Chapter 5. Experience - Perception, Emotions, and Cognition

"The experiencing self, lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other."

- Daniel Kahneman

This chapter addresses the question: Experience. What is it?

In a book dedicated to experience design, it is only logical to allocate a chapter to the nature of experience. The challenge was how to cover a topic that is like the ocean--enormously wide, deep and rich with mysteries. Despite thinking that spans thousands of years, fields such as neuro science, cognitive, social and organizational psychology, behavioral economics or artificial intelligence did not exist a century ago. Even the academic study of emotions is just a few decades old.

I am a practicing experience strategist, architect, and designer. Although the word "experience" is part of my title, much of what I learned about the physiology, psychology, and philosophy of experience, is self-taught, because my formal education focused primarily on screenwriting...