The Construction of Experience

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I think to experience something is easy, just be some place, see something, taste something, touch something... We use our senses to experience things, and then what that experience leave to us? Things we experienced leave something in us. What we see, hear and feel, where we have been only last for a short of period of time, and then are gone. What have left in us from those experience are ours.  

From the APA dictionary, experience is defined as 1. an event that is actually lived through, as opposed to one that is imagined or thought about; 2. the present content of consciousness; 3. a stimulus that has resulted in learning.

Going through life, we have experienced many things. Through those experiences, we may become more knowledgable and wiser. The lessons learned from our experience may let us not make the same mistake again. Through our experience, we may become calmer and slow to act, just like things may not be that interesting and exciting any more.

Event cognition, i.e. how people perceive, remember, think about and respond to events, is an approach to study our experience. Research revealed that our cognition uses structured representation of events (called event models) to capture information. Richmond & Zack argued that event models are important components of human mental activities, and can be constructed to enable the cognitive systems to more effectively predict the trajectory of everyday activity. Although a particular event may determine how people perceive, remember, think about and respond to the event, we all agree that each of us may react to the event differently. The potential of constructing experience is interesting and may contribute to optimize the outcomes of experience. Experience construction is an action and requires effort to build, connect and make it meaningful (i.e. be conscious and be active to stimulate). 

Resources
Richmond, L. L., & Zacks, J. M. (2017). Constructing Experience: Event Models from Perception to Action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(12), 962-980. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.08.005 

  



      

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