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Memory Hacks & Kindness Acts: The Future of Feeling Good

  • Writer: horizonshiftlab
    horizonshiftlab
  • Jun 26
  • 13 min read

Updated: Aug 1

A woman smiling, hands on cheeks, wearing a white top. Sunlight highlights her face, conveying happiness. Background is dark and blurred.
Source: Maria Orlova via pexels.com

What truly makes us happy, and how can we cultivate this essential emotion in a rapidly changing world? We kick off their new theme on behavior science by diving into the future of happiness. We explore fascinating scientific advancements like memory manipulation for therapeutic purposes, alongside the profound philosophical questions these technologies raise about our emotional landscape. And then pivot to the crucial idea that happiness isn't just a state to be achieved, but a skill to be learned and practiced – advocating for its formal education alongside traditional subjects. Drawing on the latest World Happiness Report, we uncover powerful insights about the predictive power of kindness and benevolence, highlighting how believing in and practicing kindness can lead to greater individual and collective well-being. Tune in for a hopeful and practical discussion on why cultivating compassion, connection and kindness is our pathway to feeling good.





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Episode Transcript:

Raakhee: (00:00)

Hello and welcome to Signal Shift with me, Raakhee and Lana. We are beginning a journey into a topic very dear to me and that's behavior science. It's the world of the brain, mind, emotions, neuroscience and psychology and mental health. I've worked in these areas in the past and remain passionate and committed to continuing my learning in these areas, which it's a critical aspect of our lives, of our futures.


It's a part of ourselves that we tend to only focus on when something needs fixing or we want to feel better than we do. But it's actually something that is a part of our lives as much as our physical health is, which means it needs daily focus. If we pay attention to the food we eat so well in terms of nutrition, mean, we care about what we intake with every meal. We care about physical exercise.


I think all at least try to prioritize it somewhere in our lives with no debate about it, right? Or its importance. Equally the cultivation of our mind, how it works, how we behave and respond to the world, how we adapt and change behaviors requires and will require a similar degree of focus and importance in our lives.


I think trends in the last decade showcases the popularity of psychology books in terms of narcissism. People like holistic psychologists with a cult-like following. All the neuroscience of everything being a standard module. ⁓ And that's why at Horizon Shift Lab, we consider behavior science, behavior change, mindset, resilience, and more as an actual pillar, a theme of its own, something to focus on on its own. And of course, it weaves its thread, I think, in everything we've spoken about, right? It sits there, but it needs to be pulled out and spoken about ⁓ just as importantly and equally. So ⁓ if we think about, for example, future careers and jobs, right, and the importance, I mean, I'm pretty sure it's going to be one of the favorite themes of the year. You know, it certainly is for me. And such a big question.


I mean, gosh, that world's going to change, right? So we have a whole lot of interesting episodes there. But if you think about a theme like that, everything we practically learned about all these future changes and future jobs and what to do, they're going to require the support of what we're going to learn now in this month's theme. for it's execution and success, right? They're going to have to go together.


So this is what this month's theme is going to be about. And today, with the very first episode, we wanted to talk about ⁓ an element of our behaviors, probably the most yearned emotion, maybe. And that's happiness. Who doesn't want to be happy, right? Who doesn't want happiness? ⁓ yeah, Lana, you and I are both typically, I think, very happy people. are typically always smiling.


And so here we are again, kind of doing that right now. So yeah, I think it's going to be a good one today and a special one today. Lana, what signals do you have around happiness?


Lana: (03:21)

Yeah, this was a fun one to think about, especially something like the future of happiness. And this is a fun topic to do with you, given your experience and expertise and interest in this. ⁓ But one angle that I thought was super interesting and really fascinating was around, there's a lot of scientific progress happening right now around memory manipulation.


And so both strengthening memories, which will help people with Alzheimer's, for example, or with brain disease or brain injuries, but then also weakening or even suppressing memories, for example, for PTSD treatment. And so this idea that we can manipulate our memories kind of opens up like a huge set of questions.


Like when I thought about it, a lot of my favorite movies and like TV shows really explore this idea, right? Like I really love Memento, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you know, like I love Severance, like, and so this whole concept, I just find it like endlessly fascinating. And I think, you know, some of the power of science fiction is that we can explore some of these implications of ⁓ what could happen if we had these abilities, and especially how it ties into our emotional lives, how deeply memory and happiness, or memory and suffering are connected.


And then on the other hand, we also have, you know, in this world where everything is like increasingly monitored and recorded, right? Like, even if we forget something, our AI agents won't, right? Like, everything is super documented. And then depending on how you want to document like your inner life, right? So there's, there's kind of like,some implications with that as well, right? And there's a very, ⁓ I think it was like in season one of Black Mirror, they had this like brain device, which was like a memory that implant in your brain that could replay every moment of your life. And so that's another like science fiction angle. But anyway, I think that, you know, just thinking about the future of happiness and, you know, thinking about the connection of that with memory and our ability to control memory, and even if that's digital memories, just thinking through what that could mean for us, I thought was an interesting way to look at the future of happiness.


Raakhee: (06:25)

Wow, that is a very fascinating angle. I love that. And yes, you're so right, Lana. I've seen some of the headlines, right? So it's certainly a field that is being explored a lot. And I'm sure we're going to see stuff around that. mean, we've spoken about how people are preserving their pets with preserving personalities. We've got digital avatars, and now we've got memory manipulation.


And I love the link to this idea of happiness. I mean, it raises this big philosophical question, which I love Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as well. I love it. I've not seen Severance. ⁓ man, I need to get on top of that. I distinctly remember the part in Eternal Sunshine where, you know, with a loop kind of when she meets him again, kind of repeats and even that conversation almost.


And I guess that question that sort of arises and which is...


We can remove a memory, we can remove a bad memory, we can even create false good memories. But then life is always like the next moment is happening and the next moment is happening where we could create a new bad memory or a new good memory. You know what I mean? it's totally there's something about like past, but then life is also happening and you can't escape that. And then is happiness tied to the past or the present or the future?


And this goes into a bit of the mindfulness


Because as much as we all might recognize mindfulness and its importance, very few of us have mastered that. So we are tethered in the past and the future to our happiness, and we grapple with that all the time. Nice one, Lana. OK, I'll jump to my signal.


my first signal of the day was this notion of we have to cultivate happiness. That, you know, it's not a state that's like either there or it's not, it may be dependent on things like the past and the future, but


Either ways, we still have to work on it. We have to cultivate it. We have to figure it out. The problem is, with a lot of this, is that we aren't taught it. We never taught about happiness, how to cultivate it, how do you do it, that you should. It's just assumed that it is a state that something will make you happy, and then you're happy. And a lot of the happiness that we then rely on is getting something. So I get the handbag or even I come home after work and then I'm not at work and I'm in my environment and we get these dopamine hits, right? These rewards. And it's really not about that, right? Happiness is, it's about the longer term management of dopamine and serotonin in kind of long-term ways. And that's why social media is so damaging, which I hope everyone is also learning about and trying to cultivate a different relationship with it because it does mess with your neurotransmitters. The science has proven that. But kids need to be taught this, right?


my signal is education around happiness, I think, is going to grow just as much as we learn tax. And we talk about learning about tax and finance. We need to learn about happiness, right? And what's amazing is in the last couple of years, in last decade, there's so many short courses on the science of happiness that you can take, right? Berkeley has an edX course, the Greater Good Science Center has one, and there's several short ones.


There's interesting things like memory manipulation coming our way, but I still think the education of this, the focus on it, bringing it into schools and making this a module of learning in our lives is very important. In 2023, Centenary University launched a Master of Arts in happiness. It's the first of its kind. And it's by a Harvard professor who ran really popular courses in positive psychology and those sorts of things.


I have spoken about how, know, Yuval Nohari said that philosophy might be the best next degree in the age of AI, right? Yeah, yeah. Because so much of the technical and the scientific will be outsourced, right? And we won't be able to compute data as fast as our chip can, all right? But all the human questions like. It's like when you type a philosophy question, it's like, we'll give you something from a book. But it can't be computed the way it can other things. That's still very much human. And happiness is still very much human. And so I think happiness falls in that category too. And so we might see people who are like, yeah, we want to become happiness resilience officers or just happiness officers. We know we have wellness officers.


But I think we may see a specialization into the happiness realm and roles there and more education and formalization of that.


Lana: (11:22)

I absolutely love that. I think that really, I think that does kind of connect to the next signal that I was going to mention. This is the 2025 World Happiness Report.


And so we just released this and their findings was one of the big findings from this year is that belief in the kindness of others is more predictive of happiness than income. And so they had a study and it was all over the world. They conducted this study about lost wallets. And so they're measuring what people believed, like whether people believed that their lost wallet would be returned, and then the actual like return. And so they found that people are very pessimistic about the kindness of their communities, because actual rates of wallet return were twice as high as what people expected.


So, but those that believed that others would return their lost wallet, that's like a strong predictor of population happiness. So, Finland, again, the eighth year in a row won happiest country. And so, Finland and the other Nordic nations, they both expected their wallets to be returned. And their wallets were returned. And so there's something there about kindness, you know, that it's saying like, if you, if you believe, like, that your community is kind, you feel like a sense of peace, right? A sense of contentment, like a sense of happiness, because you know, basically that you are that you're safe, that your community's got your back.


And it benefits everyone, right? Like it benefits you if you're the one that's doing a random act of kindness, it benefits the receiver, and then it has these ripple effects as well.


I just think having this reminder, right, that like how important it is and how critical these things are, maybe to your point of like cultivating happiness, like this is a strategy, right? This is a way to cultivate it.


Raakhee: (14:01)

I love it. I love it, Lana. Yeah, my signal is going to speak directly to this. It's almost the same, but I had set it up a little differently. So I'll still speak to it. But I think it's pretty amazing that we both came to this place. It's almost like we got there together, is awesome.


I think people are always, always more good and more kind than we think. Even the negativity that we experience, there's neuroscience to it. It's just the brain's protective mechanism. And if we know that and we learn that, then we start to step back and say, is that the truth? Is that the filter that a protective brain applies? there's a saying that we have, we have a primitive brain or primitive tools, mental tools for a modern age. And so it really hurts us in a different time in the world because we are not fighting for scarce resources.


And looking in the World Happiness Report again, found things like, and this is from an older report, right? But it spoke about place. On what they're measuring right now, it's like, yes, it's the Finland and the Swedes and Norway, Switzerland, right? Those countries are up there because they do have it easier in a certain sense in terms of modern life with certain resources.


But there's deeper questions here. And in the World Happiness Report 2018, they split the responses between where people were kind of, because it's a question of where you're born and the country you've moved to.


And they looked at that then independently and split that between the locally and foreign-born populations in each country for the 2018 report. And they found the happiness rankings to be the same for the two groups, which I thought was very fascinating. And I don't know what the latest data is, but at this point in time when they did do this exercise, that's what they found. In some cases, there was some continuing influence from source country happiness, some tendency for migrants to move to happier countries naturally, right?


But among the 20 happiest countries in that report, the average happiness for the locally born was just like 0.2 points higher than for the foreign born. very interesting when we think about the idea of moving and how much we lose and how hard that is.


But I think you gain a lot, right? And I think that shows in this, in the equalization, which is really interesting.


Then there was gender. And this is interesting. And this is more the latest data. But in 2021 and 2023, negative emotions were in every region more prevalent for females than males, with almost everywhere the gender gap being larger at higher ages. And I really tied that back to women and the roles we take on and the burden of work, which we speak about so much.


Which is just, it's unfair, right? We know this, it's a fact, right? we play two to three times the roles that men typically do in society between child bearers, home carers, home keepers, ⁓ food makers, and still having careers and jobs, yeah, I still am in awe on how this gets done by so many women.


Gender affects happiness in ways we might not have thought, right? ⁓ But the thing that I came down to say, okay, well, that's not gonna be fixed easily. I can't really control either that lever of place or gender too much. Yeah, but what about behaviors? And this is where I found, Lana, where we kind of came to the same space and what the report said, which is,post-COVID increases in benevolence were basically larger for all populations. But interestingly enough, particularly for millennials and Gen Z, who are more likely than their predecessors to help others in need. I think it's amazing. And I think it speaks to everything you were speaking about, about kindness and benevolence as major contributors to happiness. And I think a generation that now has less resources knows they can rely less on things and upward mobility or status symbols. ⁓ You have to look in different ways and have to support each other very differently through these challenges. So I think it was really, yeah, that was exciting for me. was like, yes, that is what we should be doing. That is where we should be going.


So great to hear that about our generation and the Gen Zs as well. But I came right back to kindness and benevolence, right? And just that being, that's a behavior and that we can control. And so for as much as our happiness is in our control, then it really serves us to be kind. It serves us. It serves us to be benevolent and to give. And I think if we all start doing it, there's going to be multiplier effects.


Yeah, that's where I landed.


In LA with the fires this year, we had one of the richest areas and really a middle class to lower income area that were both literally wiped out. You know, and kind of this cross section of let's just help whoever, it doesn't matter. Everyone needs a different kind of help.


As a city and I know for maybe other people, suddenly people called out Hollywood in the privilege. There was a narrative, but I know that locally within the state and I think the country, was like, it's painful, dot, dot, dot. And we help and we come together and it was pretty amazing to see. And I think even that thread still remains there because we all know that like, you we won.


We are one, my husband always says this, right? ⁓ Whenever we talk about anyone being homeless or somebody is sleeping in their car, we see this a lot at places like our library. You're one paycheck away from being that person or one incident. So yeah, so kindness is gonna get us through. We need to give it and we're gonna need it. So yeah.


And Lana and I are both getting emotional at the end of this happiness episode. So we'll keep it short today. I think with that, we'll close for today on a happy note, a call for more kindness. And yeah, let us know how you cultivate happiness and what you're doing to be kind and how you receive acts of kindness. Receiving is also important. So please share with us. think YouTube's a great place to add your comments. So go like, subscribe, add your comments, and we will see you next week. Bye for now.


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