> Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories No.. I think this phenomena is related to the fact that our brain is indeed a prediction machine.

> Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories No.. I think this phenomena is related to the fact that our brain is indeed a prediction machine. When a prediction is wrong (i.e we encounter something surprising/unexpected), our brain updates it's prediction based on reality (exactly like training a "predict next word" language/sequence model like GPT-3). As we get older, with more and more life experience, we don't get surprised so often (been there, done that - know how it's going to turn out), so our brain makes less and less prediction mistakes and therefore prediction-failure memory updates. Of course we have multiple types of memory - short term vs long term, etc, so these prediction-failure updates are only part of the picture, but I think this is still the core reason why "the years fly by" when you're just doing more of the same. If you want to lay down more memories then novelty should help, but it's really surprise you'd want to maximize... no good being novel if you can already anticipate/predict how it's going to go.