How Do People with Rich Life Experiences Perceive Daily Life? - Are People More Influential Than Travel? The Discovery That Social Diversity Enhances the "Granularity of Events"

The Science of the Moment You Feel "Something Has Changed"

We do not process the constant stream of stimuli as a mere "continuum." Instead, we find meaningful breaks (event boundaries) and segment the flow into smaller units to remember, understand, and predict what comes next. This is called event segmentation. From classic studies to recent cognitive neuroscience, it has been shown that the mechanism for capturing boundaries works automatically and serves as a foundation for later learning and memory. PMC

So, does the "perception of these breaks" differ among individuals? Recent reports suggest that the diversity of daily experiences—particularly social diversity—may hold the key to these differences. Phys.orgCell.com

Research Content: Testing "Boundary Detection" with Movies

A research team from Royal Holloway, UK, showed 157 young adults Hitchcock's short film 'Bang! You're Dead' and conducted a task where participants pressed a button when they felt "an event has just switched." They further evaluated each participant's "diversity of experience" through questionnaires divided into social (breadth of relationships, number of recent interactions) and spatial (complexity of living environment, exploration of new places). Phys.org

The results are clear. Those with higher diversity of experience detected event boundaries more finely. Moreover, this relationship was mainly driven by social diversity, with the influence of spatial diversity being relatively small. The research team plans to investigate brain activity differences at boundaries using MRI in the next phase. Phys.org

The study is published in iScience, with the full text and its predecessor preprint available as open access. Details of the methodology (participant attributes, task settings, analysis) are compiled in the main text and appendix, making it beneficial for reproducibility and reference. Cell.combioRxiv

Why "Breadth of Social Interaction" Matters

Event boundaries strongly arise from prediction errors, goal switching, and changes in location or characters. A life involving diverse interactions is regularly exposed to situational uncertainty and context shifts. Such exposure to "change" might cultivate a perceptual strategy sensitive to boundaries. Theoretically, this aligns with the framework where increased prediction error signals trigger boundaries. Phys.orgPMC

Moreover, considering prior research linking event segmentation to memory organization and working memory dynamics, social diversity might have an indirect effect of making information **"easier to digest."** However, reports also indicate that both overly fine and overly coarse segmentation are associated with performance decline, suggesting that the optimal granularity is context-dependent. Cell.com

Practical and Life Tips (While Avoiding Premature Generalization)

• Efforts to "Expand" Human Connections: Participating in study groups, cross-boundary projects, and hobby communities both inside and outside the company can serve as practice to train cognitive "boundary sensors." Phys.org

• Learning Design: In classes and training, intentionally incorporating switches in characters, roles, and perspectives can increase the scaffolding for understanding.

• Cognitive Support in Old Age: There are suggestions that weaknesses in boundary detection can be compensated by vocabulary and semantic knowledge. Interventions combining the use of knowledge and experience with the expansion of social interactions are promising. ResearchGate

SNS Reactions (Breaking News)

As of the time of writing this article (August 17, 2025, JST), the focus has been on coverage by academic media and university news releases, with large-scale dissemination on social media still limited. Posts introducing articles and press releases are scattered, and reactions generally fall into the following categories.

1. Empathy and Realization Group: Consistency with personal experiences such as "I am better at switching information during times when I meet many people."

2. Methodology Cautious Group: Points out that it is a correlational study, and the causality of sociability→granularity is not determined, the sample is limited to young adults, and questions the generalizability of the film task.

3. Implementation-Oriented Group: Ideas for using "boundaries" in education, UX design, and news headline design.
   Additionally, recent SNS trends of platform dispersion make discussions more fragmented. This cannot be ignored as a background for the difficulty in consolidating early reactions to findings. royalholloway.ac.ukPhys.orgnews.ssbcrack.comarXiv

※At present, the main primary information can be confirmed in the Phys.org explanatory article, Royal Holloway release, iScience paper, and preprint. It should be noted that individual posts on SNS are difficult to comprehensively confirm due to login restrictions and dispersion, and do not represent a broad public opinion. Phys.orgroyalholloway.ac.ukCell.combioRxiv

Limitations and Future Directions

• Uncertainty of Causality: Based on cross-sectional correlation, it remains unresolved whether "being social leads to finer segmentation" or "those who segment finely tend to be more social."

• Sample Bias: Limited to young adults. Re-examination is needed across life stages and cultural differences.

• External Validity of the Task: Additional research is needed to see how boundary detection during film viewing can be applied to work, learning, and interpersonal situations.

• Verification of Neural Mechanisms: The upcoming MRI study will focus on whether it can demonstrate the relationship between brain activity differences at boundaries and diversity of experience. Phys.org

Conclusion

Diverse human relationships make the "breaks" in the world more nuanced—such an intuitive hypothesis has now gained cautious academic backing. To apply this to daily life, start by **"talking to different people" rather than traveling far. Increasing daily "scene changes" might make understanding more granular, memory more organized, and the next step easier to see. Of course, the optimal granularity is context-dependent. I want to explore my own "resolution of perception"** through experimentation. Phys.orgCell.com

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