Colm O'Regan: Why do we like to piece things together out of incomplete information? It's called savouring behaviour

Colm O'Regan: 'I don’t have Sky Sports. We’ve enough fecking streamings at the moment and every day I swear I’m going to cut back and then every day, as they said in Brokeback Mountain: “I wish I knew how to quit you.' Picture: iStock

If there’s room on the Rory McIlroy Masters bandwagon for one more, I just want to talk about a very small bit of it: Watching Sport That’s Not On The Telly. Or at least Not On My Telly.

I don’t have Sky Sports. We’ve enough fecking streamings at the moment and every day I swear I’m going to cut back and then every day, like they said in Brokeback Mountain: “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

But I was following ‘The Golf’ minute-by-minute on one of the news sites. MBM is now how I spend a good chunk of my time following sport I’m either not subscribed to or just not in a position to scream at a screen.

It involves just reading a sentence describing the latest update about a sporting event and then waiting a) for something to happen and b) for the reporter to type it. And you can’t make it go faster.

And jaknowhat? Following sport in a stripped-down way — the medium, not me — is actually ok. Not amazing but certainly not ‘not enjoyable’.

Maybe I love the misery. I have lots of practice. I have listened to horse racing and cricket on the radio. I have even watched snooker on Aertél. Yes! It’s surprisingly dramatic.

When Ken Doherty won the world championship in 1997, to the best of my recollection, only the last few frames were on RTÉ. So much of his progress over that fateful May bank holiday weekend was on the BBC only.

And I followed the coverage by repeatedly typing in 2-0-something on my remote control to get the latest score. That’s how you ‘refreshed a page’ before the internet. So the ebbs and flows of a snooker match were done by subtracting the old score from the new score.

But even if you weren’t doing that, there is always the radio. One of the lesser-known side-effects of the change in the GAA championships is that there are far fewer games you can listen to on a car radio under a tree with the door open and one leg out in the ground. Mícheál O’Muircheartaigh is no longer around and won’t be replaced.

Still, there are a rake of national and local radio legends painting enough pictures with their words to allow us to fill in the gaps (and because it’s just audio, they’re not all automatically trying to go viral).

At the same time, the viewing experience has never been richer, more immersive. We simple folk used to just watch penalties from the sideline. Now we are floating in the air above the penalty taker in a drone or being jolted around on a referee’s nipple and hearing him pant “that’s a goal” into the Gopro.

Call me an oul bollix — there’s a queue — but I sometimes find that too rich. Like when you’re watching the TG4 Western on a newish telly and John Wayne looks too real when lecturing the Indians about something.

Psychology suggests that although we like to be able to see everything, piecing things together out of incomplete information, or finding out a little bit after it happened, either in the minute-by-minute or in the newspaper the following day, in the smoking lounge of your gentleman’s club, it can reward the brain as well.

It’s apparently called savouring behaviour. So there.

Should you just renounce everything and you’ll be happier? No, of course not. They’ll all be laughing at you and calling you a Johnny Minus Craic. And you don’t want that. I’m not suggesting you give up everything and wait for a telegram confirming the Junior B results. It’s more just to reassure that FOMO can be overcome by JAFO — Joy At Finding Out. Or if your team lost ALIDCUAA — Ah look it didn’t cost us anything anyway.