A great book on the secret to happiness. I found the message to be simple and wise, but the journey to be unnecessarily long. People get tattoos only to remove them and then curse at having got them in the first place. The mistakes that we make when trying to predict our future selves are l awful, regular, and systematic. Humans beings are the only animals capable of thinking about the future. Seeing the great pyramid of Giza for what it is, is a far greater achievement than actually creating it.
Some events are more pleasurable to imagine than to experience. The main reason why our brains simulate the future is so that we can control the experiences that we have. Because we have a poor recollection of our experiences, we cannot objectively compare a previous state of happiness to a present state. All claims of happiness are subjective.
And are formed from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as context. We will never be able to measure with complete accuracy the subjective experience of someone else in a way that allows us to record the experience, and compare it with that of another.
While all measures of subjective experiences are flawed, the least flawed is the real-time report of the attentive individual. We make decisions about who to marry, where to work, where to retire, and so on based on our beliefs about how we would feel if this event happened. While our lives may not turn out the way that we want, we are confident that if events had gone our way, our happiness would have been great and our troubles few.
But there is a problem with this observation. What you experience of the world is not reality but your interpretation of it. The brain is so good at filling in the details of what you see, hear, and feel that you automatically assume that your brains are right. Answers: yes, yes and yes. Which raises another question: If people who we think should be unhappy are not, is it also possible that some people are happy and don't know it? Clinically speaking, yes. There is a syndrome called alexithymia in which a person experiences the same physiological response associated with an emotion as a normal person, as recorded by an M.
Gilbert is an influential researcher in happiness studies, an interdisciplinary field that has attracted psychologists, economists and other empirically minded researchers, not to mention a lot of interested students. As The Boston Globe recently reported, a course on "positive psychology" taught by one of Gilbert's colleagues is the most popular course at Harvard.
But from the acknowledgments page forward, it's clear Gilbert also fancies himself a comedian. Uh-oh, cringe alert: an academic who cracks wise. But Gilbert's elbow-in-the-ribs social-science humor is actually funny, at least some of the time.
But underneath the goofball brilliance, Gilbert has a serious argument to make about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy. Because of logic-processing errors our brains tend to make, we don't want the things that would make us happy — and the things that we want more money, say, or a bigger house or a fancier car won't make us happy.
Happiness is a subjective emotional state, so when you and I say that we are "extremely happy" we may mean completely different things. Most people would find the idea of being a conjoined twin to be a horrible fate. You couldn't possibly be happy in that condition, right?
Then how come conjoined twins rate themselves as happy as nonconjoined people, Gilbert asks. Is that because they don't know what "real" happiness is? Or are you wrong to think that you couldn't be happy as a conjoined twin? The mistake we make when we momentarily ignore the filling-in trick and unthinkingly accept the validity of our memories and our perceptions is precisely the same mistake we make when we imagine our futures. Research suggests that when people make predictions about their reactions to future events, they tend to neglect the fact that their brains have performed the filling-in trick as an integral part of the act of imagination.
When we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes. In other words, we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out. Studies suggest that describing details of a future event will produce more accurate predictions when compared to those that don't consider the details of a future event.
When we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen.
People misremember their own pasts by recalling that they once thought, did, and said what they now think, do, and say. When people are prevented from feeling emotion in the present, they become temporarily unable to predict how they will feel in the future. The brain considers the perception of reality to be its first and foremost duty, thus your request to borrow the visual cortex for a moment is expressly and summarily denied.
Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. We quickly begin to adapt to repeated experiences, they yield less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility,.
So how do we decide how we will feel about things that are going to happen in the future? The answer is that we tend to imagine how we would feel if those things happened now, and then we make some allowance for the fact that now and later are not exactly the same thing.
Because we naturally use our present feelings as a starting point when we attempt to predict our future feelings, we expect our future to feel a bit more like our present than it actually will. The facts are these: a value is determined by the comparison of one thing with another; b there is more than one kind of comparison we can make in any given instance; and c we may value something more highly when we make one kind of comparison than when we make a different kind of comparison.
These facts suggest that if we want to predict how something will make us feel in the future, we must consider the kind of comparison we will be making in the future and not the kind of comparison we happen to be making in the present. In short, the comparisons we make have a profound impact on our feelings, and when we fail to recognise that the comparisons we are making today are not the comparisons we will make tomorrow, we predictably underestimate how differently we will feel in the future.
Objective stimuli in the world create subjective stimuli in the mind, and it is these subjective stimuli to which people react. The world is this way, we wish the world were that way, and our experience of the world—how we see it, remember it, and imagine it—is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion.
The bottom line is this: The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants. When facts challenge our favoured conclusion, we scrutinise them more carefully and subject them to more rigorous analysis.
The reverse is also true, we seek out information that confirms our preexisting beliefs see Confirmation Bias. For positive views to be credible, they must be based on facts that we believe we have come upon honestly. We accomplish this by unconsciously cooking the facts and then consciously consuming them. Ignorance of our psychological immune systems causes us to mispredict the circumstances under which we will blame others, but it also causes us to mispredict the circumstances under which we will blame ourselves.
To be effective, a defensive system must respond to threats; but to be practical, it must respond only to threats that exceed some critical threshold—which means that threats that fall short of the critical threshold may have a destructive potential that belies their diminutive size. The paradoxical consequence of this fact is that it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.
Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures.
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