Life's Value and Memory's Imperfections

Heuristics and faulty memories mean no one is in a privileged position to judge the value of a life

Please hit the ❤️ “Like” button at the top or bottom of this article if you enjoy it. It helps others find this article.

---

Let's say you had to undergo a colonoscopy. For those unfamiliar, a colonoscopy involves a camera being put up your butt to squirm through your colon. Occasionally the camera blows air in to inflate your colon, a biopsy is taken, or suction is used to remove some, uhh, matter/liquid. Overall, it's not a pleasant experience.

Which method would you rather undergo?

1. A standard colonoscopy

2. A standard colonoscopy followed by the camera being left in your butt for an extra three minutes

This isn't a weird kink thing, please assume the extra three minutes are unpleasant (but not as unpleasant as the camera actively moving around doing its thing in your butt).

The answer seems obvious: the standard colonoscopy.

And yet, if doctors use the second procedure, people rate the experience as less painful and are more likely to return for their repeat colonoscopy.

The Peak-End Rule

What the hell is wrong with people?

This is part of a phenomenon called the peak-end rule: the end of an experience has an outsized weight on our judgments about them after the fact.

The "peak" part of the peak-end rule is that the most intense part of the experience also has an outsized impact on our judgments—so the most painful moment of the colonoscopy, for example.

This effect isn't just for negative experiences—researchers have observed it in people's retrospective judgments of music and sequences of rewards in monkeys.

It also isn't just present for brief experiences—economists have found evidence of it in decisions to quit a job.

The common explanation for the peak-end rule is memory. We use heuristics when retroactively assessing an experience because our memories aren't perfect. We can't replay an experience moment-by-moment and take the sum of an entire experience to determine how much we liked or disliked it.

Instead, the most salient parts of an experience make the largest impressions: the period of greatest intensity and where it ended.

Retroactive Judgements: The Value We Place On Memory

It's common that we place a lot of value on the memory of an experience rather than the experience itself.

To take two extreme examples: anesthesiologists value certain drugs for their amnestic properties—that is, they make you forget the procedure; and in pediatric care, doctors comfort parents by telling them their infant won't remember a painful experience.

I've experienced both of these, but more troubling to me is the second example. When my first son was only a couple of months old, he had some stomach trouble. He was frequently in pain, squirming and crying for hours on end. We knew from stool testing there was blood in his stool, indicating there was likely something in his (or rather, his mother's) diet he was reacting to, but we couldn't figure out what it was. I took him to a gastroenterologist, who said there didn't seem to be any lasting damage so we could safely ignore it and it would likely get better. He told me: "He won't remember this."

To me, that missed the point. I wasn't concerned about the lasting impact of the pain; I was concerned about the pain my child was in at that moment. To write off that pain because he ultimately won't remember it seems wrong. One day I'll be dead and won't remember anything I experienced in life. That doesn't mean my pain or happiness in life doesn't matter. There is value in our experiences along the way, memory or not.

We often hear the top regrets of those on their deathbeds. Authors present these with the assumption that since these individuals are looking back at life from the end, they have the full perspective. Most of the advice itself is innocuous enough, but it's interesting to me that we privilege their views above others. After all, people looking back over their entire life are relying on memories they are the most removed from. The peaks and ends are looming the largest in what they've experienced.

Peak-end rule aside, our memories are highly imperfect. Our brains don’t play them back like a recording, we reconstruct them, and that reconstruction is error prone. When we look back at memories we've experienced, emotions and pains become muted. Details get garbled, and we compress days, weeks, or months into an imperfect feeling. Regrets might not capture the context in which we made those decisions.

Proactive Judgements: Life Desirability

It's not just when we remember experiences that the ordering of events matters. Even without experiencing it, when asked to choose between options, people prefer the option where the experience would get better over time.

Perhaps more unsettlingly, people's ratings of the desirability of a life exhibits an end-bias. Study participants rated a wonderful life that ends with a few years of only mildly pleasant life as less desirable than one that ends abruptly after the wonderful years.

There's nothing inherently irrational about this. Of course we can have preferences for the order in which we experience things, and it makes sense to want them to increase over time—perhaps we enjoy anticipating "the best is yet to come". We also undergo hedonic adaptation where we get used to a certain level of pleasantness, so it makes sense in the abstract to want our baseline quality of life to continually increase.

But for judging entire lifetimes, I find it hard to imagine making these decisions in the abstract. Can we really in one moment judge the value of years of life?

Valuing Life

Utilitarianism is the ethical view that focuses on the consequences of our actions. It's often summarized as "The greatest good for the greatest number." One requirement for utilitarian thinking is the need to compare good and bad consequences and judge what outweighs what. There's a need to do a sort of moral arithmetic, adding up the good and subtracting the bad, to come up with what the best outcome would be.

But the job of utilitarianism gets much harder if we can't just sum up the pleasantness of an experience over time as the objective measure of what is good for individuals.

The peak-end rule shows the inherent difficulty of judging how good an experience was. It's not clear who we should listen to: the person after-the-fact who has a skewed memory of the experience, or the person during the experience, who doesn't have the full perspective. Some hard experiences only take on meaning once they are done. Running a marathon, climbing a mountain, or writing a book are all considered painful during the experience, but rewarding at the end. 

The limitations of our memories bias our judgments about our experiences, but many experiences don't take on their full meaning until they are done.

This has implications for things like end-of-life care, where utilitarianism can guide decision-making. What should care workers be trying to maximize, the moment-by-moment experience, or how the patient will remember the experience?

For most practical purposes, we can probably just come up with a good rule of thumb. The peak-end bias in our memories roughly tracks our preferences for outcomes to increase over time, and it's likely the reason our brains use the peak-end rule is because it's a good way of estimating how good an experience was.

But the larger question still exists: What is it we value in life? Do we value getting what we wanted in our proactive decisions, the moment-by-moment experience, or the retroactive memory? Do we have to wait until the end of our lives to judge it holistically, or is that the worst time to judge because of the inevitable biases from our faulty memories?

I don't think there is one privileged perspective from which we can judge the value of an experience or a life. We're complicated beings filled with contradictory judgments of value. Just as there is no stationary frame of reference to judge motion in physics, there's no objective frame we can adopt to judge the value of our lives. Each moment and each perspective is valuable. It isn't just those on their deathbeds that have the privilege of judging their lives that we should take wisdom from. Everyone at all stages of life has a unique perspective that we should value as we navigate the peaks and ends of life.

---

Please hit the ❤️ “Like” button below if you enjoyed this post, it helps others find this article.

If you’re a Substack writer and have been enjoying Cognitive Wonderland, consider adding it to your recommendations. I really appreciate the support.