“Before we can decide whether to accept people’s claims about their happiness, we must first decide whether people can, in principle, be mistaken about what they feel. We can be wrong about all sorts of things—the price of soybeans, the life span of dust mites, the history of flannel—but can we be wrong about our own emotional experience?–
In a nutshell
Due to way the brain works, our predictions of how we will feel in the future are not always accurate, and that includes what will make us happy.
In a similar vein
Barry Schwartz The Paradox of Choice (p 248)
Martin Seligman Authentic Happiness (p 254)
As a boy, Daniel Gilbert loved poring over a book of optical illusions, such as the Necker cube and the famous vase/faces picture (as on the cover of this book). What amazed him was how easy it was for the eyes and the brain to be fooled.
When, many years later, he became a psychologist, he was interested in the regular mistakes and exercises of “filling in” that our brain makes in order to provide us with a quick picture of reality. Just as we could make predictable mistakes with our eyesight, he found, we could also with our foresight. That is, we spend most of our time doing things that we hope will make us happy in the future, but our understanding of that future and how we will feel when we get there is far from reliable.
Though people have been puzzling over the question of foresight for thousands of years, Gilbert claims that Stumbling on Happiness is the first book to bring together ideas from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics to provide an answer. This is quite a complex area of psychology in which the author is pre-eminent, yet he spins the material into a fascinating and often fun read. With a style reminiscent of Bill Bryson, there are at least one or two chuckles per page.
Gilbert notes that most psychology books have somewhere in them the phrase, “Human beings are the only animals that…” In his case, he fills in the sentence by saying that we are the only animals that are able to think about the future. Squirrels may seem like they can do this in the way that they put away acorns for the winter, but in fact it is just their brain’s recording of a reduction in hours of daylight that prompts them to do this. There is no awareness, only a biological instinct. Humans, however, are not only aware of the future, we are veritable “anticipation machines” focused on what is to come almost as much as we are on what is now. How did this happen?
Millions of years ago the first type of humans experienced a massive increase in the size of their brains in a relatively short space of time. But not every part of the new brain had grown. Most of the growth was in the frontal lobe region, above the eyes, which partly accounts for why our ancestors had foreheads that dramatically sloped back while ours are almost vertical—we needed the room for all those millions of new brain cells.
For a long time it was thought that the frontal lobe had no particular function, but observation of patients with frontal lobe damage revealed problems with planning, and also, strangely, a reduction in feelings of anxiety. What was the link between the two? Both planning and anxiety are related to thinking about the future. Frontal lobe damage leaves people living in a permanent present, and as a result they don’t bother to make plans, so they can’t be anxious about them.
The huge growth in the human frontal lobe thus gave humans a distinct survival advantage: the ability to imagine different futures, choose between them, and thereby control our environment. We can make predictions about what will make us happy in the future.
It is possible for the brain to cram in all of a person’s experiences, memories, and knowledge, Gilbert says, because we do not remember everything in its entirety, but instead preserve a few threads of each experience. We recall only these and the brain “fills in the rest” to make the memory seem complete.
The brain also creates ingenious shortcuts when it comes to perception. German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that perceptions are like portraits, which tell us as much about the hand of the artist (the perceiver) as they do about the subject. The brain creates an interpretation of reality, but it is so good that we do not grasp that it is only an interpretation.
In the same way that our memories and our perceptions can be faulty, when it comes to imagining the future the details that we imagine happening frequently do not give us the whole picture. It is not so much the things we do imagine happening that are incorrect, but more that we leave out things that do happen. As many psychological experiments have shown, the human mind is not well structured to note absences of things. But our brain does such a brilliant conjuring trick in making us believe that our interpretations are fact that we accept what it gives us without question.
Gilbert’s chief point about happiness is that it is subjective. He tells of conjoined twins Lori and Reba, who have been joined at the head since birth and share a blood supply and part of their brain tissue. Despite this, they go about their lives and have said to anyone who asks that they are very happy. Most people hearing this will say that these twins don’t know what happiness is, a response that presumes happiness can only come from being a “single” person. In the same way, people overestimate how bad they would feel if they became blind. But the blind still go on living and doing most of the things the sighted do, and they can be as happy and satisfied as anyone.
What makes us happy colors all our perceptions of what happiness is, but even our own perceptions of what happiness is will change at different times in our lives. Lovers can never see that how they feel about each other may be different in ten years’ time, and mothers can never imagine going back to work when they are in love with their newborn. There is a neurological reason for these mistakes in perception. When we imagine things in the future, we use the same sensory parts of the brain that we use to experience real things in the present. We are generally not rational about future events, carefully weighing up the pros and cons, but run them through in our mind to see what emotional reaction we get. What we imagine happening is defined by what we are feeling now. How do we know what will make us happy in 20 years’ time?
In short, the human brain is set up to imagine the future quite well, but not perfectly, and this accounts for the gulfs we often experience between what we thought would make us happy and what actually does. This means that we can spend all our lives making money then decide it wasn’t worth it, but also that we can be pleasantly surprised when people, situations, or events that we were certain would make us miserable turn out not to be so.
Gilbert spends virtually the whole book identifying the problems we have in accurately predicting our future emotional states, but does he provide a solution that could make happiness more reliable? His slightly anti-climactic answer is that the best way to find out how we will feel about a particular future course of action (a certain career, a move to a particular city, having children) is to ask people who have already done it how they felt. As we are creatures of control with a strong belief in our uniqueness, we are naturally averse to relying on the experience of others. However, such a strategy, while not particularly exciting, is the best available to deliver us life satisfaction and wellbeing, whereas the happiness from relying purely on ourselves is only ever to be stumbled on.
Daniel Gilbert is Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and is also the director of the Hedonic Psychology Laboratory at Harvard. He has written numerous influential articles in the social psychology field, and is the editor of The Handbook of Social Psychology.