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There's a joke about an old guy who asks his grandson, a scientist, to explain Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
"Well, Gramps, it's kind of like this. If you're in the dentist's chair getting a tooth drilled, a minute can seem like an hour. But if you're sitting with a beautiful woman in your lap, an hour can seem like a minute."
Gramps ponders, then sputters, "And from this he makes a living?"
PG STORE
I thought about that when I talked with Carey K. Morewedge, a psychologist and assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, who spends a lot of time looking into how our minds can play tricks on us.
A colleague mentioned Dr. Morewedge's yet-unpublished paper on selective memory. He has studied how unusual events in our past can shape our image of the entire era, leading most Americans to "believe everything from the general state of their country to the quality of their television programming has declined from its past zenith."
Who could argue? Early in my life, I realized my parents had divided all the world's history into just two phases, "nowadays" and "back when," with the latter being far the superior era. The dividing point, as best as I could determine, was the arrival of The Beatles.
I myself can tell you that Top 40 music peaked in 1966 when I was 10. (That may be a bad example, because that is so clearly fact rather than opinion. The Rolling Stones, Wilson Pickett, The Temptations, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Otis Redding, the Animals -- I could go on but, lawd-a'mighty, what year can beat that one?)
In Dr. Morewedge's study, 85 Boston commuters were interviewed about the average quality of television in the '80s, the '90s and the past decade. Participants were asked to recall either "one program" or their "favorite program" and then decide how similar that show was to the decade's average fare.
The study includes phrases such as "planned orthogonal contrasts" and the equation "(-2) t(82) = 3.45, p = .001, r = .36," none of which I understood. But I easily grasped that it's easier for minds to filter out the bad shows of yesteryear than today's televised dreck; we're able to recall "Hill Street Blues" and "Cheers" and "Cosby" and forget "CHiPs" and the sorry spin-offs of "M• A• S• H" and "Three's Company," whose names are better left unremembered. (OK, "AfterMASH" and "Three's a Crowd.")
"We recall atypical past experiences at the time of judgment and base judgments on those unusual memories," Dr. Morewedge said.
Or, as he later memorably put it, "Memory seems to resemble a record store, stocking the hits of the past, and the hits as well as the stinkers of the present. When we mistake the hits of the past for the average recordings of their era, it engenders the perception that the past was better than the present, giving rise to nostalgia."
I guess this is where I should concede that Chad & Jeremy also had a hit in 1966.
Our minds also can be selective when predicting the future, Dr. Morewedge has found. A 2005 paper he co-authored, published in Psychological Science, showed how a memory of a good football game or a surprise party will raise our expectations for the next game or party, but it doesn't often turn out as we expect.
"People expect to feel worse after negative events and better after positive events than they actually end up feeling."
Did he ever feel like a party pooper for explaining why we may feel good about the past or the future?
That can happen, he said, but that's outweighed by helping people understand and deal with negative events.
Anyway, expectations aren't everything. Before moving here in autumn 2007, he'd had a negative impression of Pittsburgh. That has made a 180-degree turn. He just bought a house in Friendship.
Memories are made of this.
