Stumbling on Happiness
These are the excerpts from a very good book with the same name. Human beings have the capability to think and try to answer the WHAT IF question. But to solve that question we need to understand the workings of our mind. This secret wiring of human mind helps or blocks our desire to be happy.
Following are the key points which summarize the information in the book:
Stumbling on Happiness.
When brains plug holes in their conceptualizations of
yesterday and tomorrow, we tend to use a material called today.
Future events may request access to the emotional areas of
our brains, but current events almost always get the right of way.
The point is that time and variety are two ways to avoid
habituation, and if you have one, then you don’t need the other. When episodes
are sufficiently separated in time, variety is not only unnecessary – it can
actually be costly.
So how do we decide how we will feel about things that are
going to happen in the future? The answer is that we tend to imagine how we
would feel if those things happened now, and then we make some allowance for
the fact that now and later are not exactly the same thing.
The human brain is not particularly sensitive to the
absolute magnitude of stimulation, but it is extraordinary sensitive to
differences and changes – that is, to the relative magnitude of stimulation.
We make mistakes when we compare with the past instead of
the possible.
What all these facts about comparison mean for our ability
to imagine future feelings:-
1)
Value is determined by the comparison of one
thing with another,
2)
There is more than one kind of comparison we can
make in any given instance, and
3)
We may value something more highly when we make
one kind of comparison than when we make a different kind of comparison.
Because predictions about the future are made in the
present, they are inevitably influenced by the present.
When rats and pigeons may respond to stimuli as they are
presented in the world, people respond to stimuli as they are represented in
the mind. Objective stimuli in the world create subjective stimuli in the mind,
and it is these subjective stimuli to which people react.
We clarify stimuli with regard to context, frequency and
recency.
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.
To be effective, a defense system must respond to threats;
but to be practical, it must respond only to threats that exceed some critical
threshold – which means that threats that fall short of the critical threshold
may have a destructive potential that belies their diminutive size. Unlike
large threats, small threats can sneak in under the radar.
Apparently, people are not aware of the fact that defenses
are more likely to be triggered by intense than mild suffering, thus they
mispredict their own emotional reactions to misfortunes of different sizes.
It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look
for ways to change our view of the experience.
Inescapable, inevitable and irrevocable circumstances
trigger the psychological immune system, but, as with the intensity of
suffering, people do not always recognize that this will happen.
To maximize our pleasures and minimize our pains, we must be
able to associate our experiences with the circumstances that produced them,
but we must also be able to explain how and why those circumstances produced
the experiences they did.
Unexplained events seem rare, and rare events naturally have
a greater emotional impact than common events do.
Feeling is one of our brain’s most sophisticated illusions.
Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our
experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an
experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask
to reread it.
The k-word puzzle works because we naturally (but wrongly)
assume that things that come easily to mind are things we have frequently
encountered.
The setting sun, and music at close / As the last taste of
sweets, is sweetest last/ Writ in remembrance more than things long past.
If a particular belief has some property that facilitates
its own transmission, then that belief tends to be held by an increasing number
of minds.
Super Replicators
The faculty of communication would not gain ground in
evolution unless it was by and large the faculty of transmitting true beliefs.
False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies tend
to propagate because people who hold these beliefs tend to live in stable
societies, which provide the means by which false beliefs propagate.
Money brings happiness: this false belief is a
super-replicator because holding it causes us to engage in the very activities
that perpetuate it.
Imagination has three shortcomings:
1)
Its tendency to fill in and leave out without
telling us.
2)
Its tendency to project the present onto the
future.
3)
Its failure to recognize that things will look
different once they happen – in particular, that bad things will look a whole
lot better.
We don’t always see ourselves as
superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique. Three things make us feel special:
1)
We are the only people in the world whom we can
know from the inside. We experience our own thoughts and feelings but must
infer that other people are experiencing theirs.
2)
We enjoy thinking of ourselves as special. Most
of us want to fit in well with our peers, but we don’t want to fit in too well.
3)
We tend to overestimate our uniqueness in that
we tend to overestimate everyone’s uniqueness – that is, we tend to think of
people as more different from one another than they actually are.
Alas we think of ourselves as unique entities
– minds unlike any others – and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional
experience of others has to teach us.
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