Paying Attention

In my own mind I am famous for jumping in on a subject by saying: "I read about that in The New Yorker...but I can't quite remember the details..."

Well, I read about this in The New Yorker, but I can't quite remember the details: the human mind has a neat trick of 'digitizing' common experiences. In the same way that an MP3 condenses a full song by removing all the bits you hardly notice, our brains tend to process less detail every time we experience things we've experienced before.

So as we age, and things that were once unique occurrences - starting our cars, doing the dishes, noticing plants sprouting - pile up, less and less ends up in our short and long-term memory.

The net effect is that time seems to move faster as we get older.

For myself in particular, I can recall how the two months between the arrival of the all-too-alluring Consumer's Distributing catalogue and Christmas morning seemed to take about eight months.

The point of all this? The past eleven weeks of my life have been so intense that it's seemed like a year.

So I've lived longer already!