Kahneman: Yes. Psychologists distinguish between a "System 1" and a "System 2," which control our actions. System 1 represents what we may call intuition. It tirelessly provides us with quick impressions, intentions and feelings. System 2, on the other hand, represents reason, self-control and intelligence.

SPIEGEL: In other words, our conscious self?

Kahneman: Yes. System 2 is the one who believes that it's making the decisions. But in reality, most of the time, System 1 is acting on its own, without your being aware of it. It's System 1 that decides whether you like a person, which thoughts or associations come to mind, and what you feel about something. All of this happens automatically. You can't help it, and yet you often base your decisions on it.

SPIEGEL: And this System 1 never sleeps?

Kahneman: That's right. System 1 can never be switched off. You can't stop it from doing its thing. System 2, on the other hand, is lazy and only becomes active when necessary. Slow, deliberate thinking is hard work. It consumes chemical resources in the brain, and people usually don't like that. It's accompanied by physical arousal, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, activated sweat glands and dilated pupils …

SPIEGEL: In the second part of your book, you deal with the question of why we can't even rely on our memory. You claim, for example, that when a person has suffered, in retrospect, it doesn't matter to him or her how long the pain lasted. That sounds rather absurd.

Kahneman: The findings are clear. We demonstrated this in patients who had had a colonoscopy. In half of the cases, we asked the doctors to wait a while after having finished before removing the tube from the patients. In other words, for them, the unpleasant procedure was prolonged. And that, it turns out, greatly improved the scores that people gave to the experience. The patients clearly based their global assessments of the procedure on how it ended, and they perceived the gradual subsidence of pain as being much more pleasant. Many other experiments arrived at similar results. In some cases, subjects had to tolerate noise and, in others, they had to hold their hand in cold water. The issue is not memory: People know how long they had to endure the pain, so their memory is correct. But their evaluation of the experience is unaffected by duration.

SPIEGEL: How can that be?

Kahneman: Every experience is given a score in your memory: good, bad, worse. And that's completely independent of its duration. Only two things matter here: the peaks -- that is, the worst or best moments -- and the outcome. How did it end up?

SPIEGEL: In other words, our memory also informs what we expect from the future?

Kahneman: Exactly. This can be demonstrated with a small thought experiment I sometimes ask people to do: Suppose you go on a vacation and, at the end, you get an amnesia drug. Of course, all your photographs are also destroyed. Would you take the same trip again? Or would you choose one that's less challenging? Some people say they wouldn't even bother to go on the vacation. In other words, they prefer to forsake the pleasure, which, of course, would remain completely unaffected by its being erased afterwards. So they are clearly not doing it for the experience; they are doing it entirely for the memory of it.

SPIEGEL: Why is it so important for us to imagine our lives as a collection of stories?

Kahneman: Because that's all we keep from life. It's going by, and you are left with stories. That's why people exaggerate the importance of memories.

Kahneman: Yes, our lives are governed by the remembering self. Even when we're planning something, we anticipate the memories we expect to get out of it. The experiencing self, which may have to put up with a lot in return, has no say in the matter. Besides, what the experiencing self has enjoyed can be completely devaluated in retrospect. Someone once told me that he had recently listened to a wonderful symphony but, unfortunately, at the end, there was a terrible screeching sound on the record. He said that ruined the whole experience. But, of course, the only thing it ruined was the memory of the experience, (which was) still a happy experience.

So instead of being right here with the experience, I'm often (...) building a future memory/story to tell others rather than living the moment.

Kahneman: Yes. The pupil normally fluctuates in size, mostly depending on incoming light. But, when you give someone a mental task, it widens and remains surprisingly stable -- a strange circumstance that proved to be very useful to us. In fact, the pupils reflect the extent of mental effort in an incredibly precise way. I have never done any work in which the measurement is so precise.

Kahneman: You just have to make sure that the right picture is hanging above the cash box. If a pair of eyes is looking back at them from the wall, people will contribute twice as much as they do when the picture shows flowers. People who feel observed behave more morally.

Kahneman: Yes, there is even a theory that deals with the fear of death; it's called "Terror Management Theory." You can influence people by just reminding them of something -- it can be death; it can be money. Any symbol that is associated with money, even if it's just dollar signs as a screensaver, ensures that people will pay more attention to their own interests than they will want to help others.

We can't help but look at life retrospectively, and we want it to look good in retrospect

People who ruminate have a very high incidence of depression, because it depletes the system so much.

Now I'm curious.

CCC, I don't know if you know more about the topic, but what do you think that happens when that rumination is about the rumination itself {constant attentiveness, mindfulness or contemplation} like in Actualist or Buddhist practices? What happens to the brain when it engages in this kind of conscious and voluntary metacognition and self-awareness? Is the energy consumption similar to the automatic and traditional rumination?

The default mode network and self-referential processes in depression

Abstract
The recently discovered default mode network (DMN) is a group of areas in the human brain characterized, collectively, by functions of a self-referential nature. In normal individuals, activity in the DMN is reduced during nonself-referential goal-directed tasks, in keeping with the folk-psychological notion of losing one's self in one's work. Imaging and anatomical studies in major depression have found alterations in both the structure and function in some regions that belong to the DMN, thus, suggesting a basis for the disordered self-referential thought of depression. Here, we sought to examine DMN functionality as a network in patients with major depression, asking whether the ability to regulate its activity and, hence, its role in self-referential processing, was impaired. To do so, we asked patients and controls to examine negative pictures passively and also to reappraise them actively. In widely distributed elements of the DMN [ventromedial prefrontal cortex prefrontal cortex (BA 10), anterior cingulate (BA 24/32), lateral parietal cortex (BA 39), and lateral temporal cortex (BA 21)], depressed, but not control subjects, exhibited a failure to reduce activity while both looking at negative pictures and reappraising them. Furthermore, looking at negative pictures elicited a significantly greater increase in activity in other DMN regions (amygdala, parahippocampus, and hippocampus) in depressed than in control subjects. These data suggest depression is characterized by both stimulus-induced heightened activity and a failure to normally down-regulate activity broadly within the DMN. These findings provide a brain network framework within which to consider the pathophysiology of depression.

Abstract

Many philosophical and contemplative traditions teach that “living in the moment” increases happiness. However, the default mode of humans appears to be that of mind-wandering, which correlates with unhappiness, and with activation in a network of brain areas associated with self-referential processing. We investigated brain activity in experienced meditators and matched meditation-naive controls as they performed several different meditations (Concentration, Loving-Kindness, Choiceless Awareness). We found that the main nodes of the default-mode network (medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices) were relatively deactivated in experienced meditators across all meditation types. Furthermore, functional connectivity analysis revealed stronger coupling in experienced meditators between the posterior cingulate, dorsal anterior cingulate, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (regions previously implicated in self-monitoring and cognitive control), both at baseline and during meditation. Our findings demonstrate differences in the default-mode network that are consistent with decreased mind-wandering. As such, these provide a unique understanding of possible neural mechanisms of meditation.

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thanks Felipe.