If you could get a kiss from your favorite celebrity, how long would you want to wait before getting it?

Why do things seem less meaningful or joyful over time than they were at the beginning?

And what does this have to do with Netflix,

releasing all the episodes of a new show at once so you can binge?

Or why companies always feel compelled to come out with new and improved products every year?

Or why French revolutionaries wanted to make a week equal to five days instead of seven.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about why familiar things can sometimes lose their sparkle and what we can do about that.

So let's start with the fact that when your brain sees something new and then sees it again and again,

it becomes more efficient at processing it and it burns less energy on it.

So imagine the first time you hear a really cool new song playing at the coffee shop.

You've never heard this before.

And your brain is screaming with activity processing the tune and the rhythm and the lyrics. Why? This is because,

in large part, your brain is a prediction machine. And this is a new song, and so it is unpredictable.

You don't know where the lyrics are going or the tune and so on. So the song is cool and interesting and it holds your attention and you can't wait to hear it again.

So you jump on your cell phone and figure out the name and you play the song from the beginning and you love it.

Now you listen again. Okay, it's still good.

Are you going to listen a fourth time? Maybe a tenth time.

It's not clear you're getting the same enjoyment out of it at this point.

So this is what economists refer to as diminishing returns.

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