One way or another, we’re all in the experience creation biz, so it’s bracing to realize how bad we are at talking about actual experiences rather than memories. Back when I taught English Lit at U.C. Berkeley, I’d bring three balls to class. “This one,” I’d say holding up a ball, “is the thing we’re reading.” I’d hold up the second. “This one is you, the reader,” then I’d pick up the third. “This one is the artist, whether that’s a single author or a group, whether the creator is somebody with a known biography or anonymous.”
Then I’d juggle.
“The experience of reading,” I’d say while juggling, “is the dynamic interplay among these three things. After you stop reading, you just have this,” and then I’d drop the balls on the table. “Three juggling balls, lying there, inert.” But mostly when we talk about literature, we talk about one or two balls, not all three flying through the air.
We always and only live in the present, haunted by memories of the past and squinting towards an unreachable future (because by the time we get there it’s the present… whoops).
We have analogies for attention—the foundation of experience—but they don’t capture the fullness of our nimble, improvisational, forgetful consciousness. “Attention is like a currency.” We pay attention. We talk about distractions as attentional taxes. “Attention is like light.” We have a spotlight for our deliberate attention, lantern light for our ambient attention, and social media is a strobe light at an epileptic disco.
In quantum physics, the tiniest bits of matter are both waves and particles. Sometimes they act like the wake of a boat cutting through water. Sometimes they act like a ball rolling to a stop after you throw it. Einstein wrote:
It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.
Our different analogies for attention are like this. We have to combine them to sneak up on the whole. For the experiencing self, in the moment, attention is like a wave flowing through water. For the remembering self, attention is like a particle: where the ball came to rest. The ball is still moveable, which is true of our plastic memories that change with age or how we retrieve them or narrate them to others.
Behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman talk about peak/end theory: when our remembering selves look back on an experience to judge it, we evaluate the experience based on whatever the peak was and how it ended. That’s it. Like the tip that conceals most of an iceberg lurking below the cold ocean surface, our memories ignore the vast majority of any experience.
However, this is a goal-oriented sort of remembering: when a researcher asks a subject to tell a story about an experience, the subject generates that story, assembling the narrative on the fly by grabbing the most salient peak/end details from memory. This is different than the kind of remembering that happens when we’re daydreaming, what psychologists call the “default mode” of everyday life.
In other words, there is a vast difference between what we experience and what we can say about it later. This is the Experience Gap. Michael Polayni, the great 20th Century polymath, talked about something similar: “tacit knowledge.”
“We know more than we can tell,” Polanyi said in a famous lecture. His key example: if we see a friend walking towards us on the street we recognize her without being able to describe how we do so. In German, he added, there’s a distinction between two different kinds of knowing: wissen or “knowing what” and können or “knowing how.”
Like tacit knowledge, with Experience Gaps we know we experienced something, and we kinda/sorta remember how we felt about it at the time, but we don’t have access to the full range of what we thought and felt. In part this is because as we have experiences our brains co-create those experiences in collaboration with external reality. The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains this in her wonderful little book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain:
Usually, your brain has several ways to deal with a given situation, and it creates a flurry of predictions and estimates probabilities for each one. Is that rustling sound in the forest due to the wind, an animal, an enemy fighter, or a shepherd? Ultimately in each moment, some prediction is the winner. Often, it’s the prediction that best matches the incoming sense data, but not always. Either way, the winning prediction becomes your action and your sensory experience.
As we experience every moment, our brains frantically hypothesize, synthesize, conclude, and then move to the next hypothesis. Most of each experience goes into a cognitive compost heap filled with other abandoned predictions. Forgetting isn’t just the absence of remembering: it’s an active process where tiny nanomachines in our brains break down the vestiges of experiences not worth keeping.
This is not all building to some vague self-help-y exhortation to live in the moment or to download a mindfulness app. We have no other place to live but in moments. Instead, I want to share my belief that if we are upfront about how little we remember from each moment, how much of the experience iceberg is invisible to us, then we might find ourselves able to explore different stories about ourselves, the world around us, and the other people with whom we share the world.
Here’s a trivial example: when I was a little boy, my favorite color was red. Then, when I was a slightly bigger boy, I learned that my Dad’s favorite color was blue. Since Dad was my male role model, I decided that my favorite color would be blue also. Decades later, as I was choosing a color for a car I was about to get, I found myself gravitating towards the red one. Standing in the dealership, I thought about how very, very many red zippered sweatshirts I own, and how many pairs of red sneakers, and that expensive pair of red Dr. Marten’s I bought on impulse in London. I thought of how most of my favorite superheroes—The Flash, Shazam, Superman, Spider-Man—all wear lots of red. (Batman is an anomaly, but hey, no theory can capture everything.) I even gravitate towards amber beers and red ales, and I prefer red grapes to green. “Huh,” I said. “I guess my favorite color is actually red.”
We desperately need new stories to tell about ourselves and others, to find narratives that bind us together rather than separate us, to seek empathy rather than to see otherness—even if it’s just a story about a favorite color.
Subscribe to The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch to get columns like these—and lots of other goodies—delivered directly to your inbox every Sunday afternoon!
Leave a Reply