On Peaks, Ends and Great Memories

This week’s book learning is from ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman.

A member of Daniel Kahneman’s audience at a lecture once relayed an experience of listening to a very good 40 minute symphony on a CD that was badly scratched right at the end. So, it produced a shocking sound right at the end for a few minutes and this in turn resulted in a bad memory of the experience.

Effectively, the memory of experience ignored 40 good preceding minutes and favored remembering the ending. And this finding has been found to be consistent with multiple experiments. For example, people remembered painful procedures more positively if the pain was lessened towards the end. (even if the overall experienced pain was the same!)

Kahneman explains that this is because we have 2 selves –

The Experiencing self i.e. Does it hurt now? How do you feel now?

The Remembering self i.e. How was it as a whole?

In our own lives, our remembering self keeps score, decides what we learn from situations and if our memories are positive. And generally, all the remembering self cares about is the ‘peak’ of an experience and the ‘end’.

I found this to be one of the most applicable learnings I’ve read in a very long time. We may not be able to make time for a long enough vacation or a long enough family reunion/get together with friends but if we do design these trips or gatherings with a very cool ‘peak’ experience (eg: a celebration) and a wonderful ‘end’ experience, then we would create lovely memories for ourselves and those around us..

And I don’t think it’s all that different for business meetings – a peak and a cool end. Really cool concept!

Here’s to creating meaningful memories for ourselves this week!