TED Talk The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory 经验与记忆之谜 Speaker:Daniel Kahneman
Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously.
It has moments of experience, on after the other.
And you can ask "What happens to these moments?"
And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. 答案很简单：他们永远消失了。
I mean, most of the moments of our life——
and I calculated, you know, the psychological moment 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.
【选择】-Accoding to Halneman, what happens to most of life's moments? -They are completely forgotten.
And yet, someone 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 the earth.
【跟读】It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on the 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 on-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 a experiencing self; time has very little impact on story.
Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories.
It is actually teh 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 choise.
We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. 【跟读】
And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences.
We think of the 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.
【选择】-What does Kalneman 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.
I have a 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 on of the explanations that is given for the dominace of the remembering self.
【选择】-According to Kahneman, what is the biggest reason people go on vacation? -They want to enjoy the memories on later.
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 foler 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.
【选择】-What does Kahneman's example of his trip to Antarctia show? -The flow in emphasizing memory over experience when making a decision.
There seems to be a discrepancy.这似乎不成比例。
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.
【词义】 amnesic drug= make you forget what happened. 遗忘药
Now, would you choose the same vacation?
And if you 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 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 vacation we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.