Annotations
This is an example of what the social psychologist Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkley calls the ‘vicarious construal effect’. By seeing an experience through someone else’s eyes, you can capture a feeling you’ve lost – or one you never even had.
To give it a go, take some photos from your daily life, such as what you see when you first get up in the morning; your trip to work; or from a typical evening out. Next, for each photo, combine it in your mind with a positive word, such as ‘pleasant’, ‘success’ or ‘triumph’, to create a completely new imagined scene.
The idea is that when you encounter the real objects in the photos – such as your morning coffee cup – it serves as a trigger for the associated imagined scene while you go about your daily life.
I resist the urge to fill the time with music or podcasts and strive instead for what Bringley calls a ‘princely detachment’ from time, finding the luxury and nuance in the moment.
A growing body of research suggests there are myriad psychological benefits to feeling small in the face of nature’s vastness: it dampens the ego, and can foster feelings of humility, reciprocity and generosity.
Most of these studies have focused on the physical world – boundless landscapes or the enormity of the cosmos, for instance – but one recent paper, by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, showed there are also upsides to experiencing smallness in time.
the researchers simply showed people a video that compressed the Universe’s 14-billion-year history into one year, then asked them to reflect on how human history and their lives fit within that story. The psychologists wondered if it might prompt thoughts of mortality, but the effects were actually positive: in particular, people reported greater self-forgiveness and lower anxiety.
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, is a type of cognitive bias where, once you learn about something – such as a word, person or concept – you start to notice it more frequently.