 |
| The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali |
It's pretty well accepted in psychology literature that humans use a number of different heuristics for pattern recognition and decision-making. One of these heuristics is the use of schemas. Put simply, a schema is a collection of properties that we associate with a given object. When you think about your definition of a human, or a book, or a bird, it is likely a list of properties: "a bird has wings, feathers, a beak, and flies".
When you encounter a new piece of data, you first attempt to match it to an existing schema to identify it. If you've never seen it before, perhaps this results in creating a new schema. If it matches an existing schema in some ways, then your brain will call to mind the other information that is part of that schema. For example, if you see that something has a beak, you may recall that, if it is a bird, it should also have wings, feathers, and fly. If some of that other information doesn't match the object, you may experience some cognitive dissonance. The brain seeks to avoid cognitive dissonance, so it will react to this inconsistency in one of a couple of ways:
- Ignore the differences.
- "Chickens can't fly? Are you sure? They are definitely birds."
- Modify the schema.
- "Some birds cannot fly. The ostrich is one such bird."
- Create a new schema.
- "A platypus is not a bird. It's just its own thing, okay?"
To me, these reactions kind of look like a compression algorithm. Before adding a new data entry for a newly encountered object, the brain first attempts to store it more cheaply in either a lossy fashion (lose some data to store it with an existing entry), or a lossless one (as a list of differences from an existing schema). If the list of differences would be as big as creating a new schema anyway, it just does that. The harder something is to fit into an existing schema, the more space it takes up in your brain.
 |
| La Voix des Airs, René Magritte |
Suppose your brain applies this memory compression algorithm to everything in your life, including your memory of a day, a month, a year. How does this day/month/year differ from the existing schema for a day/month/year? If that is the case, your memories of particular periods of time would take up more or less space depending on how they differ from your expectation for that sort of period of time.
Suppose we have a schema called "the average day". This is that concept in our mind that captures what we expect to happen during our average day: get up, take a shower, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, go to work, eat lunch, come home, eat dinner, watch 15 hours of Netflix, get ready for bed, sleep.
Then each day, you only remember the ways your day was different from this. The days you adhere completely to your routine, you are scarcely aware of time passing at all. The perception of time itself is tied to this memory compression algorithm.
How do you quantify how long someone has lived? Is it the objective measure of time? Is it the amount of time we have perceived them living? The amount of time they have perceived themselves living?
Either way, what we remember the most about ourselves and others is how we defied expectations. If life is what we perceive it to be, then the person who lives the most is the one who breaks them every day.
