Free Essay About The Riddle Of Experience Vs. Memory

The Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman nowadays is perhaps the world's most influential psychologist. In his TED talk "The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory" he talked about important concepts of two selves – perceiving and remembering and their interaction. He pointed out that we have two distinct selves – one who perceives, acts, and feels at the present moment – the perceiving self, and another one who memorizes the events and judges them by the impression they leave. Specifically, he presented these concepts in relation to happiness. He suggested that it is better to speak about two separate entities – happiness and wellbeing. Happiness is experienced by the perceiving self while wellbeing is judged by the remembering self (it is what you think about your life). Kahneman stated that the most important is that these two selves operate differently and impact our lives in a different way. To be specific, all of our experiences, feelings, and thoughts about life are governed by the remembering self while the perceiving self affects only what is happening at the moment. The differences between their work are more stunning – in contrary to the perceiving self, the remembering self is not affected by time. This means that the memory of experience does not depend on the duration of certain feelings and emotions but only depends on their magnitude and order. For example, the experience of a week vacation will not differ from the experience of a two-week vacation if the activities you engaged in were the same. Kahneman finishes his stunning speech with the notion of the correlation between happiness and wellbeing which is really low (about 0.5). He also says that people often mess up these two assessments.
In a formidable speech, Daniel Kahneman is trying to convey the audience in how much we are mistaken about ourselves. It is commonly supposed that each person knows self the best, apparently this is not the case. One of the crucial points Daniel Kahneman made throughout his speech is that as we live our lives mostly in our perceiving selves, we assign too much importance to it in shaping our memories. And also, that we do not really acknowledge the role of memory in forming the image of our lives. But the most important point that he made is by far about finding the points where our two selves disagree (his example about a vacation, photos, and memories of which would be erased) and working out those disagreements.
In the light of Daniel Kahneman’s speech, the role of memory in our lives can be strongly reconsidered. In this context, the actual process of forgetting is crucial in forming our self and our perception of self. As memory keeps track only of the magnitude of our feelings and their order, most of the content of our lives is forgotten and does not affect us. Considering this, studying memory construction and how it is improved is crucial not only to the field of psychology as a science but to all humanity. The improvement of our memory will help us not only in instrumental ways (remembering phone numbers, etc.) but can also literally extend our lives. This might be shocking at some point, but it is true – since our perceiving self lives only in the present, our remembering self shapes our personality with memories and experience. Thus, our life is limited to the scope of our memories and experiences, and this means that by improving memory and increasing the quantity and quality of these memories we can actually extend one’s life or at least increase its quality.