This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

In 2008, psychologist Liz Dunn was invited to go on a vacation.

The man she had just started dating and three of his high school buddies wanted to go on a road trip with their girlfriends.

They planned to drive an RV from their home in Vancouver to the Arctic Ocean.

Liz said yes. It seemed like an adventure. It sounded like fun. It felt romantic.

It was a mistake.

I would rank it as probably top three worst vacations ever.

One by one, the other girlfriends decided that an RV trip to go swimming in the Arctic Ocean was not their idea of a good time.

When the RV rolled out of town, it was just Liz and four men who thought they were having the time of their lives.

It was kind of like living through one endless day on this highway that never ended with four Canadian men who were increasingly driving me crazy.

The road trip led Liz to important insights about human nature.

Today, in the latest in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit our 2020 conversation with Liz Dunn and explore the relationship between memory and happiness.

We look at how things that start out fun can turn miserable and how our minds can take miserable experiences and remember them as fun.

Anticipation, memory and the winding road to happiness today on Hidden Brain.

Hidden Brain.

Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia.

Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending.

Liz told me that at one point in the intonational journey to the Arctic Ocean, she decided she'd had enough.

She tried to escape.

Yeah, I think this is one of my low moments of my life.

My phone, my smartphone didn't work there because we were so far north, so I sought out a pay phone.

This was shortly after the waste disposal system in the RV had sprung a leak.

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