Hey,
How are you doing?
I am writing to you after a long time. I would say it was because of work but honestly it was due to procrastination and self-doubt.
I thought a lot about what I was these weekly post-cards to you to be about. And I am going to follow my passion and talk about the human mind and the reasons behind our behavior.
I would love to know your feedback on my writing and your thoughts on each topic I speak about each week! Do reply and let’s discuss!
It is a rainy evening and I am sitting by the window with a cup of tea. My mind replays a memory of my father shouting at the ten-year-old me to stop playing in the rain as I may get sick. Even the memory of such a mundane event makes me want to go back in time.
All my memories of my father are colored in joy and sadness. Even the moments when I fought with him or was upset by him now feel like moments I want to cherish and relive.
The true value of a moment is realized only when it becomes a memory.
We want to relive those moments again as we recall them.
Why so?
Daniel Kahneman explains it with the “experiencing” self and the “remembering” self.
Our experiencing self lives in the present and knows only the present. It actually lives the moment.
Remembering self is a storyteller. Our memory tells us stories from our experiences. It dictates our emotions and how we feel when we relive moments.
Pixar’s Inside out makes it easy to understand.
In the movie, each moment we experience gets captured in a “memory orb”. Orbs are ball-like spheres containing our memories and have different colors representing the dominant emotion of the moment- yellow for Joy, blue for Sadness, green for Disgust, purple for Fear, and red for Anger. The stronger the emotion, the brighter the color.
When we remember a memory, the orb color changes depending on the story our remembering self evokes.
A fight with a friend would have generated anger at the moment but after many years, it brings joy to think about those silly fights with friends you hardly talk to.
When, as a ten-year-old, I experienced my father shouting at me, a red memory orb was formed in my mind. And it got stored in my long-term memory. When years later I recalled it, the orb is now colored blue (sadness) and yellow (joy). My remembering self tells me the story of the care and love of my father.
Daniel explains, "The psychological present is said to be about three seconds long, but most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self."
So our experiencing self is never responsible for how we feel because the moments are lost in time. It's the remembering self that tells us stories, that makes the decisions of our lives. We feel the new emotions of the stories rather than what was felt in the moment when it happened.
And these new emotions are what make us want to relive and cherish past experiences. We want to chase these memories and relive the moments again not because of how they felt then but because of the emotions we associate with them over the years.
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning founder of behavioral economics talks about the Riddle of Experience versus memory in his TED talk. It's a very intriguing experiment to understand our dual selves, one living the present and the other remembering it.
Does knowing about why we crave memories make you pause and think about how you never really live a moment, it’s always the stories of the moment?
I would love to hear from you!
Until next week,
Gayatri