“Memories light the corners of my mind, misty waters color memories of the way we were.” That’s right Mrs. Magnificent Barbra Streisand, memories do color our world but they don’t always get the facts right about the way we were.
According to Daniel Kahneman an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, our memories, not the actual experience of an event, cause us to label our lives as successful, unsuccessful, happy or disappointing.
But are these memories actually true? How many memories of failure, losing or not living up to someone’s expectations haunt you on a daily basis? Have you ever stopped to question if those memories have been misinterpreted or blurred from the truth? Could it be that you simply believe what you believe and you don’t believe there is any more to question? Or is it that you assume your memory is factual and has gathered all information correctly?
Some memories are too painful to remember and some are simply not true. Memories should be questioned, investigated and measured against the actual experience. As Daniel Kahneman states in one of his lectures, there are two beings within all of us. The first is the experiencing self. This is the self that has one experience after the other and so on and so on until the day we die. The second is the remembering self. This is the self that interprets our other self and assigns meaning and labels to life. The definition of “interpret” according to the Webster Dictionary is: understand (an action, mood, or way of behaving) as having a particular meaning or significance.
Research shows that how an event ends, not the moments within an event determines how you will remember the entire event. If an event ends on a high note, one that makes you feel good you will remember it as a happy successful event. If the event ends on a sour note, even if every second leading up to the sour note is a good experience you will tend to remember the event as unhappy or unsuccessful. 
Kahneman illustrates his research in a story of a young man listening to a breathtaking recording of classical music. As the seconds and minutes go by the music takes the young man on a heart pounding journey of loud and soft crescendos that rise and fall like a feather in the wind accompanied by dramatic mood altering melodies. However, at the end of the last song there is a head-jarring screech, a flaw in the recording which snaps the young man out of his intoxicating musical trance. The young man now angry labels the entire experience as ruined and disappointing. Huh? What about all the beautiful moments that had you blissed out in classical nirvana?
So the question is, what happens to all the experiences we experience up to a disappointing moment? How is it that we can have far more good than bad moments in our experience but we remember the entire experience as a failure? How much of our entire life do we actually experience? Are our memories remembering our lives correctly? From Mr. Kahneman’s research we begin to see that life is one experience after the other but the life we remember is a fraction of the event.
So the next time you decide that all is lost, you’re a failure, the event is unsuccessful or your life is an unhappy one, remember what you learned here. Your memory may light the corners of your mind but it’s shinning a light on a very limited truth of the overall beautiful experience.
DeDe Murcer Moffett
Speaker, Author & America’s Favorite Butt Kicker!