I am re-listening to Prof. Dan Gilbert of Harvard psychology read his "Stumbling on Happiness". I remember the book as his rundown of evidence that we generally are not very good at predicting what will make us happy or at how happy something will make us. He was talking about predictions and about comparisons of events. Were we happier when this happened or when that happened? Very slippery question!
He commented that events are like movies but have even more dimensions, also known as important variables. They take place over time, they involve sights, sounds, smells, timing and many aspects, but what gets stored in our memory is more of a synopsis containing what we take to be the "main ideas" of the event. We attended the wedding and were wowed by the beauty of the bride but we have no memory of what tie the pastor wore. Gilbert memorably said that synopses of movies are stored but not the full movie. When we are searching, we don't want to sit through several entire movies. We just want a quick summary of the "main points" of the movies. We realize that quick summaries are not going to include what tie the pastor or the bad guy wore. We can't store the whole movie in our heads. There isn't enough storage room. We store captions of pictures but not the detailed pixels.
It is no wonder that some Trivia players have to take movie notes on the make of the getaway car and the amount of money stolen. There is too much information to remember it all. That is the way our memories work: summaries of what seems important at the time.
In "Breath by Breath", Larry Rosenberg tried to avoid fidgeting in a group meditation when he was bitten by a mosquito. The bite itched but he didn't want to move or scratch. He found that if he attended to the exact sensations that darned bite produced, they were surprisingly complex, unstable and interesting. The itch comes and goes. It waxes and wanes but it is not steady or unchanging. Quite surprisingly varied. It is easy to say "I was bitten and it itched" but the reality was much more complicated.
