Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

At first blush, the idea that we can mistakenly believe we are feeling

Bruh mind fuck...

pain seems preposterous, if only because the distinction between feeling pain and believing one is feeling pain looks so suspiciously like an artifact of language. But give this idea a second blush while considering the following scenario. You are sitting at a sidewalk café, sipping a tangy espresso and contentedly browsing the Sunday newspaper. People are strolling by and taking in the fine morning, and the amorous activities of a young couple at a nearby table attest to the eternal wonder of spring. The song of a scarlet tanager punctuates the yeasty scent of new croissants that wafts from the bakery. The article you are reading on campaign-finance reform is quite interesting and all is well—until suddenly you realize you are now reading the third paragraph, that somewhere in the middle of the first you started sniffing baked goods and listening to bird chirps, and that you now have absolutely no idea what the story you are reading is about. Did you actually read that second paragraph, or did you merely dream it? You take a quick look back and, sure enough, all the words are familiar. As you read them again you can even recall hearing them spoken a few moments ago by that narrator in your head who sounds astonishingly

The word experience comes from the Latin experientia, meaning “to try,”

word aware comes from the Greek horan, meaning “to see.”

Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies o...

One gives us the sense of being engaged, whereas the other gives us the sense of being cognizant of that engagement.

awareness can be thought of as a kind of experience of our own experience.

Her eyes are projecting the movie of reality on the little theater screen in her head, but the audience is in the lobby getting popcorn.

primarily of good, not so good, and I already told you.

alexithymia, which literally means “absence of words to describe emotional states.”

They seem to have feelings, they just don’t seem to know about them.

Psychology has also created problems where once there were none by exposing the flaws in our intuitive understandings of ourselves.

or that our current experience of happiness is really different from our past experience of happiness, or that we are having an experience of happiness at all.

such as the left and right prefrontal cortex, which tend to be active when we are experiencing positive and negative emotions, respectively.

Is it possible that the two are actually having the same subjective emotional experiences but describing them differently?

The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.

Imagining “what it would feel like if” sounds like a fluffy bit of daydreaming,

but in fact, it is one of the most consequential mental acts we can perform, and we perform it every day.

and we base these decisions in large measure on our beliefs about how it would feel if this event ...

Perhaps it is true that we can’t always get what we want, but at least we feel sure that we know what to want in the first place.

and we know these things because we can look forward in time and simulate worlds that do not yet exist.

—we imagine the futures that our alternatives provide and then imagine how we would feel in each of them

the shortcoming that causes us to misremember the past and misperceive the present is the very same shortcoming that causes us to misimagine the future.

did: We cheat.

experience is not stored in memory—at least not in its entirety. Rather, it is compressed for storage by first being reduced to a few critical threads,

Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating—not by actually retrieving—the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory.

This fabrication happens so quickly and effortlessly that we have the illusion (as a good magician’s audience always does) that the entire thing was in our heads the entire time.

First, the act of remembering involves “filling in” details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.

dissect your eyeball, you would eventually come across a spot

known as the blind spot

No one can see an object that appears in the blind spot because there are no visual receptors there. And yet, if you look out into your living room, you do not notice a black hole in the otherwise smooth picture of your brother-in-law sitting on the sofa,

That’s right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn’t consult you about this, doesn’t seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene—and

Kant argued that a person’s perception of a floating head is constructed from the person’s knowledge of floating heads, memory of floating heads, belief in floating heads, need for floating heads, and sometimes—but not always—from the actual presence of a floating head itself.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.

The hand behaved like an idealist, but the eye revealed that the brain was a momentary realist.

we automatically assume that our subjective experience of a thing is a faithful representation of the thing’s properties.

consider the possibility that the real world may not actually be as it appears to us.

the mistake we make when

we momentarily ignore the filling-in trick and unthinkingly accept the validity of our memories and our perceptions is precisely the same mistake we make when we imagine our futures.

assuming that they are accurate representations of the objects we are imagining.

Instead, your brain behaved like a portrait artist commissioned to produce a full-color oil from a rough charcoal sketch, filling in all the details that were absent from my question and serving you a particular heaping helping of imaginary pasta.

It was precisely our style, and we liked what we predicted we’d hate because our prediction was based on a detailed image that reflected our brain’s best guess,

Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

when the rest of humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed—and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize.

things which, although they may be more important, do not strike it directly.

Hence, contemplation usually ceases with seeing, so much so that little or no attention is paid to things invisible.

Our inability to think about absences can lead us to make some fairly bizarre judgments.

the logical way to select a vacation is to consider both the presence and the absence of positive and negative attributes, but that’s not what most of us do.

we have an equally troubling tendency to treat the details of future events that we don’t imagine as though they were not going to happen.

but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.