Experience, Memory, Happiness

Recently stumbled upon TED Talk by Dan Kanheman which in a way provided some answers to my musings about memories and in particular my own memories about certain incidents in life. It provides a layman's view of the psychological self and how human happiness is tied to it. 

Kahneman makes a very interesting distinction, that between the experiencing self and the remembering self. There is a self that experiences things at the moment they happen and there is a self that remembers things as they happened after the instant it happened. Simple enough. But the catch is that the remembering self is a cunning b@*%^ and totally fudges all the data collected by the experiencing self. Now this in itself is not a great revelation as cognitive scientists have almost nailed down the effects of learning, reinforcement and reinvention by the brain. But what it exhilirating is the connection Kahneman draws between these two selves and the theory of happiness.

However, with some general observations, I firmly believe a third self, which for the sake of discussion, lets call 'perceived self' exists and has an overbearing influence on the remembering self. its effect on the experiencing self are debatable. The perceived self has been extensively studied (social comparison theory, modified theory of reflected appraisals). But, I find it rather strange - due to lack of any reasoning given for this exclusion - that Kahneman hasn't included the perceived self along with the other two selves in his pursuit of happiness, pun unintended. In layman terms, its the ubiquitos peer pressure at a micro level or general consensus at the macro level. Kahneman's example of the California resident's notion of satisfaction can be largely attributed to this self. It would be interesting to perform a study that evaluates all the three selves akin to the anecdotal colonoscopy study but preferably with much lesser probing, pun intended. That the remembering self has a distinct advantage over the experiencing self in its ability to improvise on a story provides reason enough to suspect the greater role of the perceived self in this improvisation.

Another profound point Kahneman makes is that 'When we think of the future, we dont think it in terms of experiences, but in terms of anticipated memories'. I for one have experienced it and all my thoughts of the future are just flashes of incidents that I anticipate will happen. I strongly doubt whether the brain even has a mechanism to anticipate experiences. When such large quantities of the self depends upon the remembering self, the perceived self takes every opportunity to reshape the remembering self or at the very least to train it to accept only chunks of the experiencing self it deems appropriate. Expectation Maximization at work! Daniel subtly hints at this when he says that the anticipated memories in a way drag the experiencing self to experience things that it had no interest in to begin with. Whether psychologists acknowledge the role of the perceived self on the remembering self and yet group it together as the remembering self or the effect of the perceived self on the study of happiness is uncorrelated to the other two selves is a tad unclear.

On a lighter note, remember Roy Sutherland's TED talk on intangible value the advertisers tend to create? He proposes to make a train journey better not by reducing the travel time but by hiring supermodels to hand out free Chateau Petrus for the duration of the journey and save a couple of billions off the engineering solution to it. If Kahneman has taught us anything, all it takes is supermodels to hand out free Chateau Petrus for the last thirty minutes and knock off another couple of billions off the operational cost. Colonoscopy could be improved too!