Stumbling on Happiness

The most recent book I completed had this title. Written by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, this book deals with the psychology of happiness. As the author disclaims in the first few chapters, this book is not a crash course on how you can be happy for the rest of your life, rather it is a book that explores the anatomy of the phenomenon called "happiness". The book is well written and the author has an uncanny knack of keeping you glued to it (I finished reading it before "Basic Economics", the other book I've been reading). Some of the experiments referred to in the book were covered in the other book, Mindfulness, that I had read a couple of months back.

The first part of the book talks about "Prospection" or our (I speak of human beings) ability of looking and imagining about the future and the influences of prospection on happiness. Later, through a variety of examples, the author tries to explain, why the future we think and imagine is inaccurate and how parameters like context, filling in tricks played by the mind and receny lead to this deviant imagination of the future. The book becomes a little dry in the middle, as you begin to wonder as a reader, the value of the message, "The future we imagine is not the future we would live in". But don't give up, the last part of the book is interesting and the conclusions drawn by the author are worth contemplating. The carrot in the book is the revelation the author makes about an effective method of judging your happiness at a future event and how the human self tries to avoid this option. I've included some notes below. If you're interested in knowing some of the salient points the book brings to perspective, please read that section.

Overall, a good book to read, giving some interesting insights into happiness and the human mind.

Notes:

Prospection:"Human being is the only animal that thinks about the future". Other animals, do act for the future, but it is an automatic reaction to experiences in the past or to the genetic composition of the animal. Humans are the only species to have a well developed frontal lobe that aids in planning and imagination. The frontal lobe has shown clear growth over years of evolution. Loss of the frontal lobe in a human being doesn't effect any physiological actions. The penchant for "control of the future" is the incentive for the human mind to think about it. We cannot judge what would make us happy in the future.

Subjectivity:Happiness is of 3 kinds, Emotional, Moral and Judgemental. Emotional happiness is the one we're concerned about. It cannot be quantified nor described. In other words, it is subjective to the person experiencing it. Levels of happiness are different and could vary from person to person. "Experience implies participation, Awareness implies observation". When you participate in something you actually feel/experience the emotion which is a level higher than awareness that you get when observing other people.

Reality:Experience is reweaved from memory and not retrieved. As kids, we start off having a mind of realism that is slowly transformed into a mind of idealism. We start off viewing things independently (out of any context) and slowly develop the art of interpretation. Time is the most difficult thing we can imagine in our minds. So the human brain tends to give a spatial interpretation to the temporal dimension

Presentism:The brain follows a "reality first policy". It always tries to fill in the holes in the past and the future by things from reality or experience. Monotonity brings boredom, but variety doesn't give pleasure always. Variety increases pleasure in short time intervals while it decreases pleasure in slow consumption. For example, If you're given a choice of choosing your favorite dish at a restaurant on a daily basis, variety in the dish increases happiness, however if the frequency is once in a month it is better off sticking to the single favorite dish. A funny quote from the book explaining the taxonomy of monotonity: "Psychologists call it habituation, Economists term it declining marginal utility and the rest of us call it marriage" :-).

Rationalization:The human brain tends to disambiguate situations by making use of context, frequency and recency. Most of us have an Psychological Immune System that is some kind of a sadness buster defending us against sadness by either taking solace from people who are worse situations or looking at the positive side of the adverse condition or by giving us a feeling of uniqueness. Mild sufferings tend to linger longer than big ones. Action over inaction, Pain over Annoyance and Commitment over freedom are shown to provide more pleasure when the amortized cost is taken. However, the human brain tries to resist this because of its fetish for freedom.

Corrigibility:Ends are more easily remembered and they influence our actions and preferences most. For example, a very good movie with an ordinary ending may bring down our rating of that movie, but an ordinary movie with a great ending maybe judged as a better one. Using a surrogate to judge our happiness to a particular situation helps us. But alas, our mind thinks we're too unique in the world to depend on a surrogate for judgement!!!!!!!

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