Optimizing for Remembered Experiences
Just as a better understanding of how humans process emotions can help people achieve some objective functions, a better understanding of how humans create “remembered experiences” is useful in achieving others.
What do we mean by “remembered experiences”? Consider an experience in which you are blackout drunk, but still able to process emotions and the world around you. That experience is not recorded and completely wiped from your memory. Does that forgotten experience still “count” towards your objective function? Alternatively, what about something you experience in a dream that is quickly wiped from your memory? What about something you experienced but have very little memory of weeks after?
A good way to test whether your objective function assigns more value to remembered experiences is to ask yourself: If there were two people who each lived for 100 years and had equally happy lives, but one slept twenty hours a day and the other only slept eight hours a day, which life would you prefer to have lived? As most do not count sleeping as “experiencing life,” they would choose the life of the person who slept only eight hours a night and had more total hours of conscious experiences they could remember.
Sleeping and being blackout drunk aren’t the only times our ability to remember the world is turned off. Almost anyone who drives is familiar with the phenomenon of highway hypnosis, in which you get in a car and find yourself arriving at your destination without much memory of driving there (it is particularly noticeable when you end up at an old workplace/home and don’t realize you had been going the wrong way until you arrive). A person in this state is not experiencing the world consciously in part because they are doing something they have done a hundred times before and their brain has turned off its “recording processes.” Highway hypnosis aside, how many unique commutes to/from home and work or school can you remember?
Highway hypnosis is clearly an extreme case. However, there are many times we experience something and then forget it just days or weeks later. If you weight such experiences less than others, there are fortunately heuristics you can use to create experiences you will remember.
The simplest of these heuristics is to pursue as many novel experiences as possible. People remember much more about events in which we are exposed to novel stimuli. This is apparent with a little bit of retrospection: Can you remember exactly what you were doing five weeks ago today? Alternately, can you remember exactly what you did on day two of the last trip you took? Chances are you remember much more about the trip you took than a random sampling from your everyday life.
A similar phenomenon happens on a grander scale through something called a “reminiscence bump.” Originally, it was assumed this was a strange phenomenon whereby elderly people remembered their teens through their thirties better than any other part of their lives in old age. Later studies showed that if you moved the most defining and novel events of a person’s life to a different time (people who migrated to a different country in their 30s for example), the reminiscence bump would move as well.
Some argue that this enhanced ability to remember certain times in our lives is due to the number of novel things we experienced during those times, while others argue that reminiscence bumps are a product of the formative role those experiences played in creating our personal identities.
Each explanation likely carries an element of truth. We can remember life more clearly when experiencing novel stimuli and when rewriting our identities. One of the most famous (though now slightly more dubious) theories in psychology is that we form uniquely vivid memories called flashbulb memories when we are presented with an event or information that is unique, emotionally arousing, and character building (news of 9/11 for instance).
Should you want to maximize the extent to which you “experience” life, you should therefore opt for novel and formative experiences whenever possible. When deciding between two date activities with your spouse—such as staying in and watching a movie, something you have done every date night for the past year but love doing, or going on a guided tour through a local factory, something you have some interest in but probably won’t enjoy as much—remember that perhaps you should not only be weighing how much positive emotion will be generated by an experience, but also how many novel memories that experience will create.
Why do our brains erase non-novel memories? Your brain tries to save as much room as possible and will not record every time you do something as a new and separate experience but instead will group similar experiences together as a single “memory,” such as every time you drive to a friend’s house. If you decide to mix things up a bit and do the same experience in a slightly different way, you will trigger a phenomenon called “retrieval induced forgetting,” in which your brain erases some of the memory of the original route you took to your friend’s house and writes over it with the memory of the new route.
All of this may be fantastic from an efficiency standpoint, but it means that all those habitual things you do for fun will be constantly overwritten. For example, if you do a date night every night with your spouse in which you watch a different movie you will remember these experiences less than if you did something totally different every night.
(Whenever we mention a mainstream psychological phenomenon by name there are going to be disagreements in the psychological community as to how the phenomenon works and this is one of those instances. It is not worth our time to go into detail on these, as for our purposes the only thing that matters it that retrieval induced forgetting exists.)
Thus, if an important aspect of your objective function is maximizing the amount of “memory” generated, you would benefit from constantly moving to new cities, creating new homes, and reinventing who you are.
Finally, the vividness and detail with which you remember something is not tied to the accuracy of what you are remembering (despite common intuition to the contrary). Several studies have shown that while people have uniquely vivid memories of where they were on 9-11, those memories aren’t necessarily accurate. Essentially, every time you reflect on a memory, you are re-recording your reflection—creating a copy of a copy—and the accuracy of these copies will degrade over time. Furthermore, because you reflect on emotionally charged memories more often, they are more likely to be inaccurate but very vivid.
Keep in mind when deciding how to maximize your memories whether you are maximizing for just the number and vividness of memories, in which case emotionally charged experiences are superior, or whether you are maximizing for accurate memories, in which case novel, life-changing experiences are superior.