The ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’

Over decades of research and experimentation, Kahneman identified a schism in the way people experience wellbeing. In his bestselling memoir, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), he articulates this dichotomy in terms of the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’. The experiencing self describes our cognition as it exists in the ‘psychological present’. That present, Kahneman estimates, lasts for around three seconds, meaning an average human life comprises around 600 million of such fragments. How we feel in this three-second window denotes our level of happiness in any given moment.

The remembering self, by contrast, describes how the mind metabolises all of those moments in the rear-view mirror. The sensation resulting from this second metric would be best described, not as happiness, but rather ‘life satisfaction’.

Kahneman’s crucial observation was that the way we recall events is invariably divorced from the experience itself. One might expect the memory of, say, witnessing the Northern Lights to directly correlate with our feelings at the time — to comprise an aggregation of the experiencing self’s emotional responses to sensory stimuli. Instead, the remembering self is susceptible to all kinds of ‘cognitive illusions’. In its urge to weave discrete experiences into a desirable narrative, the memory will edit and elide, embellish and deceive. The actual sensations, and, by extension, our true sense of how we felt, are lost forever. We are left with only an adulterated residue. ‘This is the tyranny of the remembering self,’ Kahneman wrote.

Henry Wismayer