TED Talk Tuesday: The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory

Daniel Kahneman discusses how somebody perceives themselves can change the perception of their happiness.

SPONSOREDUpdated 4:16PM • 01/19/16

When you re-tell a joke you’ve heard before, you probably have a crystal clear picture in your head of how it was told to you. You remember the beats of the joke, the exact moment when to pause for laughter and the way to deliver the punchline correctly. And then after you tell the joke, you may think you have told a killer one, but just receive blank stares instead. This sort of situation lends itself to the discussion of how you see or remember yourself compared to how others see or experience you. This argument was the basis for Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s 2010 TED Talk “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory.”

Kahneman’s argument of how you remember yourself and how you experience yourself changes the perception of your happiness.

“It turns out that the word "happiness" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things,” Kahneman said. “There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life.”

He went on to say that these types of mindsets could be compared to how a doctor diagnoses someone. The experience self-doctor will say “Does it hurt now when I touch you here?” - a quantitative realm of thinking that likes to look at data and derive conclusions from there. The remembering self on the other hand, is the doctor asking you “How have you been feeling lately?” - a qualitative line of thinking that has unstructured means to develop conclusions.

Both of these ways of quantifying happiness can lead to new insights into behavioral science, economics and public policy, Kahneman explained. Plus knowing which way you categorize your happiness will give you a better idea if your joke will fall flat or not.