Your Brain Only Kept Two Moments

Very quickly, think of the best trip you've ever taken. Now think of the worst one. Different countries probably, different years, different reasons — you never confuse the two. Now here's something that may bother you: your brain is using the same shortcut to store both of them in your memory. I'm Kiara and this is Put the Guidebook Down.

Here's the assumption we're all walking around with: a good trip gets remembered well because it was mostly good, and a bad trip gets remembered badly because it was mostly bad, or there was a big moment that disrupted the itinerary or left you feeling a little shaken. We like to think of it as a running total — add up the good days, subtract the bad ones, and whatever's left is how you'll feel about that vacation later. So if you're able to recall more good from the trip than bad, it must have been a good trip, right?

Well, that's not exactly how this works, and it's not a small miss. It's basically backwards. Your memory of a trip isn't built from the whole vacation. It's built from almost none of it. Not the eight forgettable dinners, not the three days you spent recovering from a time change, not the very average Tuesday you spent walking around doing not much of anything, and probably not the walking tour that felt really great in the moment, because you're like "yay, I'm learning a lot about the place I'm in," but then you forget about it 36 hours later. Your memory is quietly throwing almost all of that out, and keeping maybe two moments from the entire vacation.

And here's the part that should really make you think, and maybe unsettle you a little: it's the same two-moment rule whether the trip was the best one of your life or the worst. I'm going to explain why, because once you see the mechanism, you'll never plan the end of a trip, or maybe your itinerary, the same way again.

Starting with what actually gets kept: the peak-end rule. In the early 1990s, psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues ran an experiment that sounds almost cruel, maybe a little disgusting when you hear it described — patients undergoing colonoscopies, which at the time were far more uncomfortable than they are now, although some people would say even the current procedure is still uncomfortable. Patients were split into two groups. One group had the standard procedure. The other group had the same procedure, plus extra time at the end where the scope was left in place, still causing mild discomfort, just less intense than the main procedure.

By any rational accounting, the second group experienced more total pain. But when researchers asked patients afterward to rate how painful the whole procedure was, the second group, the ones with the additional minutes with the scope left in place and more total pain, rated the experience as less painful overall. They were also more likely to come back for a follow-up procedure.

This may seem shocking, but that result only makes sense once you understand what your memory is actually doing. It's not averaging your experience across time. It's sampling two points: the most intense moment of the whole experience, and how it ended. Translate that to travel, and the implication is uncomfortable. Your best trip isn't the sum of every great moment on it. It's one extraordinary moment, plus how the trip was wrapped up at the end. Your worst trip isn't the sum of every miserable one either. Same rule, same two data points, completely regardless of which direction the trip actually went, good or bad.

So let's pivot to a shorter trip, one of my own, since I like to reference my time living abroad a lot. One of my first trips was to Bulgaria for a conference. The easiest memory I can immediately pull up, and all the budget travelers know this moment, is where you don't want to opt for the later checkout and you don't want to take the earlier flight, so to save money you just take the kind of embarrassing walk of shame with your suitcase. I like to call it the budget-traveler walk of shame. But regardless, we still get to see more places that way, so it's worth it.

Anyway, back to the story. I decided to sit down while walking around in the park under a tree, to check my departure time and make sure I had my transportation locked down to get to the airport. And during this moment, I got crapped on by a bird. Yes, I had a bird poop on my hair. My mom and grandmother used to tell me that when a bird poops on you, it means good luck. I don't know how that's lucky, considering I was stuck with bird poop on me all the way through my journey back to Moldova, with no real way to get it off despite scrubbing my hair in the airport bathroom in Sofia.

So my memory of that trip to Bulgaria has been reduced to one of the high points, singing "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga at karaoke with my colleagues at the conference, and then the ending, a bird pooping on my head. That's the peak-end rule at work. My trip has been compacted and stored to karaoke and bird poop. Honestly, I'm not mad about it anymore. In the moment it wasn't great, but they both make for great stories now.

Now, the peak-end rule explains what memory keeps. There's a companion finding from the same research that explains what it drops, and it's arguably stranger of the two. Kahneman and psychologist Barbara Fredrickson found that the actual length of an experience barely affects how it gets remembered at all. Two experiences with the same peak and the same ending get rated almost identically, whether one lasted three minutes and the other lasted thirty. They call this duration neglect.

Kahneman later described this with a distinction that makes it click: essentially there are two selves, an experiencing self and a remembering self. The experiencing self is the one actually living through each moment of the trip, hour by hour, day by day, including all the remarkable moments and the unremarkable ones. The remembering self is the one you actually consult afterward, the one telling the story at dinner, the one deciding whether the trip was worth it in the end. And the remembering self is nearly blind to the duration the experiencing self went through. To the remembering self, an eight-day trip and a three-day trip with the same peak and the same ending are basically the same trip. Shocking, right?

Which means all those extra days, the ones where you were actually there, actually alive, walking around, eating something forgettable, waiting for a train, aren't gone because nothing happened. They're gone because the version of you that files the trip away for storage was never counting them to begin with. I've talked about this before on the show, because it's something I've personally worried about, that I have a bad memory, or that I'm forgetting some of the best moments of my life from traveling to different countries and learning about different cultures. But this framework explains that it's just a normal act of memory. It's just being human, and it all goes back to the peaks.

Now shifting from a shorter trip to one of the longer living-abroad examples, because this is exactly the mechanism at work. For the time I lived abroad in Indonesia and Moldova, I remember the experience as good overall. I remember the excitement of the departure, the stress of the arrival and figuring everything out day to day. I remember some of the exciting side quests in between, the happy memories of meeting new people, and then the extreme emotions at the end, saying goodbye to everyone and having to return.

Those moments living abroad happened over much longer periods of time, so there were definitely several bad moments in between when problems arose or there were hurdles to overcome, plus thousands of other memories in between all of those high peaks, medium peaks, and smaller peaks. But it all got lost amongst the other positive memories and energy I associated with that time period, and condensed down to only a few peaks or high points: the arrival, the excitement of establishing a routine, or the high emotional period of saying goodbye. So while I know there are years of memory and content there, they just feel reduced to a few core memories. That does make me a little sad, which is why I keep a travel journal and encourage all my friends to do the same, so you're able to recall those memories in later readings. But again, we can't put pressure on ourselves to remember everything, because we're only human.

Put those two mechanisms together, and here's what they explain: the best trip you've taken and the worst trip you've taken are being stored by the exact same process. Peak, then end. Everything in between is rounding error, whether it was extraordinary or completely unremarkable. So if your memory of a trip really does come down to two moments, what does that say about the rest of it, the days you actually spent there? Were those one- or two-day extensions to save money actually worth it in the end?

I don't think this loss, or this reduction of a trip to a small handful of peaks, means those days altogether didn't matter, and you most likely don't need to label yourself as having a bad memory. Your experiencing self was there for all of them, and that self is real, even if nobody consults it later. Remember, in a previous episode we talked about how you're building a version of yourself abroad, giving space for other layers within you to rise to the surface. But it does mean the story you'll eventually tell about the trip you might call the best one of your life was decided by a lot less of the actual trip than you'd assume. Most of it never even made it into the evidence of your memory.

And this cuts both ways, which is the part that actually matters if you're the one planning the trip. A rough trip that happens to end well can be remembered fondly, almost regardless of how rough the middle actually was. A wonderful trip that ends badly, a missed flight, a cancellation, getting sick on the last day, can get remembered as a disappointment even if nine out of ten days were great. The end isn't just one data point among many. It's doing the majority of the work when it comes to memory.

So this is where, as I've said in previous episodes, you need to make room in the itinerary for spontaneity and to be flexible and adaptable to whatever comes, because it can make or break your trip overall. So here's what I'd ask you to sit with: go back to the best trip and the worst trip I asked you to think about at the beginning of the episode. Try to name what the actual peak and the actual ending of each one was. Then notice how much of the rest of each trip you genuinely can or can't recall in detail, good and bad. That's not a flaw in your memory. That's just what it was built to do.

But it also means the next time you're closing out a hard travel day, or ending a difficult trip, the ending still counts for far more than you think it should. Maybe that's worth planning around. Maybe it's worth taking that last side quest to really close out the trip. I'd also encourage positive reframing in the moment, because trying to find something good even within a situation that's out of your control goes a long way. As my colleagues remember me, and my motto throughout all of my time in Indonesia, which is why I associate my time there, regardless of highs and lows, as positive overall, is because I brought my motto with me everywhere I went: always positive energy. I am Kiara. This is Put the Guidebook Down. Guidebooks tell you where to go. We're here for why you went. I'll see you in the next one. Bye!