Stumbling on Happiness

Citation

Albertazzi, A.M. (2007), "Stumbling on Happiness", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 596-599. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810710760108

Wizardry and cookery in the human brain

“Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about being happy” (p. xvi), says Daniel Gilbert of his recent inquiry into the workings of the human psyche. Gilbert's (2006) Stumbling on Happiness fondly but realistically maps out the human psyche in all its fallibility, trying to answer this burning question: why, if humans possess an imagination that can project an emotional hologram into the future, cannot we envision what will make us happy and map our day or our lives to it? Despite the disclaimer that his book will not lead to happiness, and despite his conclusion that we are hopelessly fooled by our brains into and out of happiness, he sustains an upbeat, playful, and even flippant tone as he describes the path we totter along in our search for fulfillment. Our lives, Gilbert claims, are a series of predictable misperceptions by an imperfect mind; yet somehow, that mind manages to net good feelings when all is said and done. If this book could be summarized by a gesture, it would be one of shrugged shoulders, upturned palms, and a “not bad” exaggerated frown. All things considered, the human species is managing well.

Gilbert's inquiry is highly – sometimes overly – accessible; it condenses an incredible mass of scholarship on the elusive subject of emotional happiness into a disarming series of conversational gestures (“Uh‐huh. Right. Are we really supposed to believe that people who lose their jobs, their freedom, and their mobility are somehow improved by the tragedies that befall them? If that strikes you as a far‐fetched possibility, then you are not alone”) (p. 152). If Gilbert's asides to the reader are generally vexing and overacted, they are nevertheless admissible in light of his last 30 pages: a compendium of research on happiness, consisting of 387 endnotes that cite and annotate a history of thinking on the topic. Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Gilbert clearly knows his stuff. This is a mixed ethos, but for those who attended teaching universities, it is not unfamiliar.

In his “Foreword,” Gilbert introduces his claim that humans are hopelessly ineffective at predicting what our future self's “tastes, preferences, needs, and desires” (p. xiv) will be, thus we are generally stumped when we realize that our plans for happiness did not hit the mark. Ironically, says Gilbert, our inability to predict our future emotional state tends to follow fairly predictable patterns. Just as we all err in the same way when we view an optical illusion, “the mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic” (p. xvi).

So Gilbert has already disoriented us by introducing a concept of happiness that is twice removed, first by placing it in the future, and second, by implying that it will be misidentified. In “Prospection” (Part I), he explains the concept further: “our brains were made for nexting” (p. 8), or projecting ourselves into the future and then imagining how we will feel when it happens (pp. 16‐22). The problem is that our power of “prospection,” or looking into the future, is just as prone to illusion as our eyesight and our memory (pp. 23‐24), and can be “explained by the same basic principles of human psychology” (p. 24). His next three sections, “Subjectivity,” “Presentism,” and “Rationalization,” explore those basic principles and apply them to his line of inquiry.

“Subjectivity” (Part II) paints a picture of the human brain as self‐obsessed, convinced of its absolute uniqueness, and prone to its own sleight of hand. Because of this, happiness is almost impossible to describe, and highly difficult to re‐conjure in its original form once it has passed (pp. 32‐33). Unfortunately, some of Gilbert's expressions (“Happiness, then, is the you‐know‐what‐I‐mean feeling” (p. 33)) are no match for the poignancy of his topic, but he effectively outlines the complex apparatus of human perception, using graphic representations of the brain's processes, filmic metaphors, and step‐by‐step tracings over some of the brain's most stunning, yet hidden, work.

In “Realism,” (Part III) Gilbert shows that just as the brain compensates for the blind spot on our retina by supplying an image based on surrounding information, (p. 81), the brain fills in external stimuli with “what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe” to construct what we know as reality (p. 85). Though discussion of this concept dates back to Immanuel Kant's 18^th century theory of idealism and has been echoed by the likes of Will Durant and Jean Piaget (pp. 85‐6), humans remain aloof to their own brain's scams when imagining the future, projecting erroneously every time (p. 89).

Like “Realism,” “Presentism” (Part IV) shows how the human imagination insists on imposing the present on the future. Because imagination and perception share the same apparatus, and because at any given time the brain will prioritize current feelings over imagined ones (pp. 117‐125), we often mistake “reality‐induced feelings for imagination‐induced prefeelings” (p. 123). When we think we are previewing an emotion in the future, we are simply drawing from what we feel right now and projecting it into the future.

Gilbert's depiction of the instantaneous, unsolicited processes that the brain conducts in order to shape our perceptions is disappointingly familiar. The idea that my brain is unable to measure without comparing (my old car versus a new one, last year's fashions versus this year's), and that I am unaware of how my brain will use comparisons to trick me at any given time, reminds me that my brain is the ultimate sales professional. Yet Gilbert's theory begs to be applied on a larger scale – the world marketplace, the class system, anything.

Part V concerns the brain's uncanny – and underestimated – powers of “Rationalism,” which depends on the fact that experience by its nature is ambiguous and can be perceived convincingly in a variety of ways. Using the body's immune system as a metaphor for our brain's psychological balancing act, Gilbert shows that as “a healthy physical immune system must balance its competing needs and find a way to defend us well – but not too well,” our “psychological immune system” does the same when we face an emotionally difficult event: it “strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it” (p. 162). Interestingly, the less ambiguous the experience, the more difficult it is for the psychological immune system to defend us from the rejection (p. 177). What's more, our defense system is triggered by traumatic experiences more so than life's everyday annoyances, and therefore does not provide coverage for the latter. Ironically, then, we are likely to have a more contented view of a devastating experience than we would for a broken pencil (pp. 180‐82).

It seems, though, a bit too neat to say that traumatic experiences tend to net greater happiness than annoyances – what about the phenomenon of post‐traumatic stress disorder? Gilbert's “laws” of perception would be more believable, or at least more textured, if he explored them against the backdrop of trauma, or the readers' shared sense of what deep emotional pain feels like.

In “Corrigibility” (Part VI), Gilbert brings home one of the crowning achievements of the psyche: the manufacture of memory. Our psyche selectively remembers the uncommon and the finale scenes, rather than the workaday elements that make up the majority of experience; so our past tends to look like a string of highly original and striking events, an “idiosyncratic synopsis” (pp. 197‐202). Where there are blanks, memory uses stereotypes as fillers and may completely misconstrue facts based on conjecture (pp. 205‐10). To make matters more challenging, the prevalence of inaccurate beliefs, like the transmission of genes, is possible if those beliefs create an environment that supports their continued transmission (p. 215). This holds true for the false belief that money buys happiness: it does not necessarily promote happiness, “but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serve the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth” (p. 219). Like Gilbert's analogy of the immune system with the psyche, this metaphor is absolutely fitting.

So what are we to do? Gilbert's proposes that we forego the use of imagination when predicting future emotional states, and instead, gather real‐time data from actual people who experience now the event we are pondering for the future. After all, this method has been proven to yield much more accurate results than the unaided imagination (pp. 224‐7). But of course, we categorically reject this conclusion; we are hardwired to believe strongly that we are highly unique. It stands to reason in our biased mind, then, that others don't experience things the way we do, and that surrogacy is doomed (pp. 228‐32). On reflection, I find using my own imagination highly preferable to using someone else's real‐time data. When I consider the latter, I imagine being infected by a contagion or my individuality being compromised in some way. Of course, that is my emotional reaction, and it is utterly wrong, just as Gilbert predicts. Yet I would still choose it.

Gilbert concludes that the imagination is an amazing gift, but it is far from perfect: “if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble” (p. 238). This is an “oh, well” conclusion – not even poignant enough to be disturbing. It's just flat. In fact, I hope that the tone of Gilbert's conclusion is calculated. If it is, Gilbert's genius lies in his simulation of the very trickery his book discusses. Not only has the experience of reading the book simulated the process that it describes – failed predictions about emotional wellness in the future – it explains exactly why that is so, and why we can't do anything about it. I entered the reading experience predicting increased enlightenment and fulfilled purpose by the end, only to find that my predicting equipment had far overestimated the quotient of joy I would experience. If it were not for the fact that my reaction to his ending proves Gilbert's point, I would be pretty upset with his anemic conclusion that humans are fundamentally prone to self‐deception.

Perhaps the most impressive of Gilbert's talents is his ability to make accessible a vast body of scholarship about the human perception and deliver it to a large reader base. If only for that reason, his book is a masterful instrument for transmitting ideas and prompting discussion. Like the tamping iron that pierced clean through Phineas Gage's skull and took out his frontal lobe (pp. 12‐15), Gilbert's “in your face” writing style, paired with his precise aim, exposes a little‐known aspect of our brain and leaves our consciousness changed forever … or until our brain makes us forget.