While catching up on skype a friend of mine recommended a TED Talk that he found in the past couple weeks about the difference between events as they are remembered and experienced and then I remembered… yes, i wrote a blog post on that!

This is the value of spontaneously revisiting things: you will almost always find something new. Today I realized what gives the remembering-self its ‘tyranny,’ as Kahneman calls it, is our trust, self-trust. 

The remembering self is endowed with hindsight that sometimes allows us to see variables that were hidden from the experiencing self. This is why the remembering-self is so valuable. It helps us to better understand the present moment by affording us additional wisdom about why situations, people, and feelings change. In other cases, this process becomes less useful when our remembering-self allows us to invent those hidden variables. At the point when that additional wisdom is not yet absolutely apparent to us, we make assumptions about what must have been true despite the experiencing-self’s experience. It is in that moment we mistake those assumptions for the wisdom of hindsight that it is possible to lead the self as a whole into a most erroneous sense of truth.

All of this brings me back to my original post that extolled the virtues of the experiencing self. While hindsight is a valuable asset afforded by the remembering-self, i think the experiencing self can help keep us honest and true to the way events were really experienced. Maybe it is in finding a balance between these two entities that we can move forward as one whole self.