[originaltext] Everybody talks about happiness these days. I had somebody co

Everybody talks about happiness these days. I had somebody count the number of books with "happiness" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more.(23)There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness.
     (24)The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word "happiness" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things. The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory: basically, it’s between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or happy with your life. And the third is the focusing illusion, and it’s the unfortunate fact that we can’t think about any circumstance that affects our well-being without distorting its importance.
    Now, I’d like to start with an example of a story reported by somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures. He said he’d been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful sound. And then he added, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn’t. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music.
    What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves.(25)There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, and is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life. Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.
23. What does the speaker say about happiness?
24. What is the first cognitive trap mentioned in the recording?
25. What does the speaker say about the experiencing self?