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What do psychology professors say when they pass each other in the hallway? “Hi, you’re fine, how am I?” I know, I know. The joke isn’t that funny. But the reason it’s supposed to be funny is that people shouldn’t know how others are feeling but they should know how they’re feeling themselves. “How are you?” is overly familiar for the same reason that “How am I?” is overly strange.
And yet, strange as it is, there are times when people seem not to know their own hearts. When conjoined twins claim to be happy, we have to wonder if perhaps they just think they’re happy.
Rather, their most critical functions were designed first, and their less critical functions were added on like bells and whistles as the millennia passed, which is why the really important parts of your brain (e.g., the ones that control your breathing) are down at the bottom and the parts you could probably live without (e.g., the ones that control your temper) sit atop them, like ice cream on a cone. As it turns out, running with great haste from rabid wolverines is much more important than knowing what they are.
The men who met the woman in the middle of a shaky, swaying suspension bridge were experiencing intense physiological arousal, which they would normally have identified as fear. But because they were being interviewed by an attractive woman, they mistakenly identified their arousal as sexual attraction.
Apparently, feelings that one interprets as fear in the presence of a sheer drop may be interpreted as lust in the presence of a sheer blouse—which is simply to say that people can be wrong about what they are feeling.
The word experience comes from the Latin experientia, meaning “to try,” whereas the word aware comes from the Greek horan, meaning “to see.” Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event. The two words can normally be substituted in ordinary conversation without much damage, but they are differently inflected.
This dissociation between awareness and experience can cause the same sort of spookiness with regard to our emotions.
we may be diagnosed with alexithymia, which literally means “absence of words to describe emotional states.”
René Descartes concluded that our experience is the only thing about which we may be completely sure and that everything else we think we know is merely an inference from that.
The second premise is that of all the flawed measures of subjective experience that we can take, the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual is the least flawed.16 There are many other ways to measure happiness, of course, and some of them appear to be much more rigorous, scientific, and objective than a person’s own claims.
The magic of large numbers works along with the laws of probability to remedy many of the problems associated with the imperfect measurement of subjective experience.
The hand behaved like an idealist, but the eye revealed that the brain was a momentary realist.
Experiments such as these suggest that we do not outgrow realism so much as we learn to outfox it, and that even as adults our perceptions are characterized by an initial moment of realism.21 According to this line of reasoning, we automatically assume that our subjective experience of a thing is a faithful representation of the thing’s properties. Only later—if we have the time, energy, and ability—do we rapidly repudiate that assumption and consider the possibility that the real world may not actually be as it appears to us.
Like perceptions and memories, these mental pictures pop into our consciousness fait accompli.
Research suggests that when people make predictions about their reactions to future events, they tend to neglect the fact that their brains have performed the filling-in trick as an integral part of the act of imagination.26 For example, volunteers in one study were asked to predict what they would do in a variety of future situations—how much time they would be willing to spend answering questions in a telephone
survey, how much money they would be willing to spend to celebrate a special occasion at a restaurant in San Francisco, and so on.
The point here is that when we imagine the future, we often do so in the blind spot of our mind’s eye, and this tendency can cause us to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences we are attempting to weigh.
your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts. You are a very fine person, I’m sure. But you are a very bad wizard.
it rarely notices what imagination has missed—and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize.
No matter how many sets of trigrams they saw, none of the volunteers ever figured this out.4 It was easy to notice the presence of a letter but, like the barking of a dog, it was impossible to notice its absence.
The right way to calculate the animosity and marksmanship of the urban pigeon is to consider both the presence and the absence of poop on our jackets.
Why would people both select and reject Extremia? Because when we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes. Extremia has the most positive attributes and the most negative attributes, hence people tend to select it when they are looking for something to select and they reject it when they are looking for something to reject. Of course, 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.
And yet, not one person I know has ever imagined anything other than the single, awful event suggested by my question. When they imagine the future, there is a whole lot missing, and the things that are missing matter.
The nondescribers were focused on one and only one aspect of the future—the outcome of the football game—and they failed to imagine other aspects of the future that would influence their happiness, such as drunken parties and chemistry exams.
most Americans can be classified as one of two types: those who live in California and are happy they do, and those who don’t live in California but believe they’d be happy if they did. Yet, research shows that Californians are actually no happier than anyone else—so why does everyone (including Californians) seem to believe they are?13 California has some of the most beautiful scenery and some of the best weather in the continental United States, and when non-Californians hear that magic word their imaginations instantly produce mental images of sunny beaches and giant redwood trees. But
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Well, here’s what we were thinking: When we said yes we were thinking about babysitting in terms of why instead of how, in terms of causes and consequences instead of execution, and we failed to consider the fact that the detail-free babysitting we were imagining would not be the detail-laden babysitting we would ultimately experience. Babysitting next month is “an act of love,” whereas babysitting right now is “an act of lunch,” and expressing affection is spiritually rewarding in a way that buying French fries simply isn’t.21
Distant babysitting has the same illusory smoothness that a distant cornfield does,22 but while we all know that a cornfield isn’t really smooth and that it just looks that way from a far remove, we seem only dimly aware of the same fact when it comes to events that are far away in time.
When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes.
When college students hear persuasive speeches that demonstrably change their political opinions, they tend to remember that they always felt as they currently feel.5 When dating couples try to recall what they thought about their romantic partners two months earlier, they tend to remember that they felt then as they feel now.6 When students receive their grades on an exam, they tend to remember being as concerned about the exam before they took it as they currently are.7 When patients are asked about their headaches, the amount of pain they are feeling at the moment determines how much pain
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In other words, Perot supporters erroneously recalled feeling about Perot then as they felt about him now.
If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no walls. Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick, and if the present lightly colors our remembered pasts, it thoroughly infuses our imagined futures.
Rather, these folks just find it difficult to imagine being hungry when they are full and thus can’t bring themselves to provide adequately for hunger’s inevitable return.
What is true of sated stomachs is also true of sated minds. In one study, researchers challenged some volunteers to answer five geography questions and told them that after they had taken their best guesses they would receive one of two rewards: Either they would learn the correct answers to the questions they had been asked and thus find out whether they had gotten them right or wrong, or they would receive a candy bar but never learn the answers.
And yet, for some reason, when our bellies are stuffed with mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, we can’t imagine being hungry? How come?
The point here is that we generally do not sit down with a sheet of paper and start logically listing the pros and cons of the future events we are contemplating, but rather, we contemplate them by simulating those events in our imaginations and then noting our emotional reactions to that simulation. Just as imagination previews objects, so does it prefeel events.20
Rather than choosing the poster that had made them feel happy when they imagined hanging it in their homes, thinkers had ignored their prefeelings and had instead chosen posters that possessed the qualities of which a career counselor or financial advisor would approve (“The olive green in the Monet may clash with the drapes, whereas the Garfield poster will signal to visitors that I have a scintillating sense of humor”). Nonthinkers, on the other hand, trusted their prefeelings: They imagined the poster on their wall, noted how they felt when they did so, and assumed that if imagining the
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When people who lived in cities that happened to be having nice weather that day imagined their lives, they reported that their lives were relatively happy; but when people who lived in cities that happened to be having bad weather that day imagined their lives, they reported that their lives were relatively unhappy.
these people didn’t know their brains were doing this and thus they mistook reality-induced feelings for imagination-induced prefeelings.
But their brains enforced the Reality First policy and insisted on reacting to the real workout rather than the imaginary hike. Because these people didn’t know their brains were doing this, they confused their feelings and prefeelings.
one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.27 Vacation? Romance? A night on the town? No thanks, I’ll just sit here in the dark.
At some level we recognize that our friends are probably right. Nonetheless, when we try to overlook, ignore, or set aside our current gloomy state and make a forecast about how we will feel tomorrow, we find that it’s a lot like trying to imagine the taste of marshmallow while chewing liver.
Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective. Like the sponge, we think we are thinking outside the box only because we can’t see how big the box really is. Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception.
they found that volunteers in the no-variety group were more satisfied than were volunteers in the variety group. In other words, variety made people less happy, not more.
Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.
Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
The point here is that time and variety are two ways to avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don’t need the other. In fact (and this is the really critical point, so please put down your fork and listen), when episodes are sufficiently separated in time, variety is not only unnecessary—it can actually be costly.
When your bites are separated by anything greater than ten minutes (in this case, fifteen minutes), then habituation no longer occurs, which means that every bite is as good as the first and a bite of gumbo is never better than a bite of partridge. In other words, if you could eat slowly enough, then variety would not only be unnecessary, it would actually be costly, because a bite of gumbo would always provide less pleasure than yet another bite of partridge.
Because time is so difficult to imagine, we sometimes imagine it as a spatial dimension. And sometimes we just don’t imagine it at all.
The problem with this method of making judgments is that starting points have a profound impact on ending points.
This pattern of results suggests that all volunteers made their predictions by the flip-then-flop method: They first imagined how much they would enjoy eating the spaghetti in the present (“Yum!” if they were hungry and “Yuck!” if they were full) and used this prefeeling as a starting point for their prediction of tomorrow’s pleasures.
