Based Camp: Life Extension vs Experience Extension

Description and transcript written by AI: In this enlightening discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the fascinating concepts of life extension and experience extension. They explore how the brain forms memories based on novelty and change, a phenomenon that could enable us to expand our remembered or experienced life significantly. Their conversation highlights the idea that by disrupting habitual patterns and seeking out new experiences, we can enrich our lives and potentially remember 50 to a hundred percent more of our lives than through traditional life extension strategies. Whether it's moving to a new country, starting a new job, or even taking a unique vacation, the key is to embrace change and novelty. This video is a must-watch for anyone curious about human memory, life extension, and the power of unique experiences.

Based Camp - Life Extension vs Experience Extension

Malcolm: [00:00:00] And when you are doing a, a task that you've done over and over and over again, your brain will erase that and, and begin to, so suppose on a weekend, right? If I'm always watching movies and drinking and, and doing about the same thing over a weekend, my brain compresses all those experiences together.

Malcolm: But if one weekend I do something different, like, go to a petting zoo as my kids, my brain will distinctly remember that more than if I had done, done the, the same thing I'd been doing over and over again. And through this knowledge, you could actually expand your remembered life or experienced life.

Malcolm: More than you can than through traditional life extension. So if through traditional life extension today, like being healthy in many ways and stuff like that, you're increasing your lifespan by like 25%. You can easily get your memories up 50 to a hundred percent.

Simone: Hello Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today. What are we

Simone: talking about? We're gonna do a lightning round [00:01:00] on life extension versus experience extension cause it's something we talk about a lot and I figured it might be fun to chat about it. Again, I

Malcolm: really like this topic, so when people often meet us, they go, oh my gosh.

Malcolm: It's like, you guys have lived 20 lifetimes. How have you done all of this? And, and still be so young? Or, I always expect to meet someone older. And we look at all the things that we've, we've done in our life and it's like, yeah, it is true. We have done a lot more than a lot of other people, and it's because of the way we compact and manage our time, but it also means to a very meaningful extent.

Malcolm: That we have more memories. So when I look at the different chunks of my life, I remember them as chunks and they do feel like full and separate lives. Mm-hmm. So a lot of people, they might think of their time in college, for example, and it can feel like. A full and separate life, even though it's only four years.

Malcolm: I mean, if you're an adult, think about what you were doing four years ago that was like nothing [00:02:00] ago, if you're not constantly, changing where you live, changing the jobs you're in, et cetera. But in addition to that, there's also a a, a biological and measurable part of this, so let's talk about reminiscence bumps really quickly. A reminiscence bump is a tendency to remember more during your late adolescence, often when you're in college. And people have like a much clearer memory of these things. However, reminiscence bumps can be created at different times of your life when a person really changes their environment.

Malcolm: So, you also see reminiscence bumps after immigration to new countries and stuff like that. People are literally remembering more because they recently went through a re a major change. You also see this happen with memories when a person. It's experiencing something new or different they will record it more.

Malcolm: And when somebody's experiencing something they've done a hundred times, again, Rome Hypnosis, something they brought up on the podcast before road Hypnosis is a phenomenon. Where when you drive, especially cuz the route you've done a bunch of times, your brain will actually just completely erase [00:03:00] that entire thing as if you were asleep or something.

Malcolm: And when you are doing a, a task that you've done over and over and over again, your brain will erase that and, and begin to, so suppose on a weekend, right? If I'm always watching movies and drinking and, and doing about the same thing over a weekend, my brain compresses all those experiences together.

Malcolm: But if one weekend I do something different, like, go to a petting zoo as my kids, my brain will distinctly remember that more than if I had done, done the, the same thing I'd been doing over and over again. And through this knowledge, you could actually expand your remembered life or experienced life.

Malcolm: More than you can than through traditional life extension. So if through traditional life extension today, like being healthy in many ways and stuff like that, you're increasing your lifespan by like 25%. You can easily get your memories up 50 to a hundred percent. But Simone, I wanna hear your takes on this.

Malcolm: Yeah,

Simone: no, I mean, I, I totally agree with you. I think for older [00:04:00] adults now there's still now this really easy way to kind of. Sanity test this concept with the pandemic because all of us just recently experienced a year in which life was violently different. No matter how old or like entrenched your habits were.

Simone: Suddenly, non consensually, everyone's habits, pretty much everyone's habits were really significantly changed and it, I mean, to a certain extent, Added more life to a lot of people, ironically, because it broke their routine. And I think it's really interesting. We were just reading an article on life extension by Susie Weiss and one of the life Extensionist quoted at the beginning of the article.

Simone: She describes him as having this unhurried way that he's not like in a rush to get things done. And I see that and I'm like, yeah. I mean, it doesn't matter how many eons you live. If you're gonna be slow about things, you're gonna wait to to work on something. It doesn't matter how many years you live, you're gonna [00:05:00] have a lot less life.

Simone: I, I think there's another benefit too, to. The concept of living many different lives. And I think, the way that you maximize this is you don't necessarily have to move, you don't necessarily have to change jobs. There are many different ways that people extend lives by, for example, taking vacations to really, really different places.

Simone: So I would argue that, all of our vacations, for example, we really love going to Edinburgh, right? We got married there. Mm-hmm. I, I would say that like most of our Edinburgh vacations kind of blend together. Most of our friends visits to New York City kind of blend together cause we go a lot.

Simone: To entertain friends and stuff. The, every time we go somewhere violently new, like when we went to Morocco, when we went to Africa, when we went to South Korea together,

Malcolm: well, we just got off a cruise. That was de definitely different when we Yeah, like

Simone: with that, yeah. These, these violently different experiences, like Yeah.

Simone: I mean, so anyone can travel somewhere new. Anyone can do