Summary of " the Riddle of Experience vs. Memory"

In the talk given by Daniel Kahneman, the speaker mainlly talked about several cognitive traps which made it impossible for people to think clearly about happiness.

The first trap is the reluctance to accept complexity. The world "happiness" is no longer a useful word because we apply it to different kinds of things.
The second trap is about the difficulty of understanding the two concepts: experience and memory; they are both mixed in the notion of " happiness".
The third trap is the focusing illusion. Only by distorting the importance of  feeling happy, we can think about some circumstances which affect the feeling of being happy.

There are two selfs--experiencing self, who lives in the present and remembering self, who is the one that keeps score, and maintain the story of our life.

The speaker gave us an example of two patients A and B who did colonoscopy, and it tells us that there are actually two selfs.

Another example about one week vacation and two week vacations shows that for experiencing self two weeks are twice as good as one week; however, the remembering self is not about time if there is no change, so the two selfs are quite different from each other.

Also, happiness is about spending time with people that we like, and it is a different notion from "well-being".

Finally, we can't think happiness clearly also because we need to think of contrast about the answer we want.