Experiencing vs Remembering self

As humans we go through experiences which are temporal in nature. When we are going through an experience, there is just the experience in real time. The experience might be of pain or pleasure, good or bad. But there is no element of recollection from memory or imagining future. It is what it is. Each experience helps us learn and will have an associated utility for us as an individual. And surely if we could quantify the utility of our experiences, it would help a lot in increasing our well being. This is where the trouble starts. We not only experience, but we also remember. And what we remember is not the entire experience but selected portions of it. Parts of an extended experience that may have had quite a dramatic impact on our psyche when they happened but don’t quite necessarily represent the entire experience.

A study was conducted amongst patients that had gone through two surgical procedure. The first was a 30 minutes procedure with the first 20 minutes being painful but the last 10 minutes not painful at all. The second was a 20 minutes procedure with the first 10 minutes being painless but the last 10 minutes being painful. After having gone through both the procedures, patients were asked to choose which procedure was less painful for them? Surprisingly majority chose the first procedure as less painful. How an experience ends has an outsized impact on the remembering self and its evaluation of the entire episode eclipsing the reality in totality.

It is very hard to remain objective under the influence of this remembering self that overwhelmingly plays the judge leading us to wrong conclusions in almost every aspect of life, most notably being human relationships. It is so easy for us to ruin a relationship because of the overwhelming influence of a few episodes on our remembering self causing us to completely ignore what had gone well.

It is hard to be objective, analyze on the basis of facts. It is against the natural construct of human psychology. So take a step back when you draw conclusions from your experiences. Chances are your remembering self is misguiding you.

Credits: Daniel Kanheman (Thinking fast and slow)