Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert

Rather than saying that such brains are predicting, let's say they are nexting.
Yours is nexting right now. For example, at this moment you may be consciously thinking about the sentence you just read, or about the key ring in your pocket that is jammed uncomfortably against your thigh, or about whether the War of 1812 really deserves its own overture. Whatever you are thinking, your thoughts are surely about something other than the word with which this sentence will end. But even as you hear these very words echoing in your very head, and think whatever thoughts they inspire, your brain is using the word it is reading right now and the words it read just before to make a reasonable guess about the identity of the word it will read next, which is what allows you to read so fluently. (6-7)

The surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to exercise control--not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective--changing things, influencing things, making things happen--is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed. -22

We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain--not because the boat won't respond, and not because we can't find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight ("Isn't it strange how one line looks longer than the other even though it isn't?") and illusions of hindsight ("Isn't it strange how I can't remember taking out the garbage even though I did?"), so too do we experience illusions of foresight--and all three types of illusion are explained by the same basic principles of human psychology. (25)

In Part III, "Realism," I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently skeptical of its products. (26)

In Part IV, "Presentism," I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination's products are . . . well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present. (26)

In Part V, "Rationalization," I will tell you about the third shortcoming: Imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen. (26)

Apparently, the describers' verbal descriptions of their experiences "overwrote" their memories of the experiences themselves, and they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had said about what they experienced. (44)

Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. (53)

[He uses the story of Adolph Fischer and George Eastman and an example. Both supported worker's rights and had surprising endings to their life story. Eastman was a success who committed suicide. Fischer was a failure, hanged for a crime that he didn't commit, yet he said his last day was the "happiest day of his life."]

This general finding--that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event--has been replicated so many times in so many different laboratory and field settings that it has left most scientists convinced of two things. First, the act of remembering involves "filling in" details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously. (88)

Experiments such as these suggest that we do not outgrow realism so much as we learn to outfox it, and that even as adults our perceptions are characterized by an initial moment of realism. (97)

There are endless variations on spaghetti, and this particular variation you imagined surely influenced how much you expected to enjoy the experience. Because these details are so crucial to an accurate prediction of your response to the event you were imagining, and because these important details were not known, you would have been wise to withhold your prediction . . . (100)

Pigeons have no trouble figuring out that the presence of a light signals an opportunity for eating, but they cannot learn the same thing about the absence of a light. Research suggests that human beings are a bit like pigeons in this regard. (107)

If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no walls. (126)

When we have an experience--hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room--on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. But human beings have discovered two devices that allow them to combat this tendency: variety and time. (144)

One of the reasons why most of us think of ourselves as talented, friendly, wise, and fair-minded is that these words are the lexical equivalents of a Necker cube, and the human mind naturally exploits each word's ambiguity for its own gratification. (174)

We may see the world through rose-colored glasses, but rose-colored glasses are neither opaque nor clear. They can't be opaque because we need to see the world clearly enough to participate in it--to pilot helicopters, harvest corn, diaper babies, and all the other stuff that smart mammals need to do in order to survive and thrive. But they can't be clear because we need their rosy tint to motivate us to design the helicopters ("I'm sure this thing will fly"), plant the corn ("This year will be a banner crop") and tolerate the babies ("What a bundle of joy!"). We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate. (177)

For example, studies reveal that people have a penchant for asking questions that are subtly engineered to manipulate the answers they receive. A question such as "Am I the best lover you've ever had?" is dangerous because it has only one answer that can make us truly happy, but a question such as "What do you like best about my lovemaking?" is brilliant because it has only one answer that can make us truly miserable (or two if you count "It reminds me of Wilt Chamberlain"). (182)

Wilhelm von Osten was a retired schoolteacher who in 1891 claimed that his stallion, whom he called Clever Hans, could answer questions about current events, mathematics, and a host of other topics by tapping the ground with his foreleg. For instance, when Osten would ask Clever Hans to add three and five, the horse would wait until his master had finished asking the question, tap eight times, then stop. Sometimes, instead of asking the question, Olsten would write it on a card and hold it up for Clever Hans to read, and the horse seemed to understand written language every bit as well as it understood speech. Clever Hans didn't get every question right, of course, but he did much better than anyone else with hooves, and his public performances were so impressive that he soon became the toast of Berlin. But in 1904 the director of the Berlin Psychological Institute sent his student, Oskar Pfungst, to look into the matter more carefully, and Pfungst noticed that Clever Hans was much more likely to give the wrong answer when Osten was standing in back of the horse than in front of it, or when Osten himself did not know the answer to the question the horse had been asked. In a series of experiments, Clever Pfungst was able to show that Clever Hans could indeed read--but that what he could read was Osten's body language. (190)

In fact, practice and coaching are the two means by which we learn just about everything we know. Firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge are the only two kinds of knowledge there are, and no matter what task we master-- pooping, cooking, investing, bobsledding--that mastery is always a product of direct experience and/or of listening to those who have had direct experience. (216)