Shankar Vedantam

Those are such straightforward stories for people to point to as the high point of their life.

And indeed, it is often the big moments of our lives that serve as chapter breaks, that serve as anchor points in our stories.

But I also want to remind everyone that it doesn't have to just be objective big moments.

I've read and interviewed people with absolutely gorgeous, very small moments that have very big subjective meaning associated with them.

And so that meaningful conversation...

you know, over a bowl of Cheerios could turn out to be a high point or a turning point in your life.

It doesn't just have to be the big milestone events.

It's really about the subjective meaning that we associate with our experiences.

We've looked at the reliability of memory in many episodes of Hidden Brain, Jonathan, and it's fair to say that the scientific consensus is that our memories are not very accurate, even when it comes to the big events in our lives.

How much does the accuracy of a narrative in our lives matter?

Yeah, this is such an important topic.

I guess it depends on mattering for what, right?

So fundamentally, stories are reconstructions, right?

As you said, there's excellent work on memory demonstrating that we're not particularly accurate reporters of the things that happen to us.

And there's good reason for that, right?

Our memory systems evolved to help us interpret the present and anticipate the future.

The present and the future are never exact replicas of the past.

So if we could only hold on to the past precisely as it happened, we actually wouldn't have the cognitive flexibility to navigate our lives so adaptively.

I like to say that our life stories are based on a true story, right?

If you are telling a story about wildly improbable things that could have happened to you, no one's going to believe that story, and that's going to make it hard for you to live that story.