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How Do Experiences Become Memories?

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Memory Games.

About Daniel Kahneman's TEDTalk

Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman goes through a series of examples of things we might remember, from vacations to colonoscopies. He explains how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently.

All of us roughly know what memory is — sort of the storage of the past, such as we have it. It's the storage of what we know. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

About Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman is an elder statesman in the field of behavioral economics. In the mid-1970s, with his collaborator Amos Tversky, he was among the first academics to pick apart exactly why we make "wrong" decisions.

Their work treated economics not as a perfect or self-correcting machine, but as a system prey to quirks of human perception. The field of behavioral economics was born. Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize in 2002 for his work with Tversky, who died before the award was bestowed.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

NPR/TED Staff