Stumbling on
Happiness
Tyler Michael
Why…?
 Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going
blind than blind people will pay to regain their
sight?
 Why do dining companions insist on ordering
different meals instead of getting what they
really want?
 Why can’t we remember one song while listening
to another?
 Why does the line at the grocery store always
slow down the moment we join it?
Imagining Happiness
 “The human being is the only animal that thinks
about the future.”
 “The greatest achievement of the human brain is
its ability to imagine objects and episodes that
do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this
ability that allows us to think about the future.”
 “Making future”
 ‘predicting’
 ‘nexting’
Nexting
 “As long as your brain’s guess about the next
word turns out to be right, you cruise along
happily, left to right, left to right turning black
squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and
concepts, blissfully unaware that your nexting
brain is predicting the future of the sentence at a
fantastic rate. It is only when your brain predicts
badly that you suddenly feel avocado.”
 That is, surprised. See?
Prefrontal Cortex
 Part of the frontal lobe that enables us to
imagine the future
 Frontal lobotomies were practiced to treat
anxiety and depression
 Anxiety  Planning  THE FUTURE…
 Without it…a “permanent present”
Prospection
 Daydreaming is itself a source of joy
 ACHIEVIVING & SUCEEDING!!! vs. fumbling & failing
 “Because most of us get so much more practice
imagining good than bad events, we tend to
overestimate the likelihood that good events will
actually happen to us, which leads us to be
unrealistically optimistic about our futures.”
 Unrealistically optimistic sound familiar?
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-control
group deaths?
Control
 “Apparently, gaining control can have a positive
impact on one’s health and well-being, but
losing control can be worse than never having
had any at all.”
 Picking lotto numbers
 Gambling
 Watching the re-run of last night’s game
 Vacation to Extremia or Moderacia
Subjectivity
 Conjoined twins are happier than separate twins
 How can we tell?
 “Subjective states are ‘irreducible’, which is to
say that nothing we point to, nothing we can
compare them with, and nothing we can say
about their neurological underpinnings can fully
substitute for the experiences themselves.”
 Writing about music is like dancing about
architecture.
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, economists
call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us
call it marriage.”
Prefeeling
 Imagining what an emotion or
experience will feel like
 Allows for better predictions than
logical thinking
 “Future events may request access to
the emotional areas of our brains, but
current events almost always get the
right of way.”
Shortcomings of
Imagination
 Imagination tends to add and remove details,
but people do not realize that key details may be
fabricated or missing from the imagined
scenario.
 Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the
present than they actually will be (or were).
 Imagination fails to realize that things will feel
different once they actually happen.
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