Is There a Way to Experience Something Again for the First Time
Early terminal year, I found myself on skis for the first time. As long as I could remember, I'd thought of winter sports as not my thing: likewise expensive, too posh, also much beer during the après-ski. But at that place I was, on a exercise slope in Austria, surrounded by small children fearlessly whizzing past while my swain travellers descended a blackness run some manner further up. I tin can't say I emerged as a natural talent, merely I made it to the bottom in one piece, and later on ii days of falling, swearing and climbing back to my feet, fifty-fifty I was making reasonably controlled turns and able to go down a piste without besides many falls.
Right after that first successful descent, I took a cable car to the valley. The day was coming to an end, I had the cable car to myself, the mountain mists closed behind, and ahead of me appeared a mural that wouldn't accept looked out of place on a box of Caran d'Ache colouring pencils. Bright blue sky, dark greenish pine trees, snowfall-capped mountaintops glistening in the sunday.
In the silence, endless tiny figures in shocking pinks, reds, blues and blacks slid beneath me on skis, snowboards and the odd sledge. And you lot can retrieve what you will of winter sports – decadent, platitude, environmentally unfriendly, the Sisyphean futility of climbing upwardly but to slide downwards, up and downwardly and over again – simply I chose rapture, or rapture chose me.
A mantra for our time: new experiences, not repetition
Call information technology the late bloomer's ultimate reward: for those who wait long plenty, there's always something new to come. That evening, somewhere between drinking my last white beer and sinking into the soft mattress of our Austrian chalet, I wondered why skiing struck me every bit so wonderful. Was it just the thrilling feeling in my gut as I slid downhill? Or was it likewise, perhaps mainly, the excitement of a new experience?
Because experiencing something new, doing something for the first time, gave me the pleasant sense of being correct in sync with the zeitgeist. If our epoch holds one thing dear, after all, information technology'southward the belief that in order to live a rich, full life, nosotros should accrue as many new experiences every bit possible. Although well-nigh of united states of america are happy attending the aforementioned festival year after year, or going on holiday to the same seaside town, would lovingly work for the same boss for years (if only nosotros could), and look forward to the same takeout each Friday, we're encouraged to do exactly the opposite.
"Endeavour something new every 30 days," says a Google engineer in a Ted talk with an audience of millions. "Visiting New Places Has Major Psychological Benefits,"
Nosotros're told, over and over again, to go on an adventure. We are exhorted to observe new parts of our neighbourhoods, augment our horizons, and clasp everything there is to be had out of life – rather than sticking to what we already know.
Why? For anyone doing something for the showtime fourth dimension, time slows downward, and consciousness works at full capacity. At that place's a dandy evolutionary caption for this: our brains are hard-wired to pay extra attention to firsts – to stay alert to possible dangers, to derive lessons from the unknown. When we exercise something nosotros've washed hundreds of times before, we're less attentive – and our minds retain less from the cerebral experience.
That's precisely why kickoff times ofttimes occupy our retention's hall of fame. We may remember, in detail, the showtime time nosotros kissed someone, got on a plane, smoked a articulation, rode a equus caballus, had a life-changing insight, patched together a broken heart, were awestruck by the sight of a item work of art or the sound of a particular piece of music. Memories of 2d, 3rd or nineteenth times are usually fuzzier around the edges.
Renewal is the mantra, however paradoxical or ironic that may audio. Considering even beyond the bounds of personal happiness, the new and the novel are great appurtenances – especially in cultures that pride themselves on past inventions and discoveries, cultures with a sacred belief in progress.
And so we've placed creativity – the making and inventing of new things or processes – on an enormous pedestal. Many of us accept innovation to be the engine driving the economy – and every entrepreneur wants to be their ain version of the start homo on the moon.
No innovation without repetition
I won't be the first to observe this, merely doing things once more is at to the lowest degree every bit important as doing things for the first fourth dimension. We practise the vast bulk of things more times, many more, than once. In fact, first times stand out because repetition is the norm. If y'all write off repetition, yous're writing off pretty much all of life.
But repetition isn't just the background against which the new stands out. It's oft a necessary condition for it.
But repetition isn't but the background against which the new stands out. It'due south often a necessary status for it
Small children, inexperienced by nature, run across new things all the time. To help them navigate this rush of novelty, parents and parenting experts swear by routine – a fixed rhythm to the calendar week and the weekend, every evening the aforementioned slogan of brushing teeth, story, banishing nightmares, lights out and one last wave goodnight. E'er in precisely that society, never a step unlike.
Children are creatures of addiction, just the same is truthful for adults. Artists, engineers, innovators – those who are historic for their innovation-lust – generally swear past routine. It'southward only past getting upwards at exactly the same time each solar day, having the aforementioned breakfast, completing the same circular of running and putting on the same greyness T-shirt that they're able to make new things.
In their instance, repetition is great for precisely the same reason that new experiences are corking: what we already know costs united states less attention and energy than the unfamiliar – and therefore automatically leaves room for new ideas to emerge.
Innovation is a form of repetition too
In other areas as well, repetition is what allows innovation and improvement to take place. Nine times out of 10, innovation arises from edifice step by step on what is already in that location – a form of repetition,
Companies like to exist pioneers: it gives them a "first mover advantage" and enables them to claim a large market share. But economists now realise that there is also something to be said for the second mover advantage: those walking a well-trodden path can larn, for instance, from the mistakes their forerunners fabricated and avoid making them themselves.
Speaking of learning: that, of grade, is largely made upward of repetition as well. To practice is to repeat, again and again and again – to rehearse and rehearse until nosotros've internalised the skill or story we're trying to principal.
Athletes in training, students cramming for exams, infants just learning to walk: repetition is the number one precondition for their performances, chances of success, and developing motor skills.
And in science, that collective quest for new and better cognition, repetition plays a crucial role. Researchers prefer focusing on groundbreaking research to replicating studies by others – there are more subsidies bachelor, and more honour waiting downward the line, for venturing into the slap-up unknown.
Merely only when studies are repeated by other scientists practice nosotros know whether their conclusions hold. In contempo years, thanks to such replication studies, many claims in the social and natural sciences have perished – from the result of a bold posture on performance to the thought that reading fiction makes you more empathic. Repetition is what distinguishes a fluke from an underlying reality.
The power of repetition
Humans yearn for more than merely learning, innovating and achieving, of course. Only there, too, the things that brand life worthwhile – friendship, for example, or love – are inconceivable without repetition. Psychologists have known for at least half a century that "repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus object" causes positive changes to our mental attitude to that stimulus: the "mere exposure consequence", as it's known in the field.
Why do we tend to brand our closest friends at secondary school and in college? Because we run across our fellow students every day, twelvemonth in, year out.
Why practice parents love their children? Because they care for those children daily from day 1, and while providing that care they make the hormones that are a precondition for attachment.
And beloved? As someone once remarked to me, you lot meet the love of your life for the first time only once, and all the rest is maintenance. Yous have to somehow sustain your relationship for decades, mean solar day in and day out, over and over. ("Honey doesn't just sit down there, similar a stone," writes Ursula K Le Guin: "information technology has to be made, like staff of life; remade all the time, made new.")
Why do parents love their children? Because they treat those children daily from day one
And sure, that maintenance is easier and more fun if every now and and so yous do something new together. But doesn't love likewise consist precisely of the communal routines, the little shared rituals, the unnamed, almost automatic repetitions – the fact that you plow out the lights in the living room and exit our son's sleeping room door open only a crack, that my legs find yours in bed every night, over again and once more and over again?
There's pleasure in repetition, cognisance in recognition.
For that very reason, change can startle people: think of the person who won't eat what she doesn't know, or the fanatical defender of traditions ripe for review. Politicians know that there are votes to be won with an appeal to what is old and familiar. And they know that this message is virtually constructive when it is repeated incessantly: repetition is the foundation beneath propaganda.
A repetition is rarely a copy
Repetition and innovation are in no way mutually exclusive: in fact, they require and cause each other. And if you expect at information technology like that, it turns out that repetition rarely brings us "more of the same"; information technology almost e'er brings u.s.a. something dissimilar. Or rather, something new.
Music is a practiced example. Musicians and, in their wake, musicologists know better than anyone that repetition is crucial for our perception – and appreciation – of music. The more ofttimes we hear a song, the more than we're inclined to love it –
But if you listen to a piece of music several times, you also hear something else – yous pay more attention to subtleties or details, for instance, precisely considering the brain doesn't have to put all its endeavour
And listening to music repeatedly changes the mode we heed, too. Instead of passive listeners, we become agile participants, already knowing what'due south to come, anticipating and expectant.
I'm put in mind, once again, of small children, how they love to sing the same song or read the same book several times in a row, how much they seem to dear it when the lyrics or story turn out exactly as they did before. "NO!" they yell, when you change the words of a lullaby, or secretly try to skip a couple of pages. They're role of the narrative, they join in – considering they've heard information technology all before.
And isn't that always the way repetition deviates from the kickoff fourth dimension? The 2nd, third or hundredth time you lot see, do, hear or experience something is nigh inevitably a richer feel than the commencement fourth dimension. Because you have expectations based on previous occasions. Because those expectations either are or aren't met – which may exist satisfying, surprising or annoying, but in any example adds value.
Information technology's not piece of cake to see this, when repetition counts mostly as innovation's boring little sibling, simply a repetition is never an exact copy of what went before. Considering we aren't the aforementioned: we're changed by what came first, have get new people who look at things differently. You can't pace into the same river twice, nor tin can y'all visit the same campsite twice (let alone iv times).
This means that every repetition is a new experience in itself. The expectations you accept, sometimes fulfilled and sometimes not, are new. The recognition is new. Every performance of a shared ritual makes the relationship more layered than earlier. Every descent enables the trunk to ski more than fluently than the previous attempt. Every play-through brings more than subtleties to the attention than the previous mind. It's all new.
This is a smaller, more modest sort of innovation, written on a palimpsest instead of a blank sheet. That makes information technology harder to discover, less probable to be the subject of conversation, of advice, of odes. Information technology isn't grand or all-consuming, but shows itself in small increments of depth, weight and forcefulness.
It is an innovation which isn't hands recognised every bit such, if just considering we've never really learned to retrieve of it that way. If we're constantly encouraged to go in search of the great unknown, of what is radical and new, nosotros can hands miss the more subtle change that comes with repetition.
And so here's the paradox: in social club to capeesh repetition for what it is, we really need a new sort of attention.
A better fashion of viewing repetition
For much of last year, I viewed my first fourth dimension on skis as but that: a beginning time, satisfying and moving precisely considering information technology was so very new.
But had I looked more carefully, more precisely, so I could accept seen that that first fourth dimension in fact consisted of lots of times. Of kickoff time and time again at the peak of the slope, hurtling downwardly at a kamikaze step, and dropping to the footing just before I hit the safe barrier considering I didn't empathise the art of slowing down. My bends became a piffling sharper each fourth dimension, my descent a niggling less out of control.
I was practising, repeating. I kept doing the same affair, kept beginning once more, and information technology went slightly differently each fourth dimension. That was an boosted joy, or perhaps it was the core of it: those small progressions, the fiddling surprises, the repetition with variation.
In a written report published last year, participants were asked to revisit an exhibition they had just seen, or to put on a picture they'd watched the night earlier. They were asked to indicate in advance how pleasant they expected the repetition to be.
Nosotros underestimate the pleasure of repetition because it'south never pointed out to us
As it turned out, the participants underestimated the pleasure they would derive from repeating their experience. They thought the second fourth dimension effectually would be less enjoyable than information technology actually was.
Nosotros underestimate the pleasure of repetition because it'due south never pointed out to united states of america, directed as we are instead towards the mantra of innovation. And the signal isn't so much that we have to choose, for repetition and against innovation, or vice versa. The bespeak – and I'm starting to sound similar a broken tape here myself – is that nosotros need both, that they need each other, that they are polar opposites as well as extensions of each other.
Information technology's probably impossible to achieve the level of attentiveness we bring to start times the tenth or hundredth time we do something. Merely it'due south entirely feasible to look more attentively at repetition, not to see it as a stumbling block but as a goal in itself. Not every bit a copy but equally a variation. I doubtable that the routines and rituals that make upwards daily life, the "grind" we've learned to fear, would experience less like a slap in the confront to the zeitgeist, and more like something worthwhile all on its own.
Repetition brings yous more than you call back
Describe your own conclusions, said one of the researchers who conducted that written report showing that people underestimate the pleasure of repetition. Instead of wasting time in search of still some other new experience, you lot might also choose to render to a film you lot've already seen, or to a restaurant you've already dined at. It might bring yous more than you call up.
There'south a difference between inattentively doing things once again and doing things again by choice
And in that location'southward the crux of the matter. Repetition is the norm: we're constantly repeating things, whether we want to or not. But there's a difference between inattentively doing things once again and doing things over again by choice. Conscious, attentive, deliberate. With the full awareness that this matters just as much, and with the willingness to see, hear and feel different things when you feel, hear and run across them again.
The rapture that came over me early on last twelvemonth, in that cable car on my way to the valley, certainly had to do with the overwhelming quality of a completely new experience, the wonder of a first time. That tin't be reproduced, I get that. Still, I would like to descend towards that valley in one case once more after a long day in the snowfall, encounter the sun reflected anew on the snowy mountain peaks ahead of me, and over again watch the brightly coloured miniature people speeding down the slope below. There would be things I recognised and things I saw for the first time, and I'1000 curious nigh both.
So while I still call up winter sports are not my thing – likewise expensive, likewise posh, too much beer during the après-ski – I'd love to become again adjacent twelvemonth.
And the year after, once more.
Et cetera, et cetera.
This piece first appeared on
About the images Ane day, creative person Chan Dick peeked out of the window of his toilet. Adjacent to his studio, on the dreary grounds of the Chai Wan fire station, a curious scene unfolded. A column of men in yellow suits were standing there simulating extinguishing a fire. They dragged hoses, climbed into steel structures, and marched over the asphalt. And every time he looked out of that window by his toilet, he saw them again: a procession of firefighters dragging hoses, climbing in steelwork, marching over the asphalt. Over again, and again, and again. "I couldn't get the images out of my head," Dick said. I even saw them with my eyes closed. And once I started taking pictures, I couldn't cease.
Dig deeper
How we turned into batteries (and the economy forces us to recharge) Energy has go modern society's holy grail, but what if we don't want to spend our limited time on World constantly recharging and draining ourselves? In an age of punishing pressure level to be productive, saying no is the contrary of negative.
Source: https://thecorrespondent.com/455/once-more-for-feeling-why-trying-new-things-is-overrated-and-repetition-is-vital-to-society