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

[e4q.livejournal.com]

also, i think chronic illness probably changes things. or, it has for me. i hardly ever have 'peak' experiences as such any more, since i don't do anything, but when i can enjoy small things i am grateful for their duration.

also, all this is a human preoccupation. i am thinking of the dog. this morning she had to wait an extra two hours to go out, and even then it was to go to the chemist and back, hardly very fun, but she still enjoyed it. she did her business. and now she is outside in the yard chewing a pig's ear. i don't think she would know what a remembered experience even was.

[firecat]

I know dogs remember stuff because some of them come to the animal shelter very afraid of people. But I think it might in the aggregate take less time to teach trust to an abused animal than to teach trust to an abused human.

[e4q.livejournal.com]

that's very true, but it seems to me that they carry it very differently. i think it's more like how we carry PTSD, more visceral than the sort of visual memory our remembering mind does - we have a compulsion to create narratives in a way that is really elaborated.

i knew a dog who interpreted a lot of different stimuli to mean 'postman - must attack' but i don't think he made a story out of it, i think it was much more short form.