When Memory Trumps Experience

Ok, tell me this: have you ever shared an experience with someone (a friend, a family member, etc.) and afterwards had different memories of it? It was the exact same thing, but one of you thought it was amazing while the other still liked it, but maybe not as much. Why does that happen? I'm sure there are several reasons for it, but I'm only going to talk about one of them here: The truth of the two selves.

Now before you jump up and yell: "Hey, but I'm not schizophrenic!" (of course you're not), allow me to explain what that means... or you know what? I'll let someone do it who actually knows what he's talking about. Daniel Kahneman, author of the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow talks about these two selves in the context of experiencing pain:

"I find it helpful to think of this dilemma as a conflict of interests between two selves (which do not correspond to the two familiar systems). The experiencing self is the one that answers the question: 'Does it hurt now?' The remembering self is the one that answers the question: 'How was it, on the whole?' Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self." (p. 381, emphasis mine)

Now you might say: "Ok, that makes sense." But the problem is that we're usually not aware of this and therefore believe that our memories are accurate representations of what actually happened, i.e. of the experience itself. But that, says Kahneman, is an illusion:

"Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self." (p. 381, emphasis mine)

Let's say you go to a concert and the music is really beautiful - until the last few measures of the symphony, where the cellos (or celli) suddenly mess up their part. You go home and think to yourself: "It was a nice concert, I guess, but the ending really ruined it for me." This is your remembering self talking to you. Even though 95% of the experience was great, your memory locks onto that awkward moment at the end, when (due to the cellos) the music just didn't sound right. That's what Kahneman means by "the tyranny of the remembering self."

Interestingly enough though, had the cellos messed up at the beginning, it's very likely that you would have had a better memory of the experience. That's what researchers learned from this "cold water experiment": the participants were asked to hold their hand up to the wrist in painfully cold water. Once for 60 seconds and another time for 90 seconds. In the episode that lasted 90 seconds, the temperature of the water rose by about 1° Celsius during the last 30 seconds due to slightly warmer water flowing into the tub. Without going into the details of the experiment, the fascinating finding of it was this: Most people had a better memory of the 90 second - and therefore longer - episode. It seems that the duration of a painful experience is not as important as what happens towards its end. I'll give you Kahneman one more time:

"Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong. The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds. We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains." (p. 385)

Maybe you can remember that last sentence next time you go to a concert and the cellos mess up right at the end (to all cello players out there: sorry for picking on you guys, don't take it personally :-)) ...