Charan Ranganath: belief

Transcript context

…How does studying memory affect your understanding of the nature of time? We’ve been talking about us living in the present and making decisions about the future, standing on the foundation of these memories and narratives about the memories that we’ve constructed. It feels like it does weird things to time. Yeah, and the reason is that in some sense, I think especially the farther we go back, there’s all sorts of interesting things that happen. Your sense of if I ask how different does one hour ago feel from two hours ago? You’d probably say pretty different. But if I ask you, okay, go back one year ago versus one year and one hour ago, it’s the same difference in time. It won’t feel very different. There’s this kind of compression that happens as you look back farther in time. It is kind of like why when you’re older, the difference between somebody who’s 50 and 45 doesn’t seem as big as the difference between 10 and five or something. When you’re 10 years old, everything seems like it’s a long period of time. Here’s the point is that… One of the interesting things that I found when I was working on the book actually was during the pandemic, I just decided to ask people in my class when we were doing the remote instruction. One of the things I did was I would pull people. I just asked people, “Do you feel like the days are moving by slower or faster or about the same?” Almost everyone in the class said that the days were moving by slower. Then I would say, “Okay, so do you feel like the weeks are passing by slower, faster, or the same?” The majority of them said that the weeks were passing by faster. According to the laws of physics, I don’t think that makes any sense, but according to memory, it did because what happened was people were doing the same thing over and over in the same context. Without that change in context, their feeling was that they were in one long monotonous event. Then at the end of the week, you look back at that week and you say, “Well, what happened? I have no memories of what happened,” so the week just went by without even my noticing it. That week went by during the same amount of time as an eventful week where you might’ve been going out hanging out with friends on vacation or whatever. It’s just that nothing happened because you’re doing the same thing over and over. I feel like memory really shapes our sense of time, but it does so in part because context is so important for memory. That compression you mentioned, it’s an interesting process because when I think about when I was 12 or 15, I just fundamentally feel like the same person. It’s interesting what that compression does. It makes me feel like we’re all connected, not just amongst humans and spatially, but in terms back in time. There’s a kind of eternal nature, like the timelessness I guess, to life. That could be also a genetic thing just for me. I don’t know if everyone agrees to this view of time, but to me it all feels the same.…

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