The Secrets Of Coronation Street Gail’s Memory
THE Secrets Of Coronation Street Gail’s Memory:
In Corrie, Gail can’t remember falling down the stairs. This is a common response to trauma; a colleague of mine recently fell off his bike and broke his nose (it didn’t spoil his looks – he’s a scouser), and he can’t remember the accident either.
The mind blocks out distressing events; it’s easy to imagine an evolutionary reason for this.But it’s not just in extreme cases that our memory of bad things is distorted. Daniel Kahneman has shown (pdf) that our memories of less dramatic things can also be systematically distorted in two particular ways.
First, our memories are insensitive to the duration of a bad event; we remember long uncomfortable experiences as being no worse than shorter ones despite the fact that we’d all prefer discomfort to be as short as possible.
Second, our memory conforms to a “peak-end rule”. If the end of an episode is less painful than its worst moment, we look back on the incident less unfavourably than we do if the pain suddenly stops.
Posted: 25th, March 2008 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
