You may have woken up today feeling a little more wobbly than usual, not just from last night’s festivities, but about what 2017 holds. We can’t help our memories of last year colouring our expectations of the next. We’re wired that way.
We know this from the Colour Phi experiment in 1976, where respondents were shown a blue dot at the top left hand corner of a screen followed soon after by a red dot at the bottom right.
What they reported seeing was a dot moving from top to bottom, and changing to red midway. Our brain creates an illusion, joining up the two dots and projecting the colour of the red dot backwards in time.
The same applies to how we view our own life story and our hopes for the new year. It’s a funny point each January where we’re caught between imagining the future and knowing the past. In Roman tradition, Janus is the god of endings and beginnings, with two faces, looking backwards and forwards.
This story of transition should reassure us. We make it up as we go along. So we can allow ourselves the possibility of change: nothing is fixed, it’s only a matter of perception.
Dr Daniel Glaser is director of the Science Gallery at King’s College London
