stumbling on happiness( reading report)
Transcript of stumbling on happiness( reading report)
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Stumbling onHappinessTyler Michael
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Why…?
Why will sighted people pay more to avoid goingblind than blind people will pay to regain their sight?
Why do dining companions insist on orderingdifferent meals instead of getting what theyreally want?
Why can‟t we remember one song while listeningto another?
Why does the line at the grocery store alwaysslow down the moment we join it?
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Imagining Happiness
“The human being is the only animal that thinksabout the future.”
“The greatest achievement of the human brain isits ability to imagine objects and episodes thatdo not exist in the realm of the real, and it is thisability that allows us to think about the future.”
“Making future” ‘predicting’
‘nexting’
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Nexting
“As long as your brain‟s guess about the nextword turns out to be right, you cruise alonghappily, left to right, left to right turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, andconcepts, blissfully unaware that your nextingbrain is predicting the future of the sentence at afantastic rate. It is only when your brain predictsbadly that you suddenly feel avocado.”
That is, surprised. See?
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Prefrontal Cortex
Part of the frontal lobe that enables us toimagine the future
Frontal lobotomies were practiced to treatanxiety and depression
Anxiety Planning THE FUTURE…
Without it…a “permanent present”
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Prospection Daydreaming is itself a source of joy
ACHIEVIVING & SUCEEDING!!! vs. fumbling & failing
“Because most of us get so much more practiceimagining good than bad events, we tend tooverestimate the likelihood that good events willactually happen to us, which leads us to be
unrealistically optimistic about our futures.” Unrealistically optimistic sound familiar?
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Control After simulating the future, our brains aim for
control of the future
Electric shock experiment 3 jolts are more painful than 20?
Nursing home houseplant experiment
More in the low-control group died
Nursing home visitor experiment
Perceived control…more low-control or high-controlgroup deaths?
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Control “Apparently, gaining control can have a positive
impact on one‟s health and well-being, butlosing control can be worse than never havinghad any at all.”
Picking lotto numbers
Gambling
Watching the re-run of last night‟s game
Vacation to Extremia or Moderacia
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Subjectivity Conjoined twins are happier than separate twins
How can we tell?
“Subjective states are „irreducible‟, which is tosay that nothing we point to, nothing we cancompare them with, and nothing we can sayabout their neurological underpinnings can fully
substitute for the experiences themselves.” Writing about music is like dancing about
architecture.
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Habituation aka Declining Marginal Utility
As an individual undergoes the same experience
multiple times, they are affected less and less
Habituation dependant on variety and time
Chicken or steak?
Works for both positive and negative stimuli
“Psychologists call this habituation, economistscall it declining marginal utility, and the rest of uscall it marriage.”
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Prefeeling Imagining what an emotion or
experience will feel like
Allows for better predictions thanlogical thinking
“Future events may request access tothe emotional areas of our brains, but
current events almost always get theright of way.”
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Shortcomings of
Imagination Imagination tends to add and remove details,
but people do not realize that key details may befabricated or missing from the imagined
scenario.
Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like thepresent than they actually will be (or were).
Imagination fails to realize that things will feeldifferent once they actually happen.
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Relevance to Ecological
Economics How to imagine, simulate, and prepare for the
future
How to analyze those simulations
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why _are_we_happy.html