The Trip My Brain Remembered Wrong

A while ago, I went to Goa with some of my closest friends from college. For the first two days, it was exactly what I’d hoped for: beaches, food, drinks and long conversations with people I hadn’t seen enough of lately.

On the third day, I fell out with a close friend. I won’t go into the argument, but it changed the trip enough that I decided to leave early. After I got home, I had an accident with hot water and burned myself. It was a fairly miserable end to what was supposed to be a holiday.

A few days later, someone could have asked me how Goa was and I’d have said, “Terrible.” That was the version I remembered.

Except it wasn’t quite true. I’d enjoyed two whole days before any of this happened. There had been good meals, stupid conversations and the comfort of being around old friends. I hadn’t imagined that enjoyment. But when I thought about the trip, those days barely registered. My mind went straight to the argument and what happened afterward.

I started reading about memory because I couldn’t quite understand how a few bad moments had swallowed everything else. That was how I came across the peak-end rule.

What the ending does to the memory

The idea is that when we look back on an experience, we don’t always weigh every moment equally. An especially intense moment and the way things ended can have an outsized influence on our overall impression.

One experiment made this surprisingly easy to understand. Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked people to put a hand in painfully cold water for 60 seconds. In another trial, they endured the same 60 seconds, followed by 30 more during which the water became slightly warmer. It was still uncomfortable, just less so.

When asked which trial they would repeat, most chose the longer one. It had included the same unpleasant minute and then some, but the gentler ending made a difference.

A short laboratory experiment isn’t the same as a holiday, of course. And my accident happened after I’d left Goa. Still, I’d bundled it all into one story, and the idea gave me a useful way to question that story.

The trip I had, and the trip I remember

During those first days, I wasn’t thinking, “What an awful holiday.” I was having a good time. Looking back, though, I could reduce the whole thing to five words: Goa, argument, home, accident, regret.

That summary left out most of the trip.

Once I noticed it, I started recognising the same habit elsewhere. A good dinner can become “that terrible restaurant” because of a frustrating half-hour waiting for the bill. A relationship that ended badly can be difficult to remember with any affection, even when there were years that mattered.

I don’t think the answer is to force a positive interpretation onto everything. Some experiences really are bad. But I’m less willing now to trust my first, neat verdict on something complicated.

“That trip ended badly” and “that trip was bad” aren’t the same thing.

Learning about the peak-end rule didn’t repair the friendship or make the burn hurt less. Goa still isn’t a trip I look back on fondly. It just helped me make room for the bits I’d been leaving out.

I’ve also started paying more attention to how I leave things: the final evening away, saying goodbye to a friend, the last conversation before heading home. I can’t arrange a perfect ending every time. But I’d like to stop giving a bad one the final say.

Those first two days in Goa happened too. I’d like to remember them.