Activity 5.3: Find and Post a Video on Memory
Activity
5.3: Find and Post a Video on Memory
The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory
Daniel Kahneman discusses three cognitive traps that keep people from understanding what it means to be happy. The first is that happiness is too vague, and that terms, well-being or life satisfaction are better suited to his contention. A second is that we distort the importance of any circumstance that affects well-being. A third trap is that there is a difference between happiness in your life (experience) and happiness about your life (memory). What is interesting is how he distinguishes between our two selves. Our experiencing self, lives in the present, and our remembering self, “maintains the story of our life,” both selves confusing what we identify as happiness. What we keep, or remember from our experiences are stories of our memories. Kahneman determined that time has little effect on our stories, whereas, endings do. We can have a great experience that ends badly, and recall the experience as negative, or a bad experience with a fantastic ending, thus, a positive memory. The ideas in the power point (slide #41) that the accuracy of long-term memory may be effected by; “memory reconstruction, memory invention, repressed (recovered) memory, fable (created) memory, autobiographical memory, or traumatic memories” support this cognitive trap theory.
The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory
Daniel Kahneman discusses three cognitive traps that keep people from understanding what it means to be happy. The first is that happiness is too vague, and that terms, well-being or life satisfaction are better suited to his contention. A second is that we distort the importance of any circumstance that affects well-being. A third trap is that there is a difference between happiness in your life (experience) and happiness about your life (memory). What is interesting is how he distinguishes between our two selves. Our experiencing self, lives in the present, and our remembering self, “maintains the story of our life,” both selves confusing what we identify as happiness. What we keep, or remember from our experiences are stories of our memories. Kahneman determined that time has little effect on our stories, whereas, endings do. We can have a great experience that ends badly, and recall the experience as negative, or a bad experience with a fantastic ending, thus, a positive memory. The ideas in the power point (slide #41) that the accuracy of long-term memory may be effected by; “memory reconstruction, memory invention, repressed (recovered) memory, fable (created) memory, autobiographical memory, or traumatic memories” support this cognitive trap theory.
posted by Renee Park Mooney @ 8:16 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I, Nick Flaim, will watch this video and comment on it.
Nick,
I will post my blog about this video Monday night ... just got back into town from an out of state wedding 10pm.
All is well.
This was a really interesting Ted Talk, Renee! I think I have seen it before, but I also really liked how he discerns between experiencing self and remembering self. These two ideas are very different and kind of adds an interesting wrinkle into the information processing model. If sensory input is the fist part of the "remembering self" how can we separate the two? Also, I liked how you mentioned the idea of how we reconstruct our memories over time. It makes me think of the flash bulb memory effect and how vividly we can remember certain aspects of our pasts, but others are a vague shadow even when cued strongly by environmental stimuli.
I have not heard of this "flash bulb" effect, it sounds interesting. I often wonder if my memories are real, if I dreamed them, or if it is another person's memory, or story adopted by me, for instance my sister's. I have had experiences with my "remembering-self" forming a negative long-term memory due to a bad "ending" of an experience of my "experiencing-self". I do not like when that happens, and I need to try not to allow my experiencing-self to form that long-term memory. Can my free will change my ong-term memories? Kahneman talks about how people will actually end a vacation early, on a positive note, so they will have good long-term memories of the trip, which seems a bit crazy; it is kind of like "quitting while you are ahead". This is what TV shows often do, like Breaking Bad, ending while on top! A friend of mine really drove this point hard when she told me how the story of her life with her family was changed when her husband left her for another woman after what she believed were 30 happy years of marriage. It was so sad, because she had had such a perfect life it seemed to her and to me, but all her "remembering self"could remember was the devastating ending to her story.
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