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May. 12th, 2006 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taerowynWent to hear Dan Gilbert of the Hedonic Psychology Laboratory (and doesn't that just sound like fun) talk about his book Stumbling on Happiness, which, despite its self-help sounding title, strikes me as a fairly kick-ass book and a fun read. Almost made me consider breaking my no new books rule, but I figure by the time the year is out, it will be out in paperback so it's a win-win. He's quite the comedian for being a scientist...very funny both in person and in prose.
So, if it's not self-help, what's the book about? I'll get to that, but first, just for added fun (and no peeking), let's try a little poll:
[Poll #727228]
Now, no promises on total accuracy here (this is me interpreting my hastily scribbled notes from this evening, but basically, the book is about how bad we are at forecasting the things that will or won't make us happy and to what extent they will do so. As he puts it in the foreword (which he read before further discussing the book) most ( if not all) decisions we make are made "in charitable service to the people we will become," whether that's a second, a minute, a day, a decade etc. from now. But, he points out, like regular children, our "temporal progeny are often thankless," looking back on our past decisions, that we made with the best of intentions, and wondering what the f$#@ we were thinking, and how could we have thought X, Y, and/or Z would make us happy when really it was B and C all along.
One of the things he discusses is how we drastically overestimate the intensity and duration of our future emotional reponses, whether high or low. If, for instance, we were asked to predict how bad we would feel to lose an election, a job, a limb, even a lover...we almost always overestimate how bad we'll feel. It's because, when you get down to it, we are remarkably resilient creatures and, with the exception of the truly catastrophic (his example was seeing your whole family gunned down in front of you), most people can rebound from any loss within about three months.
He made the comparison between your brain's response to optical illusions and this erroneous forecasting by saying they're both "mistakes" that your brain makes, but since they're systematic and follow certain rules and...a few other things I can't recall...they can be considerd "smart" mistakes. He said that when you're looking at optical illusions like, say, The Necker Cube, your brain sees one image first, perhaps a cube with a yellow wall at the back and a red dot in the lower, inner, right-hand corner. Then, as your brain keeps analyzing the picture it goes "Oh! It's also a looks like an open box with a pink exterior and a yellow interior and a red dot on one corner of the outer rim." And then your brain just flips back and forth betweek these views. Now, if you were to be rewarded, say given an M&M, every time you saw the box with the yellow interior, pretty soon, that's the only view you'd see because your brain will have learned, through the reward, that that's the one that "feels" the best...in fact, according to Gilbert, it would become impossible for your brain to see the image any other way.
Well, your brain can interpret events in tons and tons of ways, but it will often settle on the most "rewarding", ie the one that "feels" the best. Our brain's are remarkably good at coming to think of a situation in a way that makes you feel good. Say your girlfriend and you get in a fight that ends with her throwing her engagement away and storming off. She It won't take long before you start thinking she really wasn't that pretty, her habit of snapping her gum was too annoying for words and man, what were you doing with her in the first place? Whether you call this "coping" or "rationalizing" or what have you, it's your brain getting you adjusted to the situation.
However, we're not very good at relying on this facet of our brain when it comes to decision-making for our future, which is where the poll above comes in. Most people, when asked whether they'd rather lose their eyesight or have chronic lower back pain for the rest of their life, choose the back pain. But, in reality, your brain is going to much more easily cope and adapt with the loss of eyesight than constant pain...it's pain...it hurts...chronically. If you ask people who are blind vs. people with chronic lower back pain how happy they are, the blind people are much happier with their lives. Their brains have learned to adapt to the new situation. They don't have the same kind of life as you or I, but it's not worse. Sure, we can do things they can't, but they can do things we can't. Whereas, the chronic lower back pain people are in pain...always...doesn't make it all that easy to be happy.
Anyway, he went into a lot more aspects of our failure to predict happiness... Stuff like how things we prize like variety and the freedom to change our mind are not always good things when it comes to us trying to figure out what will make us happy or why we tend to repeatedly do things even though we already know they won't make us happy cause we've done them before and been unhappy. He even explains the mystery of why everybody feels they have the misbegotten power to get into a line at the grocery store (or at a toll booth) and suddenly have it be the slowest moving line there is...
Fun stuff like that, but I'm not going to go into it cause a) I'm tired and b) I have to leave SOME of it a mystery. Kinda like he did when he told us that there is a way around our brains' ineptitude about predicting our future happiness and that he not only goes into it in the book, but also explains why most people dismiss it immediately....he just refused to tell us. (I, of course, went to another bookstore and took a peak...interesting argument and for it, and a bunch of other reasons, you should totally check out the book)
So, if it's not self-help, what's the book about? I'll get to that, but first, just for added fun (and no peeking), let's try a little poll:
[Poll #727228]
Now, no promises on total accuracy here (this is me interpreting my hastily scribbled notes from this evening, but basically, the book is about how bad we are at forecasting the things that will or won't make us happy and to what extent they will do so. As he puts it in the foreword (which he read before further discussing the book) most ( if not all) decisions we make are made "in charitable service to the people we will become," whether that's a second, a minute, a day, a decade etc. from now. But, he points out, like regular children, our "temporal progeny are often thankless," looking back on our past decisions, that we made with the best of intentions, and wondering what the f$#@ we were thinking, and how could we have thought X, Y, and/or Z would make us happy when really it was B and C all along.
One of the things he discusses is how we drastically overestimate the intensity and duration of our future emotional reponses, whether high or low. If, for instance, we were asked to predict how bad we would feel to lose an election, a job, a limb, even a lover...we almost always overestimate how bad we'll feel. It's because, when you get down to it, we are remarkably resilient creatures and, with the exception of the truly catastrophic (his example was seeing your whole family gunned down in front of you), most people can rebound from any loss within about three months.
He made the comparison between your brain's response to optical illusions and this erroneous forecasting by saying they're both "mistakes" that your brain makes, but since they're systematic and follow certain rules and...a few other things I can't recall...they can be considerd "smart" mistakes. He said that when you're looking at optical illusions like, say, The Necker Cube, your brain sees one image first, perhaps a cube with a yellow wall at the back and a red dot in the lower, inner, right-hand corner. Then, as your brain keeps analyzing the picture it goes "Oh! It's also a looks like an open box with a pink exterior and a yellow interior and a red dot on one corner of the outer rim." And then your brain just flips back and forth betweek these views. Now, if you were to be rewarded, say given an M&M, every time you saw the box with the yellow interior, pretty soon, that's the only view you'd see because your brain will have learned, through the reward, that that's the one that "feels" the best...in fact, according to Gilbert, it would become impossible for your brain to see the image any other way.
Well, your brain can interpret events in tons and tons of ways, but it will often settle on the most "rewarding", ie the one that "feels" the best. Our brain's are remarkably good at coming to think of a situation in a way that makes you feel good. Say your girlfriend and you get in a fight that ends with her throwing her engagement away and storming off. She It won't take long before you start thinking she really wasn't that pretty, her habit of snapping her gum was too annoying for words and man, what were you doing with her in the first place? Whether you call this "coping" or "rationalizing" or what have you, it's your brain getting you adjusted to the situation.
However, we're not very good at relying on this facet of our brain when it comes to decision-making for our future, which is where the poll above comes in. Most people, when asked whether they'd rather lose their eyesight or have chronic lower back pain for the rest of their life, choose the back pain. But, in reality, your brain is going to much more easily cope and adapt with the loss of eyesight than constant pain...it's pain...it hurts...chronically. If you ask people who are blind vs. people with chronic lower back pain how happy they are, the blind people are much happier with their lives. Their brains have learned to adapt to the new situation. They don't have the same kind of life as you or I, but it's not worse. Sure, we can do things they can't, but they can do things we can't. Whereas, the chronic lower back pain people are in pain...always...doesn't make it all that easy to be happy.
Anyway, he went into a lot more aspects of our failure to predict happiness... Stuff like how things we prize like variety and the freedom to change our mind are not always good things when it comes to us trying to figure out what will make us happy or why we tend to repeatedly do things even though we already know they won't make us happy cause we've done them before and been unhappy. He even explains the mystery of why everybody feels they have the misbegotten power to get into a line at the grocery store (or at a toll booth) and suddenly have it be the slowest moving line there is...
Fun stuff like that, but I'm not going to go into it cause a) I'm tired and b) I have to leave SOME of it a mystery. Kinda like he did when he told us that there is a way around our brains' ineptitude about predicting our future happiness and that he not only goes into it in the book, but also explains why most people dismiss it immediately....he just refused to tell us. (I, of course, went to another bookstore and took a peak...interesting argument and for it, and a bunch of other reasons, you should totally check out the book)
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-12 08:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-12 08:05 am (UTC)I always thought it's because you only really notice it those times, and not only that, but the times you are waiting longer, you kinda get to spend more time thinking about it. Or I could be way off.
Anywho, I think I'll have to head to the library soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-12 08:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-12 01:27 pm (UTC)To learn from our mistakes, we have to remember them and our ability to acurately remember our emotional experience is bad. It's only the truly exceptional events that stand out in our heads.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-12 04:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-12 05:13 pm (UTC)I'm pretty curious to read this book. Sounds interesting.