If you were told to plan the ideal vacation with the caveat that you wouldn’t remember it afterwards, what would you plan?
This question was posed by behavioral economist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman in his TED talk on memory vs. experience. (For the TED talk, click here.)
His thoughts relate to a phenomenon that’s humanly impossible to escape. In short, the memory of an experience is different from the experience itself.
I’ve witnessed this many times, firsthand. As I help clients process difficult memories, I see distinctive changes in their recollection of those memories over the course of counseling. Key lesson: Our remembrance of events is dynamic, not static.
Kahneman explains it this way. We have two selves. First, the “experiencing self who lives in the present”, and, second, the “remembering self who keeps score”. He refers to the latter self as the storyteller.
What defines a story? “Changes, significant moments, and endings.”
According to his view, there is a continuously streaming sequence of events that comprises a lifetime. The experiencing brain registers that sequence moment by moment. How we translate that sequence is the job of the remembering self.
That translation, or narrative, of the storytelling self is impacted by how an event
- begins
- ends, and
- holds value
Consider. Psychologists pose strong objections to the use of eyewitness accounts to determine key events in criminal court cases.
Why? The experiencing self, the one with an objective view, only registers for several seconds (the determined length of a “moment”). By the time an eyewitness testifies, there isn’t an objective report of the events; there’s a story instead. Eyewitness accounts can change dramatically from one day to another, based on a variety of environmental influences.
As Kahneman says,
We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.
How we choose those memories comes from that storytelling self and its current narrative.
Why does this matter? It explains our blind spots.
Maybe the tally you’re keeping of your spouse’s emotional outbursts is exaggerated, and maybe your perspective that your teenage daughter is being disrespectful is skewed.
Does this mitigate objective truth? Not at all. The greater our humility about blind spots, the more we’ll implore our communities to help clarify truth with grace and love.
So what vacation would you choose sans memory scrapbooking? This summons a deeper question. How differently would you experience a single moment if you weren’t concerned with remembering it at all?