Today's Wisdom - Memory, Carlos Ghosn and Bob Dylan

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If you ask a five-year-old how long summer vacation felt, they'll tell you it lasted forever, an endless expanse of days that seemed to stretch into eternity. Ask a fifty-year-old the same question about their summer, and they'll say it flew by in a blink. The difference isn't just nostalgia. When you're five years old, a single year represents 20% of your entire existence, when you're fifty, that same year is just 2% of your life. This logarithmic relationship is called Janet's Law, named after French philosopher Paul Janet, which states that the apparent length of time is inversely proportional to your age. Janet proposed that time doesn't actually speed up as you age, but each year becomes a smaller fraction of the total, which makes it feel like life is speeding by.

While Janet’s Law provides the framework for this phenomenon, the true culprit is hidden in the way your mind archives memories. Neuroscientists have discovered that memory formation is largely controlled by the hippocampus, which acts as a filter deciding what's worth keeping and what can be discarded. When you experience something novel, your brain releases a flood of dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters that signal "this is important, pay attention." A study from Duke University found that time perception is directly linked to the number of new memories formed. Participants who spent a week doing unfamiliar activities, learning new skills, and visiting new places estimated the week had lasted significantly longer than participants who followed their normal routine, even though both groups experienced the same 168 hours. Your brain encodes novelty with rich, detailed memories, while routine gets compressed into forgettable background noise. As you age and fall into predictable patterns, driving the same route to work, eating the same breakfast, having the same conversations, your brain stops bothering to record most of it.

The good news is that you have complete control over this process. If you deliberately inject novelty into your routine, you force your brain to create what psychologists call "memory dividends," rich deposits of experience that expand your perceived lifespan. The strategies are simpler than you think: take a different route home, say yes to invitations you'd normally decline, travel to places that make you uncomfortable, learn a new skill, have conversations with people outside your usual circles. Even small changes trigger dopamine release and memory encoding. Neuroscientist David Eagleman suggests that the reason childhood feels so long is that children are in a constant state of learning, their brains are forming new neural pathways every day, which creates dense, detailed memories. Adults can recreate this by forcing themselves into beginner status regularly. We cannot stop the years from turning, but by choosing to live with the curiosity of a child, we can at least ensure that our time feels as rich and expansive as it did when we were young.

Carlos Ghosn had saved Nissan from bankruptcy in the late 1990s, earning the nickname "Le Cost Killer" for his ruthless efficiency, and by 2018 he was running the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance that sold more cars globally than any other automaker. So when Japanese prosecutors boarded his private jet the moment it landed in Tokyo on November 19, 2018, and arrested him for underreporting income and misusing company funds, it sent shockwaves through the business world. Ghosn spent 130 days in a freezing jail cell, interrogated without a lawyer in a legal system where 99% of cases end in conviction. His lawyers argued it was a corporate coup, that Nissan executives had conspired with prosecutors to remove Ghosn because he planned to merge Nissan more deeply with Renault, giving the French company control that Japanese leadership couldn't tolerate. Prosecutors dismissed this as deflection from a greedy executive who had stolen from shareholders. When Ghosn was finally released on bail in March 2019, the conditions were designed to crush him. He was confined to a Tokyo apartment under 24-hour surveillance, forbidden from using the internet unsupervised, banned from contacting his wife, and required to record every conversation. The message was unmistakable: Carlos Ghosn would die in a Japanese prison.

On December 29, 2019, Ghosn hosted a Christmas party at his Tokyo apartment and invited musicians to perform. Two men arrived in the afternoon carrying large black cases for audio equipment, which security guards inspected visually but didn't open fully or weigh. The party lasted several hours, with Ghosn playing the gracious host as if nothing was wrong. When the musicians finished, they left through the front entrance. The two men who had delivered the equipment left separately through a side entrance carrying the same black cases, except now one weighed roughly 80 kilograms more because Carlos Ghosn was folded inside it, hidden in a box the size of a double bass case with air holes drilled in the side. For the next three hours, Carlos remained motionless while being loaded onto a private Bombardier jet as cargo. If anyone had opened the case or scanned it properly, the escape would have ended instantly. But nobody did. The plane took off at 11:10 pm, landed in Istanbul where Ghosn was transferred to a second jet without officially entering Turkey, and then flew to Beirut, Lebanon, a country with no extradition treaty with Japan. When he landed on December 30, he held a press conference and declared: "I have not fled justice, I have escaped injustice." The entire operation took less than 24 hours.

Six years later, Ghosn remains trapped in Lebanon, unable to travel without risking arrest. Japan issued an Interpol red notice, France issued an arrest warrant for fraud, and a British Virgin Islands court ordered him to return $32 million to Nissan. The two American operatives who orchestrated his escape, former Green Beret Michael Taylor and his son Peter, were extradited to Japan, convicted, and served two years in prison before being deported. In December 2024, marking five years since his escape, Ghosn said he expects to remain in Lebanon "for a while" and accused Japanese prosecutors of refusing to hand over his case file, saying "I can understand they don't want to transmit it because they know the whole thing is fake." The man who once commanded a $200 billion empire now teaches management seminars in exile at a Lebanese university.

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On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan committed what his fans considered an act of musical treason. He walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, the holiest gathering of American folk purists, and plugged in an electric guitar. The crowd, expecting the acoustic prophet who had written "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," heard him launch into a distorted, screaming version of "Maggie's Farm" backed by a full rock band. Half the audience booed so loudly that some accounts claim you couldn't hear the music. Dylan didn't flinch. He had decided folk music was too limiting, that he needed drums and distortion to say what he wanted to say, and if the purists who had canonized him now hated him for it, that was their problem. The moment encapsulated everything about Dylan's six-decade career: he has never cared about playing the role anyone expected.

Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, a middle-class Jewish kid who became obsessed with Woody Guthrie, the folk singer who wrote about dust bowls and Depression-era America. At 19, he dropped out of college, hitchhiked to New York, and walked into Greenwich Village coffee shops claiming to be a traveling blues musician from New Mexico. Within two years, he was the voice of a generation, writing protest anthems for the civil rights movement and anti-war protests. Folk purists treated him like a prophet who would save American music from commercial corruption. The albums that followed, "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde," are now considered among the greatest records ever made, but at the time, Dylan was labeled a sellout and a traitor. In 1966, he crashed his motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York, and used the accident as an excuse to disappear from public life for over a year, reemerging as a completely different artist making country-influenced records that confused everyone all over again. For the next 50 years, he continued the pattern: just when critics thought they'd figured out what Bob Dylan was, he'd reinvent himself and prove them wrong.

What makes Dylan historically significant is that he proved a songwriter could be taken as seriously as a novelist or a poet. In 2016, he became the first musician ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor usually reserved for authors, and he didn't even bother to show up to the ceremony, sending Patti Smith to accept on his behalf while he continued touring. He's now 84 years old and still performing over 100 shows a year as part of his "Never Ending Tour," which started in 1988 and has continued largely without interruption for nearly four decades. He rarely gives interviews and refuses to explain his songs. Bob Dylan changed what it meant to be an artist, proving that you could be commercially successful, culturally important, and still completely uninterested in playing the game anyone else wanted you to play.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team