Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert came to TED with a daunting task. In just a single short talk, he planned to explain a sophisticated concept called “synthesized happiness” and why it led us to make wildly inaccurate predictions about our own futures. Let’s see how he set about it. Here’s how he begins: When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. An opening line anchored in the here and now, but immediately creating intrigue. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass,
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