In his brilliant book,
Thinking, Fast and Slow,
Nobel Prize Winner
Daniel Kahneman writes that we effectively have two selves, an experiencing self, and a remembering self. The experiencing self is the one that is here right now, experiencing what is happening to us at this time. The remembering self is the self that evaluates our past experience. The catch is that it is the remembering self that makes nearly all of our decisions, based on our memories. The problem is that our memories deceive us in various ways.
Kahneman gives this instructive example. A man listened raptly to a long symphony on a disc that was scratched near the end, producing a shocking sound. He reported that the bad ending had ruined the whole experience. But the experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. The experiencing self had had an experience that was almost entirely good and the bad end could not undo it because it had already happened.
Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living. Crucially, it is the one that makes decisions.
Odd as it may seem, when I make decisions, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me. In effect, the wrong self is running my life.
What we learn from the past is to maximise the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experiences. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.
With regard to holidays, Kahneman says that there are two distinct industries, one that caters to the remembering self and the other to the experiencing self. The first offers tourism and adventure, the second relaxation and pleasure at a resort. The first offers lasting memories, the second offers pleasant relaxation.
I have noticed the way that my remembering self over-rides my experiencing self. While climbing a mountain I sometimes ask myself, "Am I enjoying this moment?" The answer is usually no, as climbing is tough work, not pleasure. The pleasure comes briefly at the top and in surveying the views. Yet, I still want to climb more mountains because the experience is memorable. Also, my memory edits out the long hard slog to the top, while emphasizing the summit.
Can we make even the simplest, most trivial decision, without recourse to memory? I think only reflex reactions, such as removing our hand from a hot stove, bypass memory. Even to choose vanilla in preference to chocolate is based on our past experience.
As for why the remembering self is an unreliable judge of experience, Kahneman gives two factors. The first is the peak-end rule. We over-value the end of the experience as well as focusing too much on the brief peaks and troughs. The second is duration neglect: the duration of an unpleasant procedure has no effect on the post-factum rating of its painfulness.
The peak-end rule applies to divorces, where the two people focus on the painful end of the relationship, rather than the years that preceded it, which may have contained much happiness.
Kahneman is not saying that we have two separate selves. His point is that, when making decisions, we are not in the moment. Instead, we are in the mode of using memory to decide what to do. The experiencing self cannot be interrogated directly, only indirectly through memory, with all its flaws.
Someone suggested we can avoid the tyranny of the remembering self by practising mindfulness, but I think this does not help. The problem does not relate to consciousness but to decision-making. Simply put, to make a decision we almost always need to refer to the past and hence must work with memories.
The mystics tell us to be here now, ie to be in the moment, rather than to reference the past. Yet we cannot do this unless we lose our memories, which would make us helpless. The abilty to recognise objects and our surroundings is something that we learn and it relies on memory. Nor are we the only ones. The ant remembers the location of its nest, the ant-eater remembers the members of its own family, and the rabbit remembers that foxes are dangerous but sparrows are not. Memory is vital to animals as well as to humans.
I thought of a possible remedy for Kahneman's tyranny of the remembering self. We need to compensate for the systematic ways in which our memory distorts our experience. We can do so by giving more emphasis to duration, downplaying the importance of the end of an experience, and focussing more on the average, rather than on the highs and lows. Another important strategy is to anchor the memory of the present experience for later reference, eg ask ourselves, "How does this feel right now?" Keeping a diary, especially if we update it soon after the event, is another way to counter the distortions of memory.
Of course, our memories fail us in many more ways in addition to those that Kahneman has studied scientifically. We simply forget most of what happens to us, including some important things. Memory is a summarising function. It removes details and presents us with a capsule description of what happened. We have little control over this largely unconscious process. This unreliable faculty called memory is what frames our reality.
Without our memories we are nothing. All our knowledge, every skill, our ability to speak, the ability to recognise objects, and our identity exist only because of memory. The abillity to think is dependent on memory, as otherwise we have nothing to think about. Even instinct only works in the context that perception and memory provide, eg in avoiding predators and other dangers.
So there is little hope of escaping the tyranny of memory. In a sense, we are obliged to live our lives backwards.
