The Peak End Rule, or, The Secret to a Winning Colonoscopy


When we consider ourselves as individuals, we tend to think in terms of a single entity with agency. In essence, I take on information through my five senses and then use my memories to inform, guide and, perhaps most importantly, predict what will happen next—or, more accurately, what might happen next.

So those recollections, the stories we tell ourselves to record those experiences, are what fundamentally help us both understand ourselves and the world around us. 

This all makes perfect sense, except for one problem: that’s not actually how it works, according to Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning economist.

Kahneman says the two systems—experiencing and remembering—are not in sync. In a series of experiments, he and his team proved that your experiencing self perceives the world moment by moment, but your remembering self follows a strange phenomena that Kahneman refers to as the “peak end rule.” 

Here’s how it works: our remembering selves tend to recall the extremes of a given experience without accurately recording how long it took, or how it generally felt while it was happening.

Imagine watching your favorite team play a near perfect game, relishing every second, and then in the last five minutes, the opposition mounts an incredible come-from-behind charge that knocks your team out of contention.

If your experiencing self and remembering self worked the same way, you’d average out your second-by-second feelings—the 98% of the game you were happy and the 2% of the game you were disappointed—and record the whole affair as having been 98% a good time.

But any sports fan knows that’s not how it works. The final moments of the game carry a disproportionate power, like a shadow that blots out all of your team’s great efforts over the preceding hours of play.

And it’s not just sports; Kahneman reports that in experiments involving colonoscopies, the final moments will totally color your notion of the entire procedure. If it’s by and large painful, but the pain decreases at the end, you’ll report it wasn’t so bad. Conversely, if it didn’t hurt that much until the final few minutes, you’re more likely to consider it an exceptionally bad experience.

Our brains are wired not to give equal weight to every detail but instead to record those moments that stand out for us. Our remembering selves are therefore in the business of altering reality by way of a neat and tidy editing job. 

And the end result is a kind of highlight film bringing you “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” From your brain’s point of view, that’s the best game in town.


Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more