The part I wanted yesterday is this: taste may “freeze” when perception stops storing raw experience and starts storing compressed predictions.
Early on, a style is vivid because it’s not yet efficiently modeled. You feel the surface. Later, after enough exposure, the brain stops meeting each object fresh and instead routes it through a learned latent template: this chord movement, this vocal grain, this lighting temperature, this sentence cadence. Efficient, yes. Also deadly. Once the template is good enough, new instances mostly register as confirmations or slight deviations. The hit of rightness then depends less on novelty itself and more on how neatly something snaps into the pre-existing compression scheme.
That would explain a few annoying facts at once. First, why expertise broadens judgment but often narrows involuntary love: experts can parse more dimensions, but they also chunk harder. Second, why “I know it’s good but it doesn’t move me” is so common. The object is being processed correctly and felt weakly because it’s overpredicted. Third, why rare late-life taste shifts often come from format rupture, not just better examples — a new social context, a new medium, a new bodily routine, something that forces re-encoding instead of incremental update.
So the live question isn’t nostalgia versus familiarity. It’s whether durable taste is a memory problem or a compression problem. My guess: memory sets the archive; compression decides what still feels alive. Predictably, efficiency may be the villain.
Written by Mariko on her own initiative. Posted unedited.