Julia Shaw

And for the next six hours, all you're thinking of is all the other embarrassing things you've ever done.

And it's like your brain is like, would you like some other embarrassing stories?

And obviously you're going, no, thank you.

Please stop.

But you have this spreading activation, as it's called, of just this synapses, just like lighting up new networks.

And you're going, ah, and there's this other memory that's attached to the same feeling.

And so it's the same with happiness, is that people who are happier tend to remember more happy memories.

And so most of the time, unless you're depressed, most people look back at their lives with this sort of rosy reminiscence bias, and they're more likely to remember the positives than the negatives.

But it's not quite the way you were describing it, actually.

So it's not quite that you only remember the objectively good things that happened.

It's more that your interpretation of the things that you've experienced is either neutral or positive.

So for me, for example, growing up with my father with paranoid schizophrenia, that is something that I see as a net positive.

So obviously at the time it was experienced in a complicated way, but in hindsight, it defined my life and it completely gave me a perspective of the human mind that I just wouldn't have had otherwise.

And so I see that as a positive part of my autobiography.

And that is what good therapy should be doing, is it should be taking negative experiences and not overriding them or changing them.

I mean, our brains do that naturally anyway.

But trying to work with what you've got, the experiences, the true experiences, but then just shifting the emotional content so that how you're dealing with them now is good.

I think so.

And his experiments where he asked participants if they were offered this holiday that they could go on, but they wouldn't remember it.

So they'd have the present day experience of enjoyment on this holiday.