Dr. David Eagleman

It's that

It's what you did this past weekend can make the weekend seem longer.

When it comes to some great new event like the birth of a child or a wedding or whatever it is, it has to do with how much attention you're paying and how much memory you're writing down.

And that means it is to some degree in our control if we really attend to things and write down memories instead of letting life just wash over us.

We can seem as though we've lived longer.

I'm not talking about longevity.

I'm just talking about seeming as though you've lived longer, which is, look, here's something that I try to do all the time is just switch stuff up.

For example, brushing your teeth with your other hand.

Not hard to do, but it's just one of a million ways of knocking yourself off a path.

One thing I try to do every time I drive home from Stanford is I try to take a different drive home, a different route home.

you know, wastes an extra minute, whatever.

But it's, I'm seeing new things.

I'm observing new things about the neighborhood or whatever that I hadn't noticed before.

One thing that's very easy to do is just rearrange your office, like push your desk over here, take two paintings and just swap them on the wall.

All this stuff is super easy, but it really matters.

It's important because what it's doing is

enhancing brain plasticity in the sense of just challenging, you know, your internal model says, okay, I've got this world.

And then suddenly it says, oh, there's something new.

There's something interesting going on in this world.

And it makes it seem as though you've lived longer because you're writing down more memories about everything.