I was talking to a data center executive yesterday about a project and he asked me do I think the project is really interesting. We then discussed the issue of telling a good story to get people interested.
Check out this video to get some ideas on how memories and experiences are not the same.
The following text starts at 3:51.
Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.And let me begin with one example. This is an old study. Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. And here are two patients. Those are their recordings. And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?" And it's a very easy question. Clearly, Patient B suffered more. His colonoscopy was longer,and every minute of pain that Patient A had Patient B had and more.
But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" And here is a surprise: And the surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends --and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great --but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. And the one that is worse was the one where pain was at its peak at the very end. It's a bad story. How do we know that?Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" and it was much worse for A than for B in memory.
