Experience is Just a Memory with Mark Molony

We often talk about learning from experience. But what if experience isn’t what we think it is?

In this excerpt from my On Experience conversation with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony, we explore a surprising idea:

Perhaps we don’t carry our experiences forward at all.
Perhaps we carry our memories of those experiences.

And if memory is selective, incomplete, and shaped by interpretation, what does that mean for the decisions we make today?

This conversation is about memory, stories, judgment, and the assumptions hidden inside our experience.

Edited Transcript

Mark: And, from our conversation the other day, I started going down the path of thinking about memory and how we record memory. Now, of course, that’s very relevant to experience.

Geoff: Yep.

Mark: And how we capture stuff. Just doing a, “That’s my memory of it.” if you look at generally, the unreliability of people’s memory about what was incorporated and how things went, and whether it was in a particular sequence or how it operated, and how they overemphasize some things and they underemphasize other things, and they only record pieces of the puzzle, and the rest of it is the mind making up the context about whether it’s seen it before or how that… You’d sit there and say, “Gee, maybe experience is just a memory, therefore I have to be extra careful with it.”

Geoff: Well, the piece I’ve started to explore around this is kind of very similar to that. That if you think about an experience as in something happened, then what we remember is not what happened, but our story about what happened, and we actually carry the story forward, not the experience. So even though I have…

And this is where we can get really lost in this. Okay, I fixed my computer five times in a row. That means I can fix it the sixth time? No, I’m using a new piece of software, or maybe I’m having a bad day. Because the research also shows that intuition, and this comes from Daniel Kahneman, that intuition works really well when you’re relaxed.

But as soon as you get stressed, it’s not a very good indicator, and therefore your experience might mislead you more likely when you’re stressed, which feeds into that whole thing you’ve just said around being at least present enough to admit, “I don’t know the answer,” or present enough to go, “Oh, I think I know enough to give this a crack.”

Mark: Yeah. And, also that ability as we were talking about from… a reset. So for want of a better term, it’s setting you up to be able to be aware and to notice in a particular way, perhaps with a greater clarity, right?

And, so one of the things about meditation is that calming, soothing both of your mind and your nervous system. And, so I think that practically helps your awareness, your noticing, and perhaps it also helps your objectivity. It’d be an interesting test to be able to see, does mindfulness practice help you to be more objective or considered?

I haven’t seen a lot of work on that, but I imagine it could be beneficial. So yeah, the mindfulness stuff, I think if I apply it to myself, what I’ve seen happen is that it gives me more time spaciousness to think about something and to observe its intricacies, as opposed to in the past, I would probably have reacted out of habit or ’cause I’d seen it before, I knew exactly what to do.

It does create that spaciousness and the ability to be able to pull back and look at other ingredients. I remember one of my bosses years ago used to use the term “hasten slowly”, and I used to say to him, “What the hell does that mean?” And he said, “One day, grasshopper, you’ll understand when I use the term hasten slowly.”

He was so right. I finally worked it out, I think. So, you know, that idea of being able to just be able to take a few minutes to be able to really look at something and think it through in an in-depth, more in-depth way. And, you know, our repartee of our interview is a, a great example of that. To be able to create the space and then all of a sudden other awareness and, and, thoughts come in.

So I think, you know, what we’re saying in a way, Geoff, is by all means, experience is useful. Yeah? So we’re not saying chuck experience out. It’s a bit like some of those kids’ toys. It should come with a caution sign sticker on it that says, you know, “Be aware that your experience is not a full-fledged replay memory of what happened.” It’s probably biased. It’s probably missing key components. And you need to be careful of what state you’re in when you use your experience.