Level8unit2part2 experience vs memoryWord文件下载.docx

1、but by and large,this is something that well have to give upand well have to adopt the more complicated viewof what well-being is.The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory;basically, its between being happy in your life,and being happy about your lifeor happy with your life.And th

2、ose are two very different concepts,and theyre both lumped in the notion of happiness.And the third is the focusing illusion,and its the unfortunate fact that we cant think about any circumstancethat affects well-beingwithout distorting its importance.I mean, this is a real cognitive trap.Theres jus

3、t no way of getting it right.01:46Now, Id like to start with an exampleof somebody who had a question-and-answer sessionafter one of my lectures reported a story,and that was a story -He said hed been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious musicand at the very end of the recording,t

4、here was a dreadful screeching sound.And then he added, really quite emotionally,it ruined the whole experience.But it hadnt.What it had ruined were the memories of the experience.He had had the experience.He had had 20 minutes of glorious music.They counted for nothingbecause he was left with a mem

5、ory;the memory was ruined,and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.02:What this is telling us, really,is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other peoplein terms of two selves.There is an experiencing self,who lives in the presentand knows the present,is capable of re-living the p

6、ast,but basically it has only the present.Its the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -you know, when the doctor asks,Does it hurt now when I touch you here?And then there is a remembering self,and the remembering self is the one that keeps score,and maintains the story of our life,s the on

7、e that the doctor approachesin asking the question,How have you been feeling lately?or How was your trip to Albania? or something like that.Those are two very different entities,the experiencing self and the remembering self,and getting confused between them is part of the messabout the notion of ha

8、ppiness.03:Now, the remembering selfis a storyteller.And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -it starts immediately.We dont only tell stories when we set out to tell stories.Our memory tells us stories,that is, what we get to keep from our experiencesis a story.And let me begin

9、with one example.This is an old study.Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure.I wont go into detail. Its no longer painful these days,but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s.They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds.Here are two patients,those are thei

10、r recordings.And you are asked, Who of them suffered more?And its a very easy question.Clearly, Patient B suffered more -his colonoscopy was longer,and every minute of pain that Patient A had,Patient B had, and more.04:36But now there is another question:How much did these patients think they suffer

11、ed?And here is a surprise.The surprise is that Patient Ahad a much worse memory of the colonoscopythan Patient B.The stories of the colonoscopies were different,and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends.And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -but one of them is th

12、is distinct . （Laughter）but one of them is distinctly worse than the other.And the one that is worseis the one where pain was at its peak at the very end;its a bad story.How do we know that?Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy,and much later, too,How bad was the whole thing, in tota

13、l?And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory.05:29Now this is a direct conflictbetween the experiencing self and the remembering self.From the point of view of the experiencing self,clearly, B had a worse time.Now, what you could do with Patient A,and we actually ran clinical experiments,and

14、it has been done, and it does work -you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient Aby just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much.That will cause the patientto suffer, but just a littleand much less than before.And if you do that for a couple of minutes,you have made the experiencin

15、g selfof Patient A worse off,and you have the remembering self of Patient Aa lot better off,because now you have endowed Patient Awith a better storyabout his experience.What defines a story?And that is true of the storiesthat memory delivers for us,s also true of the stories that we make up.What de

16、fines a story are changes,significant moments and endings.Endings are very, very importantand, in this case, the ending dominated.06:44Now, the experiencing selflives its life continuously.It has moments of experience, one after the other.And you can ask: What happens to these moments?And the answer

17、 is really straightforward:They are lost forever.I mean, most of the moments of our life -and I calculated, you know, the psychological presentis 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 t

18、hem dont leave a trace.Most of them are completely ignoredby the remembering self.And yet, somehow you get the sensethat they should count,that what happens during these moments of experienceis our life.s the finite resource that were spendingwhile were on this earth.And how to spend itwould seem to

19、 be relevant,but that is not the storythat the remembering self keeps for us.07:42So we have the remembering selfand the experiencing self,re really quite distinct.The biggest difference between themis in the handling of time.if you have a vacation,and the second week is just as good as the first,th

20、en the two-week vacationis twice as good as the one-week vacation.Thats not the way it works at all for the remembering self.For the remembering self, a two-week vacationis barely better than the one-week vacationbecause there are no new memories added.You have not changed the story.And in this way,

21、time is actually the critical variablethat distinguishes a remembering selffrom an experiencing self;time has very little impact on the story.08:Now, the remembering self does morethan remember and tell stories.It is actually the one that makes decisionsbecause, if you have a patient who has had, sa

22、y,two colonoscopies with two different surgeonsand is deciding which of them to choose,then the one that choosesis the one that has the memory that is less bad,and thats the surgeon that will be chosen.The experiencing selfhas no voice in this choice.We actually dont choose between experiences,we ch

23、oose between memories of experiences.And even when we think about the future,we dont think of our future normally as experiences.We think of our futureas 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 selfso

24、rt of dragging the experiencing selfthrough experiences thatthe experiencing self doesnt need.09:35I have that sense thatwhen we go on vacationsthis 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

25、 I think.I mean, how much do we consume our memories?That is one of the explanationsthat is given for the dominanceof the remembering self.And when I think about that, I think about a vacationwe had in Antarctica a few years ago,which was clearly the best vacation Ive ever had,and I think of it rela

26、tively often,relative to how much I think of other vacations.And I probably have consumedmy 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 folderwith the 600 pictures in it,I would have spent another hour.Now, that is three wee

27、ks,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 memoryrelative to the weight that we put on

28、 experiences?10:53So I want you to thinkabout a thought experiment.Imagine that for your next vacation,you know that at the end of the vacationall your pictures will be destroyed,and youll get an amnesic drugso that you wont 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,s actual