partner said that
Speaker 1: the entire incident from the car approaching to when it
Speaker 1: went by, took maybe all of three seconds. And his
Speaker 1: partner said that the three shots sound like bang by bang,
Speaker 1: but it didn't feel that way to the officer firing
Speaker 1: the shots. It seemed like he had taken a lot
Speaker 1: of time to think about ricocheting, about people sitting in
Speaker 1: their living rooms, about whether the shot had hit the
Speaker 1: back window, about whether the shot would possibly hit a
Speaker 1: guy in a bar or some distance away. And in
Speaker 1: his mind, the shots went bang bang bang, as though
Speaker 1: everything were happening at a much slower pace. So how
Speaker 1: is it that a bang bang bang from one guy
Speaker 1: is perceived by someone else's bang bang bang? How does
Speaker 1: that happen? Now, here's another story from a doctor who
Speaker 1: got in a motorcycle accident. So he's going forty five
Speaker 1: miles an hour down the road. A car pulls out
Speaker 1: of the driveway and he comes off his bike and
Speaker 1: he hits the road and he rolls four or five times,
Speaker 1: and time appears to slow down, and he feels like
Speaker 1: he's rolling forever. So after he rolls twice, he thinks, God,
Speaker 1: when am I ever going to stop rolling? So it
Speaker 1: seemed like time had slowed down for him. And when
Speaker 1: he was thinking about this later, he estimated it would
Speaker 1: take him about two and a half or three seconds
Speaker 1: to think that particular thought, And so that provided him
Speaker 1: with a timescale of the amount of time that a
Speaker 1: single roll seemed to take. So when he calculated this
Speaker 1: later in retrospect, he determined that the whole event seemed
Speaker 1: to have taken about fifteen seconds, but it couldn't have
Speaker 1: taken any longer than five or another report I collected
Speaker 1: was from a mother who saw her three year old
Speaker 1: child fall into the shallow part of a lake at
Speaker 1: a little distance away at a park. So, like any
Speaker 1: parent would, she started immediately sprinting towards the lake, but
Speaker 1: it seemed to take forever to reach there. Now, her
Speaker 1: child was fine, and in fact it didn't take her
Speaker 1: that long, but she was haunted by remembering her thoughts
Speaker 1: during what seemed like a painfully slow process of reaching
Speaker 1: her child. And this impression that time runs slowly is
Speaker 1: not an uncommon occurrence. Other people I interviewed describe things
Speaker 1: like car accidents where they watched the whole event unfold
Speaker 1: slowly with a kind of inevitability, the car sliding towards
Speaker 1: them impacts and the door crushes and so on, Or
Speaker 1: the victim of a mugging describing the way that the
Speaker 1: mugger reaches into his jacket to draw a weapon, or
Speaker 1: a person who's been in an accident with his skateboard
Speaker 1: going towards the parked car. All of these things involve
Speaker 1: very short time windows that for some reason seem very lengthy,
Speaker 1: and these people, like me, reported that the sensation of
Speaker 1: time had seemed to proceed more slowly than normal, And
Speaker 1: so these reports made it seem possible to me that
Speaker 1: the brain has a capacity to operate at a higher
Speaker 1: frame rate, which is how filming slow motion in the
Speaker 1: movies works. You capture information at a higher frame rate
Speaker 1: and then you play it back at normal speed. But
Speaker 1: what if there was another possibility here? What if, for example,
Speaker 1: it's a trick of memory, such that you're laying down
Speaker 1: denser memories and when you read it back out, your
Speaker 1: brain's only conclusion is, well, if I have that much memory,
Speaker 1: that must correspond to five seconds, when in fact it
Speaker 1: only lasted one second. So I wanted to understand what
Speaker 1: was happening here the brain, So I scoured the neuroscience literature,
Speaker 1: but it turned out no one had ever put the
Speaker 1: question of slow motion perception to the test. Why not, Well,
Speaker 1: it's because it would require placing volunteer subjects in life
Speaker 1: threatening situations, which is not a clear path to tenure
Speaker 1: for an academic. But without a rigorous scientific experiment, I
Speaker 1: realized it was difficult to know how to interpret these experiences,
Speaker 1: including my own, from a neuroscience point of view, and
Speaker 1: I was obsessed with figuring out how to test this first,
Speaker 1: I needed something scary, so I packed up stopwatches and
Speaker 1: pads of paper, and I took all the members of
Speaker 1: my laboratory to Astraworld, which was the local amusement park,
Speaker 1: and we set out to find the most terrifying roller coaster.
Speaker 1: We had a fantastic time as a group, and we
Speaker 1: did a lot of laughing, but at the end of
Speaker 1: the day we couldn't find anything frightening enough to give
Speaker 1: us the impression that time had moved in slow motion.
Speaker 1: We needed something more terrifying, so we kept looking, and
Speaker 1: three weeks later, and three hundred miles away, we found it.
Speaker 1: SCAD diving Now SCAD stands for suspended catch air device.
Speaker 1: Imagine a huge metal tower. It's one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: feet tall. It's kind of like a poor man's Eiffel Tower,
Speaker 1: and you step on a small platform that pulls you
Speaker 1: up like a small elevator, and you find yourself standing
Speaker 1: at the very top of the tower, looking down on
Speaker 1: the city. Now, you put what a big leather harness
Speaker 1: on your back, and then you click the front of
Speaker 1: your harness into a bolet hook. You position yourself so
Speaker 1: that you're hanging from the hook. Cradled in that piece
Speaker 1: of leather, dangling in the air with a net one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty feet below you, and then the hook
Speaker 1: releases and you are in free fall backwards, looking at
Speaker 1: the sky, falling backwards, not even able to see where
Speaker 1: the net is or how much time you have left.
Speaker 1: When you finally hit the net below, you're going seventy
Speaker 1: miles an hour, and the net catches you softly and
Speaker 1: you finally breathe again. This was sufficiently scary. Now I'm
Speaker 1: going to get back to the experiment in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first I want to specify that this isn't your
Speaker 1: typical in lab science experiment. So I had to do
Speaker 1: a lot of convincing to get the university to sign off.
Speaker 1: It took me seven months, but we were finally ready.
Speaker 1: So before we tested anyone, I took the plunge myself
Speaker 1: three times in a row, and I can tell you
Speaker 1: that each time was equally terrifying as the previous. There's
Speaker 1: no getting used to falling backwards from a height like that.
Speaker 1: It goes against every Darwinian instinct that you have in
Speaker 1: terms of staying alive. But back to the question, we've
Speaker 1: now found something sufficiently scary, how do we do the
Speaker 1: experiment to see if people are overclocking or having a
Speaker 1: faster frame rate in the moment. So in my lab
Speaker 1: we engineered a wristband that we called the eagle eye,
Speaker 1: or more technically the perceptual chronometer, which is just a
Speaker 1: fancy way of saying something that can measure the speed
Speaker 1: of your perception, in other words, how fast you're taking
Speaker 1: in information from the world. So picture this. It's like
Speaker 1: a watch with a big face, and it has a
Speaker 1: rectangular screen of small LED lights. So we can display
Speaker 1: a number on it, let's say the number twenty seven,
Speaker 1: by turning on the LEDs that make that number. But
Speaker 1: here's the trick. We now switch the lights so that
Speaker 1: in the next moment, all the LEDs that are on
Speaker 1: turn off, and all the ones off turn on, So
Speaker 1: that still shows you a twenty seven, But now it's
Speaker 1: like a negative photograph where the background is lit but
Speaker 1: the number is so you can still easily read that
Speaker 1: as twenty seven. Now what we do is we alternate
Speaker 1: the positive and negative images rapidly, so all the lights
Speaker 1: are blinking on and off and at a fast pace.
Speaker 1: You can still easily see that the number being displayed
Speaker 1: is twenty seven, But if we make it just a
Speaker 1: little bit faster than that, you can't see any number
Speaker 1: at all, because the speed is such that the positive
Speaker 1: and negative images fuse together, and it looks like just
Speaker 1: a bunch of LEDs that are on, and you can't
Speaker 1: distinguish that number twenty seven from any other number that
Speaker 1: might be displayed. So this speed is known as the
Speaker 1: flicker fusion frequency. Things are flickering so fast that they
Speaker 1: all fuse together. Perceptually, now we know that even though
Speaker 1: you can't see the number anymore, there are cells in
Speaker 1: your visual cortex that can follow flicker at much higher
Speaker 1: rates than your consciousness can. So the question was this,
Speaker 1: if you're in a terrifying event, can you actually see
Speaker 1: in slow motion like Neo in the matrix who season
Speaker 1: bullet time? And can you therefore distinguish the flashing numbers
Speaker 1: at a faster rate than you would be able to normally.
Speaker 1: In other words, we set the pace of alternating lights
Speaker 1: just faster than then you can normally see, just beyond
Speaker 1: the flicker fusion frequency. So if your vision speeds up
Speaker 1: like a slow motion camera taking in more frames per second,
Speaker 1: then you should be able to report the number that
Speaker 1: was being flashed. If, on the other hand, you're not
Speaker 1: actually seeing in slow motion but instead just laying down
Speaker 1: more memory, you'd be no faster at reading the display
Speaker 1: and it wouldn't look like anything to you. So we
Speaker 1: got twenty three volunteer participants to do the fall, and
Speaker 1: here's how it works. Imagine you're the volunteer. First, we
Speaker 1: measure your flicker fusion threshold under normal relaxed circumstances, in
Speaker 1: other words, how fast I can alternate these numbers before
Speaker 1: you can't see them anymore. Then we put you on
Speaker 1: the platform that's winched fifteen stories up above the ground.
Speaker 1: You strap the perceptual chronometer to your wrist, and then
Speaker 1: you're attacked to this bolet hook that's dangling way above
Speaker 1: the net, and we set the speed of alternation of
Speaker 1: the lights to just slightly faster than you can see
Speaker 1: any number on there, and you're instructed to keep your
Speaker 1: eyes on your wrist in front of you. And then
Speaker 1: at a moment you're not expecting the hook releases during
Speaker 1: the fall, your only job is to identify the random
Speaker 1: number flashing on the watch. That's it. If you're having
Speaker 1: higher temporal resolution. During the free fall, the rate of
Speaker 1: alternation should appear slowed, which would allow you to read
Speaker 1: the numbers that would otherwise be unreadable. But that was
Speaker 1: only one part of the experiment. After the fall, we
Speaker 1: had participants retrospectively reproduce how long their fall took using
Speaker 1: a stopwatch. So you think back on your fall and
Speaker 1: you start the stopwatch when you picture the hook being released,
Speaker 1: and you stop when you think you hit the net,
Speaker 1: so you're reproducing it in your mind. And then what
Speaker 1: you also do is you watch other people take the
Speaker 1: fall and you reproduce that memory on your stopwatch as well,
Speaker 1: so the moment they were released to the moment they
Speaker 1: hit the net in your memory. And what we found here,
Speaker 1: consistent with the verbal reports, is that everyone estimates to
Speaker 1: the duration of their own fall to be longer than
Speaker 1: when they're remembering someone else's fall the same fall. On average,
Speaker 1: people felt that their own falls took at least thirty
Speaker 1: percent longer. But the surprise came with the results from
Speaker 1: the perceptual chronometer. No one was able to read the
Speaker 1: numbers in free fall at a faster rate than they
Speaker 1: could when they were standing calmly on the ground and
Speaker 1: It's not because they closed their eyes or didn't pay attention.
Speaker 1: We monitored for that carefully, but because they couldn't, after all,
Speaker 1: see time and slow So despite my subjective experience of
Speaker 1: falling from the roof, I hadn't, after all seen my
Speaker 1: surroundings in bullet time like NEO. Now, this wasn't necessarily
Speaker 1: the result I was expecting, So we analyzed this data
Speaker 1: every which way to make sure there wasn't a mistake,
Speaker 1: and there wasn't. People weren't actually seeing in slow motion,
Speaker 1: and this was the first step to realizing the link
Speaker 1: between time and memory. The reason participants reported a longer
Speaker 1: duration for their own fall, even though they were seeing
Speaker 1: no faster than normal, comes down to a walnut size
Speaker 1: area of the brain called the amygdala. When there's an
Speaker 1: emergency situation, the amygdala kicks into high gear and it
Speaker 1: commandeers the resources of the rest of the brain and
Speaker 1: it forces everything to attend to the situation at hand. Now,
Speaker 1: what's emerged in neuroscience in the last few decades is
Speaker 1: that when the amygdala gets involved, memories are laid down
Speaker 1: on a secondary memory system. This is not your normal
Speaker 1: memory system for every day stuff, which is taken care
Speaker 1: of by the hippocampus, but a secondary track, because that's
Speaker 1: what memories are for. In an emergency situation, when everything
Speaker 1: is hitting the fan, that's when you want to make
Speaker 1: sure that you write down all the details for future reference.
Speaker 1: Now here's the key. When you play these memories back out,
Speaker 1: your brain interprets the higher density of data as a
Speaker 1: longer duration. So under normal everyday circumstances, most of what
Speaker 1: happens to you passes right through your system and very
Speaker 1: little gets retained. You don't remember much of anything about
Speaker 1: the details of who you passed on the street today,
Speaker 1: or all the billboards you saw on your drive, or
Speaker 1: the color of the car in front of you, or
Speaker 1: who was in front of you in line at the
Speaker 1: coffee shop, or much else. When you're judging how long
Speaker 1: something lasted, the only way you can do it is
Speaker 1: by looking back and essentially counting up memories. Your brain
Speaker 1: doesn't get time information for free. It's not like it
Speaker 1: has a built in clock. It's made up of billions
Speaker 1: of cells and that's all it has to work with.
Speaker 1: So through experience it figures out how to make correlations.
Speaker 1: If I have this much memory I can draw on,
Speaker 1: then that event must have lasted ten seconds, or ten months,
Speaker 1: or ten years. And in this way, duration is always
Speaker 1: a retrospective estimate and is totally dependent on how much
Speaker 1: memory you have, what landmarks you can identify in your
Speaker 1: memory landscape. And this is why time and memory are linked.
Speaker 1: But here's what's really important to know about this consciousness.
Speaker 1: Your experience of the world right now, it's always a
Speaker 1: story that's told retrospectively. You're not conscious of anything in
Speaker 1: the moment in real time. But consciousness is always about
Speaker 1: your brain asking itself what just happened? What just happened,
Speaker 1: and it pulls the appropriate signals from whatever is available
Speaker 1: to answer that question. So the reason that police officer
Speaker 1: remembered his gunshots as being far apart in time is
Speaker 1: because he was laying down so many details of the footage,
Speaker 1: so many memories. The car is approaching him, he jumps
Speaker 1: out of the way, he hits the ground, he's shooting
Speaker 1: at the side, he shoots at the back window, the
Speaker 1: closeness of the squealing tires, one hundred other details. All
Speaker 1: that gets stored by this emergency memory storage system. And
Speaker 1: so when his brain says, what just happened, what just happened,
Speaker 1: he has such a density of memory that his brain
Speaker 1: concludes naturally that the event must have been spread out
Speaker 1: over a long time. And the same goes for that
Speaker 1: doctor in the motorcycle accident. In a normal five seconds
Speaker 1: of riding along on the road, not much as getting
Speaker 1: written down in your memory, But when you're on the road,
Speaker 1: rolling on the asphalt, and possibly about to die, your
Speaker 1: brain is keeping track of everything it can. So when
Speaker 1: your brain says what just happened, it has such a
Speaker 1: density of memories that it assumes the event lasted longer.
Speaker 1: Now getting back to the test that I conducted. After
Speaker 1: I published these results, several people independently said to me, Hey,
Speaker 1: I read your paper, but I think you're wrong because
Speaker 1: I know that I experienced the car accident in slow motion.
Speaker 1: So I just asked them, look, the person who was
Speaker 1: sitting next to you on the passenger seat, did it
Speaker 1: really sound like they were saying, Because if not, then
Speaker 1: you weren't actually experiencing the world in slow motion. And
Speaker 1: they have to allow that if time were really stretched out,
Speaker 1: everything would have to be in slow motion like a movie.
Speaker 1: So I want to add there are some interesting exceptions
Speaker 1: to this slow motion effect. It only happens in certain circumstances,
Speaker 1: and the reason is because it depends on whether or
Speaker 1: not you're expecting or foreseeing the disaster that's heading your way.
Speaker 1: This is what I call the sliding on ice towards
Speaker 1: a brick wall phenomenon. If you're in that situation and
Speaker 1: you see what's coming, then all of your attention is
Speaker 1: riveted on the details, and so as we just saw,
Speaker 1: you're capturing them for later analysis in your memory. So
Speaker 1: you have the retrospective impression that it all must have
Speaker 1: taken a long time. But interestingly, when something unexpected happens,
Speaker 1: when you don't see it coming at all, you don't
Speaker 1: have time to put your attentional systems on it and
Speaker 1: write down the memories, and in retrospect, it seems like
Speaker 1: it happened with no time at all. Once, when I
Speaker 1: was biking, my front tire went into a pothole and
Speaker 1: I went flying over the handlebars. But I don't remember
Speaker 1: anything from the event because the whole thing came as
Speaker 1: a surprise. I didn't see it coming. And this is
Speaker 1: what happens when people are t boned in their car
Speaker 1: by a vehicle that they didn't see. The event doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to run slow motion, but instead it's as though
Speaker 1: time is gone. They were driving along through the intersection,
Speaker 1: and in the next moment their car was pinned up
Speaker 1: against the lamp post without any notion of what the
Speaker 1: heck just happened. So I noticed when I interviewed people
Speaker 1: that they described all the predictable things as though they
Speaker 1: happened in slow motion because they had so many detailed
Speaker 1: memories about them. But they don't describe the airbag is
Speaker 1: coming out in slow motion because that happens totally unexpectedly. Now,
Speaker 1: let me get back to the big question. What is
Speaker 1: this link between time and memory have to do with
Speaker 1: our normal lives. Well, this is why time seems to
Speaker 1: speed up for all of us as we get older.
Speaker 1: We all have the impression that a childhood summer seemed
Speaker 1: to last forever, But when you're older, the summers are
Speaker 1: here and then they're gone, and years zip by and
Speaker 1: decades zip by. Well, now you know why. It's because
Speaker 1: the job of the brain is to build an internal
Speaker 1: model of the world out there. Your brain is locked
Speaker 1: in silence and darkness inside your skull, and all it's
Speaker 1: trying to do is understand the structures of the world
Speaker 1: so it can operate in it better, and whenever it
Speaker 1: encounters a surprise, it writes that down and it makes
Speaker 1: changes to your circuitry. But as you go through life
Speaker 1: and your brain develops better models of the world, less
Speaker 1: and less carries much surprise. And this is why you
Speaker 1: lay down fewer memories as you age. It's because you've
Speaker 1: seen that situation before, and you've met that personality before,
Speaker 1: and you've done that job before, and so the memories
Speaker 1: that you lay down are much thinner, they're more impoverished.
Speaker 1: But in contrast, when you're in your childhood, everything is new,
Speaker 1: and so the richness of that of your memories gives
Speaker 1: you the impression of increased duration. When you are looking
Speaker 1: back at the end of a childhood summer, it seems
Speaker 1: to have lasted for such a long time because everything
Speaker 1: was new. But when you're looking back at the end
Speaker 1: of an adult summer, it seems to have disappeared rapidly
Speaker 1: because you haven't written much down in your memory. So
Speaker 1: I don't recommend emergency situations, but it sure does make
Speaker 1: you operate like you're a child again. So here is
Speaker 1: the take home lesson. We have to seek novelty, because
Speaker 1: this is what lays down new memories in the brain.
Speaker 1: So one thing I do every day that I can,
Speaker 1: I drive home a different route from work. It's not
Speaker 1: that hard and it doesn't take much longer, but it
Speaker 1: allows me to see things in a fresh way. Most
Speaker 1: of us have had the experience that when you drive
Speaker 1: to work for the first time, it seems to take
Speaker 1: a really long time, but after that it shrinks. And
Speaker 1: it's because you're becoming an automatized zombie and you're just
Speaker 1: running this program unconsciously of driving to work. You're not
Speaker 1: noticing new things anymore. And another thing I try to
Speaker 1: do is rearrange my office every month or so. It's
Speaker 1: really easy. You just push your desk over to the
Speaker 1: other side. You maybe swap the artwork on the walls,
Speaker 1: things like that. These are easy things to do. One
Speaker 1: thing that I recommend is tonight brush your teeth with
Speaker 1: your other hand. It's not that hard to do, but
Speaker 1: it will make you seem as though you are extending
Speaker 1: your time a bit because you're forcing your brain off
Speaker 1: its hamster wheel of doing things a particular way every day.
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you wear a watch or
Speaker 1: a fitbit switch it to the other hand, so that
Speaker 1: when you are looking at it, it's not just an
Speaker 1: automatic thing, but it's something you have to put a
Speaker 1: little bit bit of attention towards. So all these kind
Speaker 1: of things, any version of this, it's the best thing
Speaker 1: that you can do to perceptually extend your life. That's
Speaker 1: all for this week. To find out more and to
Speaker 1: share your thoughts, head over to eagleman dot com, slash Podcasts,
Speaker 1: and you can also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: on YouTube. Subscribe to my channel so you can follow
Speaker 1: along each week for new updates until next time. I'm
Speaker 1: David Eagleman, and this is the Inner Cosmos.