Good morning friend,

I had an especially busy last week, but it felt satisfying both in the moment and at the end of the week looking back. How have you been?

Here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. We live in three-second moments. What makes some stick as memories while others vanish? Augustine, James, and Kahneman offer clues. 🧠

• You have to check this out. 12 rules to change your life that you might not like. 📐

Are you ready to jump in? 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

The melody of time and memory.

E. L. Doctorow famously said:

"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

I've encountered that quote three or four times in the last year. This concept really sticks with me, and I think it applies to more than just writing.

Imagine being that driver on a foggy night.

As you drive down the road, your headlights illuminate about 50 yards before you. Traveling at 45mph, you will cover 50 yards every 2.27 seconds.

We typically think about driving as moving forward in space.

But your speed (e.g., miles per hour) is a measure that combines space and time. So are you also moving forward in time as you drive down that foggy road?

As discussed in my letter, On Time and Attention, philosophers like Martin Heidegger have argued that you are inseparable from time. So, as you drive down the road, you move through space, but you move alongside time - you and time are inherently moving forward together, as one.

This is what fascinates me with the Doctorow quote:

If your headlights allow you to see 50 yards down the dark, foggy road, the specific 50 yards you can see continuously changes, like the collection of still images in a flip book.

The 50 yards of real estate you see at 2:00 pm differs from the 50 yards you see one second later at 2:00:01.

Come along with me as I link this idea to aligned ideas from three giants of philosophy, psychology, and behavioral economics.

Time as Melody

St. Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 in what was then Roman North Africa.

He believed memory (awareness of what just happened) and forethought (projection of what is about to happen) are essential to evaluating the passage of time.

Said differently, without memory and forethought, our present-tense perception of the passage of time would be radically altered.

He proposed a brilliant analogy. Imagine you’re listening to a song - perhaps Amazing Grace.

“Listening to one note by itself will not give you the melody. It’s the memory of the previous notes, in sequence, that does so; and it’s the anticipation of the note to come that makes melody memorable,” explains Dr. Robert Kurland.

Written music is presented as a score, which illustrates notes in a sequence and defines a time signature (a fraction, such as 2/4 time, where the 2 defines the number of beats per measure, another metric of speed or pace).

As you drive down the foggy road, your memory of what you just passed and your foresight of what’s around the next bend come together with your present-tense experience to give you a complete view of your experience as a sequence of events occurring over time.

The present is an interval of time.

William James was born in 1842. He is considered the founder of American psychology. While at Harvard, he taught the first class on the subject, and his book The Principles of Psychology is still taught today.

James argued that our perception of the “present” is “no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time” (forward and back).

He used the analogy of sitting in a boat, with a bow and a stern representing the forward-looking and rear-looking ends of the boat. The length of the boat is the duration of time we perceive to be the "present."

With our earlier analogy of driving down a foggy road at night, I said the exact 50 yards of road illuminated by your headlights is technically changing every second (and microsecond).

James would argue that your actual experience of each stretch of road would be longer. Your sense of the present ("I'm driving down a foggy road right now") would be built upon blocks of time, a duration of time.

Like Augustine, he believed the structure of these blocks of time (their pattern, or melody) was essential to memory formation and foretho

The psychological present and memory formation.

Born in 1934, Daniel Kahneman was an Israeli-American psychologist and behavioral economist. He was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002, and is certainly the thinker I’ve quoted the most in this newsletter.

Kahneman suggested the “psychological present” is about three seconds long.

So the blocks of time we can make sense of (similar to a musical measure three beats long in a ¾ time signature song) are roughly three seconds long.

Kahneman suggested we process these blocks of time as the experiencing self. It is the experiencing self that the doctor asks, “Does it hurt when I push here?”, he explained.

A typical life has about 600 million of these three-second blocks of time.

The vast majority of them leave no trace. Once you experience them, they are gone forever, and no memories are formed.

He compared the experiencing self to the remembering self. The remembering self keeps score and maintains records. It is the remembering self that the doctor asks, "How have you been feeling?".

“Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self,” Kahneman explains.

This framework mirrors the concepts of prospective time (experiencing self) and retrospective time (remembering self) that I discussed last week regarding how we judge the speed of time passing.

As a reminder, I explained:

• When it comes to our experience of time in the moment (prospective time), attention is the variable with the biggest impact on your perceived speed of time.

• Regarding our experience of time after the fact (retrospective time), memory density is the variable with the biggest impact on your perceived duration of time. The more memories you encode (per unit of time), the slower time appears to be moving.

So if…

The vast majority of your experiences do not form memories, and…

Memory density is the variable that changes how fast your life appears to go by, then…

Understanding which experiences translate into memories (and why) seems incredibly valuable.

Like Augustine and James, Kahneman believed experiences become memories when they unfold in a pattern, like Augustine’s song-melody analogy.

Memories as stories.

The way melodies give structure to music, stories give structure to memories.

Like Augustine, Kahneman believed the structure of experienced blocks of time (their pattern, or melody) helps to turn them into memories.

Stories have a start and an end that help define which collection of individual moments we bundle together to form a single memory.

The structure of stories (something happened, then something else, then a peak moment, then one more thing, then it was resolved) helps us remember them.

This is the same reason melodies help us remember songs and song lyrics.

If you asked me to recite the lyrics of Madonna’s Material Girl, I’d have no chance.

But if you played the song for me, I could sing every word. The melody is what is lodged firmly in my brain. The lyrics are attached to the melody, to the pattern of the melody.

The pattern is what is memorable, for stories and songs.

The question becomes: what types of experiences are most likely to be encoded as memories?

This is the question I stumbled upon two weeks ago, suggesting novelty (doing something new, learning something new) could be a big part of the answer to that question.

We'll explore that more next week unless I decide to take a brief break to write about something else.

When I write this letter to you each week, I can only see as far as my headlights.

Thanks for reading today, my friend.

Kevin

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