Stumbling on Happiness: An insightful neuroscience self-help psychology book on cognitive enhancement and human behavior

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

Phineas Gage was a foreman for the Rutland Railroad who, on a lovely autumn day in 1848, ignited a small explosion in the vicinity of his feet, launching a three-and-a-half-foot-long iron rod into the air, which Phineas cleverly caught with his face. The rod entered just beneath his left cheek and exited through the top of his skull, boring a tunnel through his cranium and taking a good chunk of frontal lobe with it (see figure 3). Phineas was knocked to the ground, where he lay for a few minutes. Then, to everyone’s astonishment, he stood up and asked if a coworker might escort him to the doctor, insisting all the while that he didn’t need a ride and could walk by himself, thank you. The doctor cleaned some dirt from his wound, a coworker cleaned some brain from the rod, and in a relatively short while, Phineas and his rod were back about their business.10 His personality took a decided turn for the worse–and that fact is the source of his fame to this day–but the more striking thing about Phineas was just how normal he otherwise was. Had the rod made hamburger of another brain part–the

visual cortex, Brace’s area, the brain stem–then Phineas might have died, gone blind, lost the ability to speak or spent the rest of his life doing a convincing impression of a cabbage. Instead, for the next twelve years, he lived, saw, spoke, worked and travelled so uncabbagely that neurologists could only conclude that the frontal lobe did little for a fellow that he couldn’t get along nicely without.11 As one neurologist wrote in 1884, ‘Ever since the occurrence of the famous American crowbar case it has been known that destruction of these lobes does not necessarily give rise to any symptoms.’12

For example, people who suffer from the condition known as blindsight have no awareness of seeing, and will truthfully tell you that they are completely blind.11 Brain scans lend credence to their claims by revealing diminished activity in the areas normally associated with awareness of visual experience. On the other hand, the same scans reveal relatively normal activity in the areas associated with vision.12 So if we flash a light on a particular spot on the wall and ask the blindsighted person if she saw the light we just flashed, she tells us, ‘No, of course not. As you might infer from the presence of the guide dog, I’m blind.’ But if we ask her to make a guess about where the light might have appeared -just take a stab at it, say anything, point randomly if you like–she ‘guesses’ correctly far more often than we would expect by chance. She is seeing, if by seeing we mean experiencing the light and acquiring knowledge about its location, but she is blind, if by blind we mean that she is not aware of having seen. Her eyes are projecting the movie of reality on the little theatre screen in her head, but the audience is in the lobby getting popcorn.

Some people seem to be keenly aware of their moods and feelings, and may even have a novelist’s gift for describing their every shade and flavour. Others of us come equipped with a somewhat more basic emotional vocabulary that, much to the chagrin of our romantic partners, consists primarily of good, not so good and I already told you. If our expressive deficit is so profound and protracted that it even occurs outside of football season, we may be diagnosed with alexithymia, which literally means ‘absence of words to describe emotional states’. When alexithymics are asked what they are feeling, they usually say, ‘Nothing’, and when they are asked how they are feeling, they usually say, ‘I don’t know.’

an even more remarkable study, volunteers listened to a recording of the word eel preceded by a cough (which I’ll denote with a *). The volunteers heard the word peel when it was embedded in the sentence ‘The *eel was on the orange’ but they heard the word heel when it was embedded in the sentence ‘The *eel was on the shoe.’13 This is a striking finding because the two sentences differ only in their final word, which means that volunteers’ brains had to wait for the last word of the sentence before they could supply the information that was missing from the second word. But they did it, and they did it so smoothly and quickly that volunteers actually heard the missing information being spoken in its proper position.

‘The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost–one might say–a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.’

In a sense, each of us is a counterfeiter who prints phony dollar bills and then happily accepts them for payment, unaware that he is both the perpetrator and victim of a well-orchestrated fraud.

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know–that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers. We may see the world through rose-coloured glasses, but rose-coloured glasses are neither opaque nor clear.

The bottom line is this: the brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.