Notes on "The Surprising Science of Happiness"

TED TALK ... Dan Gilbert: The Surprising Science of Happiness

The entire video is completed in 21 minutes

Over time mankind's brains have  gained new structures

a "new" part is the  "frontal lobe" ...and a part called the "pre-frontal cortex" 

one of the most important things the pfc does is it provides the means to simulate experiences (Like a Flight SIM) this "marvelous adaptation" that we may  actually try on experiences in our heads before in acting out in real life ...  This is something ancient humans couldn't do (I don't know how that can possibly be known, but...) and  animals don't do it as we do (Sammy supports this). 

Dr. Gilbert asks us to imagine two different futures ... One, winning the lottery (yes, I like this ... I will buy a plane, and maybe an island suitable for the construction of a landing strip ... and definitely a sail boat, a small one ... I will recreate the Corona ad and learn to enjoy beer or at least ice cold limeade ... ). The other is become paraplegic.  (No thanks.)

He informs us that "Happiness" data has been collected on these two different groups.

"Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives."

Research being done on this topic by independent groups talk about something they call "impact bias" ... which is a way of saying the simulator works poorly.

"For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are."

He mentions the fact that lotsa studies on this stuff support the idea that what we might see as positive and negative outcomes have a lot less impact ... less intensity and also less long lasting effect then what we intuitively believe would/will be the case.  One study says that these events have (mostly)very little impact on our happiness levels after three months.  And that is because happiness is synthesized.

 I like the idea presented that we have a     "psychological immune system."  He says these are; largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better. We fabricate happiness ... very cool.   We think it is something to be found, we work and plan, we seek ... we have it within, but look outside, ourselves for happiness.

Next in his talk he begins to present "stories" about how we synthesize happiness.   One he mentions is Former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, whose career blew up ... and who said he is now better off in every way.  He mentions three other examples to set up the idea we "smirk" at synthetic happiness discounting it as not as valuable or authentic as "natural happiness".

"Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind." 

He suggests that synthetic happiness is just as valuable and lasting as natural happiness. And ... he has data.

Copied from the transcript:

"Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. And this isn't mine. This is a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm." It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because the experiment I'm going to tell you about uses them, these are Monet prints. So, everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least.Now we give you a choice: "We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four.

Sometime later ... the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. "Tell us how much you like them now." What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that has been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! "The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!" (Laughter) That's the synthesis of happiness.

We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis that -- they drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. ..."

The amnesiac group does what the other guys did ... even though they didn't know they owned "Monet print number three" they reported liking it better. They "synthesized" happiness.

"...  they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster."

The talk becomes even more interesting for me starting now ... all that other stuff just led up to this idea:  While everybody has a psychological immune system, aka the ability to synthesize happiness ... some of us are better at it then others (no surprise there, I mean, we all have our strengths and weaknesses).

"It turns out that freedom -- the ability to make up your mind and change your mind -- is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose -- to change and make up your mind -- is the enemy of synthetic happiness."

"The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped." ... this is the difference between dating and marriage ... "You find a way to be happy with what's happened. Now what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage."

And he tells us about this experiment:

"Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a photography course, a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras; they went around campus; they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet; they figure out which are the two best pictures; and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up, and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, "Which one would you like to give up?" They say, "I have to give one up?" "Oh, yes. We need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice.You get to keep one, and I get to keep one."

Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, "But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters, I'll be glad to" -- (Laughter) -- yeah, "headquarters" -- "I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room and give -- just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable." The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: "Make your choice. And by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again." Now, half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their liking, satisfaction with the pictures. And look at what we find.

First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.

Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot! And people who are deliberating -- "Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one? Maybe I left the good one?" -- have killed themselves. They don't like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the reversible condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness.

So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, "You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?" Duh! 66 percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture. Because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows."

Dr. Gilbert closes his Ted Talk with this quote: 

"This is worth contemplating: "The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another ... Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice." ~ Adam Smith  

In summary:

"... our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience." ~ Dan Gilbert

Good talk.