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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