Put simply, your brain adjusts its state of awareness based on how exciting, new and important the things happening to it are. The higher the level of awareness, the more efficiently your memory will store information.
We have vivid memories of childhood because as children, everything is very new and important to us, and we are high-awareness. It all goes into storage.
When you're 30 and eating your 823rd egg salad sandwich in a diner just like the last 50 you've eaten in, your brain's level of awareness is "meh, whatever" and it doesn't record any details.
Honestly, this wasn't good enough. I had to delve deeper into the annals of the internet. Where do the great thinkers go these days? Certainly not Youtube right? A few years ago I discovered a website called TED, where great thinkers from many different fields meet up to lecture. TED has a great section titled "How the Mind Works". I highly suggest it if you are at all interested in the subject. At any rate, I promised myself I would watch three videos and find out about the capabilities of our minds. The speakers I listened to ranged from psychiatrists to philosophers to sociologists, and it was all interesting. Anyway, here is what I discovered:
In this video, Daniel Kahneman discusses memory and happiness. He says there is a disconnect between the value we place on experience and recalling that experience ("being happy in your life and being happy about your life"). Often, we put all the emphasis on the event happening in the past at the expense of the experience while it happened. Thinking of my life, I often regret being unable to form new memories with a person rather than actually missing their presence. Of course this isn't 100 percent true all the time, but think back to your last vacation. I bet even before you left you were saying, "I am going to form some good memories from this one." Daniel Kahneman says the importance we place on different memories is how we place them in an overall narrative.
In the first example, he describes listening to a piece of music a symphony was playing. It was beautiful up until the end when a large shrieking sound occurred and "ruined the whole experience." (Makes me think of Sgt. Pepper's.) Emotionally, it destroyed what was being built up, changing the frame which the person was going to remember it. Kahneman says, "He had had the experience, he had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory, the memory was ruined, and the memory was all he had gotten to keep." In another example, Kahneman gives a graph of two patients undergoing surgery. More waves represented increasing pain, and it was clear that patient B had had a more miserable experience. However, during the procedure for patient A, the doctor jiggled the instrument at the end, causing a sudden jump in pain and making A remember the whole thing as being terrible, while B's pain was slowly reduced. Our memories are thus influenced by the narratives we construct, and if something bad happens at the end, it can change the story.
"Now, the remembering self is a storyteller and that really starts with the basic response of our memory, it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is what we get to keep from our experiences is a story," Kahneman says. People need to write their narrative in motion, and we all do this. In the surgery example, the remembering Patient A would be better off with more pain in the beginning than at the end, but experiencing Patient A would be worse off. Thus, change is important in the construction of story--during vacation, the remembering self would care little if a great vacation lasted one or two weeks. "We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don't think of the future normally as experiences, we think of the future as anticipated memories." It's like asking whether you would prefer happy experiences or interesting experiences. The "present" self would like the happy times, but I bet your remembering self would think the interesting ones were better. Here's a quote from Little Miss Sunshine:
Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap-high school and everything-just skip it.
Frank: Do you know who Marcel Proust is?
Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.
Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh... he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18... Ah, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that.
Stress, change, and events are how you grow into yourself. You would never get there if you were always happy and never challenged. This is the experiencer's misery. By simply changing your memory's story you can become better off. All those terrible things you did in the past, you can rearrange them and make them into a story of your necessary growth into the person you are today. A lot of people do this. Kahneman talks about people who move to California--a person's experiencing self will not be better off, but their memory self has the potential because they will start comparing their memories to the ones they would have made elsewhere (such as Montana). We fix our memories to a story, that our lives are building to something. Existential crises are what happen when people's narratives get crushed and they have to fix their narrative to a new goal. In another TED video, the philosopher, Julian Baggini, asks if there even is a real you?
We frame our lives on the fixed self--there is a core to us, horoscopes, numerology, personality tests, a sort of "permanent truth about our lives." You accumulate memories, you have desires, beliefs, you have a job, a kid, and you are from some place--"a common sense model." Baggini says "There isn't actually a you at the heart of all these experiences. Alright? Strange thought? Well Maybe not. What is there then? Well, clearly there are memories, desires, intentions, sensations, and so forth, but what happens is these things exist and they are kind of all integrated, overlapped, connected in various different ways. They are connected partly perhaps even mainly because they belong to one body and one brain, but there is also a narrative, a story we tell about ourselves, experiences we have, we remember past things, we do things because of other things." Baggini later compares humans to water and says when we see a hydrogen atom drawn on a piece of paper, we don't think, "Hey! there is a water molecule missing the oxygen part." Humans, in this metaphor, shouldn't see themselves like a hydrogen atom collecting oxygen, a fixed person gathering things.
Steven Pinker would call this the "ghost in the machine" myth. Is the self really an illusion? Some prominent psychologists argue for this, but Baggini says differently. I will let you watch the video, but he explains that although the river is constantly changing, forming new paths and water moving, the river doesn't disappear overnight--it is just fluid, moving, ever changing. At lunch the other day, I discussed this with a counselor. She dislikes psychology today because they often counsel by making excuses. The fault can always be placed on another, or you can claim you have a disease like alcoholism and not take personal responsibility. She said this was unhealthy because it traps you. You are something--you are an alcoholic, you are messed up because your mother said something to you when you were little, you are an incurable mess of a person. This, of course, is easier to sell, because it takes the blame off the person for their actions. Thus the psychologist can steal your narrative and warp it the way they want. Why give them this power?
If you take the river example, people are always changing. You can change too. You don't have to be an alcoholic, you don't have to be messed up--I could go on about psychology all day, but I will stop here.
This last one is more scientific because the speaker, Iain McGilchrist, is a psychiatrist. He talks about the left and right brains. The Left (which remember controls the right side) is the boxing, masculine side, the right is the free-floating, feminine side. "The body becomes an assemblage of parts in the left hemisphere." "Let me make it very clear, for imagination you need both hemispheres. Let it make it very clear, for reason you need both hemispheres," says McGilchrist. This is a great video in understanding how we experience the world around us and then begin to make sense of this. In a blog I will post soon on hypnosis, I discuss the different types of people--emotional and physical. Physical people would reside in the right brain, where words bring about physical responses. Emotional would be in the left brain, where the world is more abstract, full of concepts. "Even rationality is grounded in a leap of intuition." You need both ways of looking at the universe. I would say this speaker and Kahneman relate well to each other. If you watch, you might agree.
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