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.”

I never really put it together, regarding an experiencing self and a remembering self, but it makes enough sense. When friends would ask me if I’ve seen a certain movie and it’s kinda hazy to me, I’d reply “I remember seeing it, but I don’t remember anything about it.” The remembering self remembering atleast the experience but not taking away anything substantial from said experience. It may certainly be that the experiencing self goes through life and does more things, and that the weight and importance carried by the remembering self is disproportionate in comparison, but I don’t see this as a negative, or something that should be fixed – a topic that gets addressed in spiritual self help books and other publications of the ilk that encourage you to live in the now, to stop being trapped in the past, etc etc. Going along with Daniel’s theme of happiness, I feel that happiness and satisfaction on an experiential level are fleeting, easily reproduced, and simple. Happiness and satisfaction on a reminiscential level are unique and can last for ages. Different emotions would be a different conversation altogether though; while happiness is something you’d like to remember, pain and discomfort probably aren’t. Daniel also talks about the focusing illusion, which definitely distorts memories over time, so that your perceived memory may not actually be anywhere close to what someone else’s shared memory, but I’ll choose to keep myself ignorant of those complications (for the sake of happiness! ho ho ho)

What he talks about a little but made me really think were his words on vacations, and how he would ‘consume’ those memories through looking at photographs of said vacation. I shoot a whole lot, and especially more during vacations, but to what effect? Am I keeping memories of those moments through pictures, or am I primarily shooting for the sake of shooting – for the experience? I thought about it more, and I’d have to say that my love for photography is definitely experiential. Memories of the experience through photos, while not quite an afterthought, rank below the excitement I get solely for taking pictures. Shooting, composing, and editing are all exciting to me, no matter where the location. Sharing the pictures – showing off, basically – also gives a great deal of satisfaction. But even after all that, I’m stuck on his idea of happiness during a vacation. When Will and I were in Dominican Republic we’d jokingly say “I can’t wait to get back to edit these pictures”, which in all honesty was hardly a joke. The sole purpose of the vacation was to take pictures. Maybe next time I go on vacay I’ll leave the cameras at home and see how much I can enjoy myself solely with the remembering self in mind, and not the experiencing self. (You might take note that this whole offshoot has contradicted my stance on which I prefer, the remembering self or the experiencing self. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the subject.. am I happy because I remember a good experience taking photos or am I happy whenever I am in the moment of taking photos?? Am I anticipating memories by shooting? head asplode)

I’ve talked about my interest in associating music to a memory, and with the TED talk in mind, I think that music heard during an experience definitely solidifies the memory and the song associated with that memory. And more often than not, you’ll forget all lyrical content of the song and simply associate it with a memory – which would lead to some weird matchups. How many R&B songs do I enjoy because of the opportune times I heard them during my life, rather than actually cheating or fucking or creeping? (Now that’s a really extreme example – of course I remember the first song I dedicated to a girl, somewhat loosely based on the lyrics, but you get what I mean right?) There are other ramifications as well, like having a good song ruined by a bad experience, or having the focusing illusion take effect, or is happiness from a memory based on the memory or a song’s upbeat nature. Shit is really deep. The mind is a frightening thing.

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.

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..)