It happens every time a group of people are gathered to talk about movies. Someone will list having watched three or four movies the previous day, and someone else will express astonishment. Not at having the time; there’s always an explanation for that. But at the very thought of watching three or four movies in a single day. There’s always someone who “can’t do that!” They and the person with the lengthy list from the previous day will blink at one another dimly, because neither understands the other one’s brain.

I’m a “watch movies all day long” type, myself. They don’t even have to have anything to do with one another; in fact, it may be easier if they don’t. When I saw The Godfather for the first time a few years ago, I watched all three movies one right after the other. (Seriously—don’t do that.) And I’ve plowed through the odd box set—Mae West, the Marx Brothers, The Creature From the Black Lagoon—usually because it’s about to be overdue. And, of course, there’s the long list of Traditional Christmas Movies. But what’s more likely is just “a bunch of movies.” Especially on the day before I have to get things back to the library.

I was discussing this with my boyfriend yesterday, and he pointed out that, as an inveterate channel-flipper, the hardest part for him about watching things on his computer instead of on TV was that he’d watch just one thing for a solid half-hour, which he’d basically never done before. Sometimes, he told me, he’d forget what he’d been watching and end the half-hour watching something else. I, on the other hand, don’t flip away during commercials. I just wait for them to be over. I told him I’d use the data point.

But it strikes me that some of the people who “have no idea how you do that!” will, on the other hand, watch an entire season of a TV show in a weekend. It can’t just be about patience. We seem to process movies and TV shows differently. We’re used to an evening with as many as six different half-hour stories, and no one asks how you can watch that unless they’re one of those horrible snobs who hasn’t owned a TV since 1982 and insists they spent their evening reading Proust or something instead. We just do that, and that’s normal.

I’d note, too, that the average TV schedule doesn’t have six shows of an evening, and when it does, they’re all comedies. There doesn’t seem to be any such thing as a half-hour TV drama, and hour-long TV comedies are pretty rare, too. Maybe that’s worth considering. It’s about having stories, and our comedies are usually lighter on story than our dramas. Which is a whole other debate to be getting into in another column. Maybe it’s the idea that some people are better equipped to go through a bunch of stories in a day than others.

This is all spitballing, of course. The simple fact is, I can watch as many movies in a day as there’s room for. I could put on a movie when I woke up (though these days, it’s generally Sesame Street, and man, I wish Netflix had more episodes streaming!) and go to sleep at night when I finished the last one, and that never bothers me. Other people have difficulty getting through one. Why? Why are people like anything? This one is not a high priority for psychologists, I suspect. I was just curious.