The Water Table of Memory--Cold Water and the Duality of Happiness (1990s)

The Water Table of Memory--Cold Water and the Duality of Happiness (1990s)

Once in Cold Water, Daniel Kahneman revealed how human "memory" and "experience" follow separate logics. This is not just an experiment. It was also a quiet questioning of the fundamentals of how we feel and talk about happiness.

In the famous "cold water experiment" conducted by Kahneman et al. in the 1990s, subjects were asked to immerse their hands in 14°C water for 60 seconds, or to immerse their hands in 14°C water for 60 seconds, followed by 30 seconds in 15°C water, for a total of 90 seconds. When asked which they would like to experience again, the majority of the subjects, strangely enough, chose the latter, which was supposed to be longer and more uncomfortable. The reason was simple. The reason was simple: the latter had a milder "ending.

This counterintuitive choice supports the concept of the Peak-End Rule. It indicates that people tend to evaluate and remember events based on the "most memorable moment (peak)" and "ending (end)" rather than on the overall experience or average pleasantness or unpleasantness. This law has been applied to medical practice, customer service, and even life planning. Even a painful surgery can be remembered as a "good experience" if the end of the pain can be alleviated. Human beings are beings governed more by impressions than by records.

Underlying this insight is Kahneman's concept of the dual self, the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self. The Experiencing Self is a being that lives "what it is feeling right now. The taste of the meal in front of you, the sound of the wind on your ears, the sharp pain of cold water in your mouth-these are all realities that the Experiencing Self perceives in the moment.

The remembering self, on the other hand, reconstructs these experiences and stores them in memory as stories. It is the work of the remembering self to look back after the trip and say, "That was fun," where the "meaning" and "narratability" of the experience are important. It was precisely this influence of the remembering self that led to the preference in the cold water experiment for a 90-second experience with a relaxed ending, rather than the shorter and more painful 60-second experience.

When we make decisions about our future actions, those decisions are often made by our remembering selves. Where to travel, which restaurant to choose, what kind of life we want to live. But it is always the experiencing self that tastes the consequences. Here lies a deep contradiction in the pursuit of happiness. The sense of living in the present moment often conflicts with the story that will be told later.

Kahneman called this rift "the tension between the story that records life and the person who lives it. We make sense of the world and choose our future based on "how we remember" rather than on actual experience. But this sometimes leads us away from "true happiness. What was revealed in the cold water was a truth more than a psychological law. The two selves, experience and memory. In the chasm between these two selves, our consciousness and life are quietly submerged.