Video 3 Exeperience vs Memory
Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously.
It has moments of experience, one after the other.
And you can ask: What happens to these moments?
And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever.
I mean, most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long;
that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 -- most of them don't leave a trace.
Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self.
And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life.
It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth.
And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us.
So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct.
The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time.
From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self.
For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added.
You have not changed the story.
And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story.
Questions
In what way do people mistakenly view lives moments?
>People think they're all significant but can only remember a few of them.
If something is finite, it...
>has an end or limit.
Why does the remembering self feel one-week vacation and two-week vacation is equally enjoyable?
>The remembering self isn't influenced by time.
A variable is something that can change.
Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories.
It is actually the one that makes decisions
because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose,
then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen.
The experiencing self has no voice in this choice.
We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.
And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences.
We think of our future as anticipated memories.
And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self,
and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need.
I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case; that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self.
And this is a bit hard to justify I think.
I mean, how much do we consume our memories?
That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self.
And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had,
and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations.
And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years.
Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour.
Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half.
There seems to be a discrepancy.
Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine
question.
Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?
So I want you to think about a thought experiment.
Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed,
and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything.
Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter)
And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict,
and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer,
and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer.
Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.
Questions
Why does Kahneman offer the senario about choosing a surgeon?
>to show that people don't choose between experience, but memories of experiences.
According to Kahnman, what is the biggest reason people go on vacation?
>they want to enjoy the memories of it later.
What does Kahneman's example of his trip to Antarctica show?
>the flaw in emphasizinig memory over experience when making a decision.
A discrepancy is...
>an inconsistency between two things.
What does Kahneman mean when he says the remembering self drags the experiencing self through experiences it doesn't need? People often do things for the memories rather than the experience.
Why is that hard to justify going on vacation for memories? People spend more time enjoying the trip than their memories of it.
Why does Kahneman thought experiment about taking a vacation show? Decision making often involves a choice between the two selves.
An amnesic drug makes you forget what happened.