Catch up time

So, time for some catch up on life.

Christmas has come and gone, along with New Year's. Christmas was good, I finally got a Wii and have had many hours of fun with it since. New Year's was spent hanging out with friends from high school. Somewhat odd since everyone is now 21 and 22 so they enjoyed alcoholic beverages while I imbibed Cherry Coke. It was odd mostly because it was different for me to be hanging around with such a group as, obviously, that's not a common occurrence in Utah. It wasn't a big deal though, as most had one or two drinks over the course of the evening and champagne at midnight so it wasn't like anyone was going overboard.

Most of my free time has been spent either playing Wii games (Wii Sports, Guitar Hero III, and Super Mario Galaxy) and reading.

My latest two books were "The Paradox of Choice" and "Stumbling on Happiness". Both actually discuss a lot of similar studies and ideas. So reading them back to back instilled some strong feelings of deja vu. I'd suggest splitting up the books a little bit if you plan to read them both. They contain a lot of interesting ideas about decision making and why we're so bad at it much of the time. We are terrible at predicting emotional responses, and terrible at remembering emotional responses. We mostly remember only two parts of an experience, the strongest (best/worst) and the end. So if we have a good day with one really bad moment (say getting a paper cut) which also ends well, after some time we'll remember the paper cut and believe the day overall was pretty crappy. Our mind does a lot of this type of information compression. We'll remember a few details of an event and then when we "remember" the event, our mind will fabricate the event using the pieces we actually stored and making up the rest. This is why eye-witnesses are notoriously unreliable, but we all think we remember more accurately which is why eye-witnesses are so effective in court (This eye-witness stuff isn't in either book, but I'm extrapolating to things I've learned in Psychology.).

I'd recommend either book to someone looking to get some insight into the human mind. If you have read and enjoyed Blink, you'll enjoy this as well.