Digging around in the mind

[firecat]

Interesting book review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html">"Two Brains Running" by Jim Holt (a review of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman)

Excerpt (emphasis mine:

What does it mean to be happy? When Kahneman first took up this question, in the mid 1990s, most happiness research relied on asking people how satisfied they were with their life on the whole. But such retrospective assessments depend on memory, which is notoriously unreliable. What if, instead, a person’s actual experience of pleasure or pain could be sampled from moment to moment, and then summed up over time? Kahneman calls this “experienced” well-being, as opposed to the “remembered” well-being that researchers had relied upon. And he found that these two measures of happiness diverge in surprising ways. What makes the “experiencing self” happy is not the same as what makes the “remembering self” happy. In particular, the remembering self does not care about duration—how long a pleasant or unpleasant experience lasts. Rather, it retrospectively rates an experience by the peak level of pain or pleasure in the course of the experience, and by the way the experience ends.
...
Kahneman’s conclusion, radical as it sounds, may not go far enough. There may be no experiencing self at all. Brain-scanning experiments by Rafael Malach and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, for instance, have shown that when subjects are absorbed in an experience, like watching the “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the parts of the brain associated with self-consciousness are not merely quiet, they’re actually shut down (“inhibited”) by the rest of the brain. The self seems simply to disappear. Then who exactly is enjoying the film? And why should such egoless pleasures enter into the decision calculus of the remembering self?

This intersects in interesting ways with my studies and experiences in Buddhism, especially the notion that the mind constructs the self, and the self isn't some kind of unchanging core. (A metaphor I found useful is that the mind constructs the self the way a hand constructs a fist.)

Also I've known for much of my life that what I want to do in the moment and what I want to have done are different, and I frequently noodle about how to reconcile them or rebalance the amount of energy I spend on each. My behavior tends to mostly toward what I want to do in the moment, and toward habit.

Comments

[firecat]

I've tended to think that what makes unpleasant things harder to do, for me, is a personality trait set of "contrary" + "questioning" + "lazy" + "low pain threshold."

What sometimes works for me is to take the "contrary" and "questioning" and use them to ask myself "OK, so WHY don't I like this? Is it really so awful?" Sometimes I discover that I don't mind it that much. (Like being out in the rain.) Sometimes I am able to name what I don't like and just naming it makes it so I don't mind it as much. (I don't like the low level uncertainty involved in making phone calls.) Sometimes naming it sends me down a path of problem solving: "OK, how can I set up my life to have less of this thing in it?" (This is how I decided to go freelance -- I hated several things about working in an office.)

It's interesting how a lot of people think that doing something you don't want to is "being an adult." My childhood had just as much of doing things I didn't want, if not more. And the adults I know aren't better at doing things they hate than the children I know.

Hmm, I sure rambled on a lot...sorry!

[e4q.livejournal.com]

yes! i actually disliked being a child quite a lot for that very reason. i hated the lack of agency.

and i think the discomfort i am finding in my life right now is that historical feeling - lack of choice. however, no matter how bad things get, and they do get bad, there are lots of things i have power over that i didn't as a kid - like i have a dog, i have the heating on when i want. this morning i woke up with a migraine and cystitis. i medicated what i could, bathed when i felt ready, and i will deal with my day as i see fit. sure, it would be nice to have help, but when that help arrives it will be in the shape of my boyfriend who is kind and supportive. can't be bad!

[snippy]

Being a child is doing things you don't want to because somebody else makes you.

Being an adult is doing things you don't want to because you recognize that doing them is both your responsibility and something that will make your life better/easier.

[firecat]

That makes sense, but it still seems that I know a lot of adults who mostly operate on the former principle, and some children who operate a lot on the latter.

[snippy]

After all, it's really about maturity, which is not always correlated with age. I was surely an adult pretty early chronologically.