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Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory. (transcript)

TED talks are usually informative and fun to burn 10-20 minutes on and learn something new, but I’ve probably watched/read this one multiple times now – it’s really affected me and how the concept can be applied to certain things I’ve been interested in. Without paraphrasing too much from the video, as I strongly suggest taking some time to watch, Daniel Kahneman tells us that we all live two lives – one for our experiencing self, and one for our remembering self. The experiencing self lives life every day, while the remembering self decides which experiences are worthy enough to be remembered. Most are not. And when making life decisions, or just every day decisions even, our remembering self uses its memory to dictate which direction an experience will go – Daniel calls the future 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.”

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i’ve been kind of preoccupied with the notion of words gaining new meanings, or words getting put into a different context – through pop culture. it happens all the time, but what is interesting(moreso annoying) to me is when these new meanings or representations are introduced to/through the internet, and the reappropriation of that word causes havoc on search queries. how can i find more about that sweet spot right after golden hour when the sun is down but the sky isn’t dark yet? heaven forbid i use the word twilight. i can’t search for Tweet related things without inadvertently getting results about twitter. and i definitely can’t find pictures of ACTUAL Madagascar – instead i’ll get that damned dreamworks movie, which i haven’t even seen! it’s a mess!

oxford university press might liken these as new words, but i think there should be a more developed term for this phenomenon – which is very much a new school idea. at first i thought that it could be grouped with skunked terms, but that’s a bit too vocabularily focused: it’s more about actual word definitions taking on new meaning, and not about words being borrowed(borrowed? more like taken over) for movie titles, musician names, internet companies, etc. i’d say that neologisms come closest, especially with the evolution of note, but as i said before the words im talking about are borrowed, not newly coined. hmmm indeed.

so for a few months now, i’ve been posting throwback tracks of the week along with why/how it throws me back – recalling certain memories about my life that i associate with said track; i end up doing the same when i post up remixes. what i’ve realized though is that each time i’ve done this little exercise of recollection through music, certain songs have much more vivid memories than others – some songs i can pinpoint the when and where and what i was doing, while others i may just associate a nostalgic feelgood feeling about that certain period of time. this isn’t really news, surely you all experience the same. but i was really trying to figure out the why..

in 2008, UC Davis psych professor Petr Janata concluded a study regarding just that. his results:

Each song was rated for familiarity and like/dislike, and then the students were asked if the song evoked any memories for them. They indicated what emotions they associated with the song, whether the memories were about person, place, or event, and what words they associated with the memory. As the songs increased in familiarity, so did the strength of the autobiographical memories associated with the songs.

cool right? i kinda wish i was in on this study – i’d probably be in the room going ‘oh shit’ all by myself when they play the clips. this made me think about the emotional attachment i have to certain songs, the ‘oh my god this song just reminded me of u!!’ type of conversation. gag me with a spoon, i know i know. but autobiographical memories, atleast the most vivid ones, are usually attached to emotional events, therefore, music that evokes a vivid autobiographical moment should trigger a certain emotion, or emotional event. ’tis true! at first i was taking issue with this, but after actually going through my own vivid memories related to songs, i realized that emotion should actually mean emotion, and not emotion in a lovedovey/sappy/sad sense. por ejemplo: my memory of snow – informer(HAHA) is me with my sony walkman listening to Power in the back of my parent’s Mazda 626, driving north up White Oak towards Victory, hearing this song get played and being absolutely tickled at the thought of this dude getting strip searched. happiness is still an emotion!

what i find interesting is that the more i listen to old school/remind myself of music i grew up listening to, the more i recall such autobiographic memories, helping to unshroud them a little more each time* as well as help reinforce the association between the event/emotion and the song. and i’m not the only one. my main dude Petr Janata just finished up another study earlier this year and concluded:

By making tonal maps of each musical excerpt and comparing them to their corresponding brain scans, he discovered that the brain was tracking these tonal progressions in the same region as it was experiencing the memories: in the dorsal part of the medial pre-frontal cortex, as well as in regions immediately adjacent to it. And in this case, too, the stronger the autobiographical memory, the greater the “tracking” activity.

“What’s cool about this is that one of the main parts of the brain that’s tracking the music is the same part of the brain that’s responding overall to how autobiographically salient the music is,” Janata said.

how fucking cool is that?!?! like way cool on a level of ’so thats why ahhh i get it’, but also way cool on a level of ‘we could use this research to help alzheimers patients feel good instead of lost’, amazing. i wonder if that’s what keeps my gramps in better-than-average memory faculties for his age- dude loves to sing old tagalog songs. albeit its like two or three songs, and he doesn’t sing them as often as he used to, but whatever works. i figure i’ll never get alzheimers since i jog my memory so much through music, but honestly, my memory outside of music is pretty shit.

*hmmm, unshrouding them or making up memories for them?? that’s on some shell beach steez. kiefer sutherland showin up in my memories teaching me how to use my jedi powers and shit. (but foreal though, what about feeling nostalgia for things you’ve never experienced? there’s gotta be a study on that… or a word, atleast..)