Chapter 6: Your Brain on Repeat

Here's an uncomfortable truth: the better you get at your life, the faster it disappears.

Not because success is bad. Because your brain is efficient. Ruthlessly, brilliantly efficient. And efficiency, when applied to the processing of daily experience, is the engine of temporal compression.

Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at UCLA, describes the brain as a time machine. Not in the science fiction sense. In the pattern-recognition sense. Your brain's primary job is to predict what's coming next based on what's come before. It builds models of the world, then runs those models forward. When the prediction matches reality, which it does most of the time in a routine life, the brain doesn't need to work very hard. It coasts. The neural effort required to process a familiar stimulus is a fraction of what's needed for a novel one.

This is why your commute disappears. You've done it hundreds of times. Your brain has a perfect model of it. There's nothing to update, nothing to encode, nothing to flag as noteworthy. So it doesn't. The drive happens. You arrive. And your memory has almost nothing to show for it.

A 2024 pre-registered study made this concrete. Researchers showed participants the same stimulus multiple times and measured their perception of duration. The second and third exposures were perceived as significantly shorter than the first, even when the actual duration was identical. Repetition didn't just make things feel familiar. It made them feel faster. The compression was measurable and automatic. Your brain literally shortens repeated experience.

This extends far beyond individual stimuli. A 2025 study on neural temporal dedifferentiation found that younger brains switch between neural states frequently and distinctly. Each transition creates a boundary, a kind of timestamp in your stream of consciousness. Older brains linger longer in each state. The transitions blur. The boundaries soften. Days blend into one another because, at the neural level, the states that compose them are less distinct.

This isn't a slowing of your internal clock. It's a coarsening of your temporal resolution. Think of it like the difference between a high-definition photograph and a low-resolution one. Both capture the same scene. But one has texture you can zoom into, and the other turns to mush when you look closely. A brain that switches states frequently produces high-definition days. A brain that lingers produces days that compress into indistinguishable blocks.

There's a related phenomenon called the oddball effect, and it's one of the more fascinating findings in time perception research. When you're exposed to a sequence of identical stimuli, say a series of identical images, and then one image is different, the different one is perceived as lasting longer. Not because it actually does. Because your brain pays attention to it. The unexpected stimulus triggers a burst of neural processing. More information gets encoded. And more encoding creates the subjective experience of expanded time.

The reverse is also true. When everything is expected, when your brain has seen it all before, it processes each moment with minimal effort. Minimal effort means minimal encoding. Minimal encoding means the period compresses in memory. And compressed memory is exactly what makes a year feel like a month.

This creates a paradox that I think is worth sitting with. The skills, routines, and habits that make you effective at your job and efficient in your daily life are the same ones that make time disappear. Expertise is a form of neural compression. The master carpenter doesn't think about each cut the way an apprentice does. The experienced driver doesn't consciously process each lane change. The seasoned executive doesn't agonise over each email. They've done it all before. Their brains have optimised the process. And in doing so, their brains have also stopped recording it.

I spent a decade at one company. By the end, I was very good at what I did. The work was demanding, but it was a familiar kind of demanding. I knew the rhythms, the patterns, the types of problems that would arise and roughly how to solve them. I was operating at a high level on autopilot. And that decade, which should have been the richest period of my professional life, compresses in memory into something that feels like two or three years.

The cruelty of it is that the compression happens precisely because you're succeeding. You're not bored. You're not idle. You're engaged. But you're engaged in patterns your brain already knows. And the brain doesn't waste resources on what it already knows.

So what breaks the pattern?

The oddball effect points the way. Anything unexpected, anything that doesn't match the brain's prediction, triggers heightened processing and richer encoding. This doesn't mean you need to quit your job or upend your life. It means your brain needs surprise. Not shock. Not chaos. Just enough deviation from the predicted pattern to wake up the encoding machinery.

A new project that stretches you. A conversation with someone who thinks differently. A route you've never walked. A piece of music in a genre you don't normally listen to. A skill you're bad at. These aren't luxuries. They're temporal necessities. They're what keep your brain switching states, maintaining its temporal resolution, and producing days that feel distinct from one another.

The goal isn't to abandon routine. Routine is useful. Routine frees up cognitive resources for the things that matter. The goal is to interrupt routine strategically and often enough that your brain doesn't compress entire months into a single undifferentiated block.

Because a life on repeat isn't shorter in hours. It's shorter in experience. And experience is the only unit of time that actually counts.