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Stumbling onHappinessTyler Michael

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Why…? 

Why will sighted people pay more to avoid goingblind than blind people will pay to regain their sight?

Why do dining companions insist on orderingdifferent meals instead of getting what theyreally want?

Why can‟t we remember one song while listeningto another?

Why does the line at the grocery store alwaysslow down the moment we join it?

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Imagining Happiness

“The human being is the only animal that thinksabout the future.” 

“The greatest achievement of the human brain isits ability to imagine objects and episodes thatdo not exist in the realm of the real, and it is thisability that allows us to think about the future.”

“Making future”  ‘predicting’

‘nexting’

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Nexting

“As long as your brain‟s guess about the nextword turns out to be right, you cruise alonghappily, left to right, left to right turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, andconcepts, blissfully unaware that your nextingbrain is predicting the future of the sentence at afantastic rate. It is only when your brain predictsbadly that you suddenly feel avocado.”

That is, surprised. See?

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Prefrontal Cortex

Part of the frontal lobe that enables us toimagine the future

Frontal lobotomies were practiced to treatanxiety and depression

Anxiety Planning THE FUTURE…

Without it…a “permanent present”

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Prospection Daydreaming is itself a source of joy

ACHIEVIVING & SUCEEDING!!! vs. fumbling & failing

“Because most of us get so much more practiceimagining good than bad events, we tend tooverestimate the likelihood that good events willactually happen to us, which leads us to be

unrealistically optimistic about our futures.” Unrealistically optimistic sound familiar?

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Control After simulating the future, our brains aim for 

control of the future

Electric shock experiment 3 jolts are more painful than 20?

Nursing home houseplant experiment

More in the low-control group died

Nursing home visitor experiment

Perceived control…more low-control or high-controlgroup deaths?

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Control “Apparently, gaining control can have a positive

impact on one‟s health and well-being, butlosing control can be worse than never havinghad any at all.”

Picking lotto numbers

Gambling

Watching the re-run of last night‟s game 

Vacation to Extremia or Moderacia

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Subjectivity Conjoined twins are happier than separate twins

How can we tell?

“Subjective states are „irreducible‟, which is tosay that nothing we point to, nothing we cancompare them with, and nothing we can sayabout their neurological underpinnings can fully

substitute for the experiences themselves.” Writing about music is like dancing about

architecture. 

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Habituation aka Declining Marginal Utility

As an individual undergoes the same experience

multiple times, they are affected less and less

Habituation dependant on variety and time

Chicken or steak?

Works for both positive and negative stimuli

“Psychologists call this habituation, economistscall it declining marginal utility, and the rest of uscall it marriage.”

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Prefeeling Imagining what an emotion or 

experience will feel like

Allows for better predictions thanlogical thinking

“Future events may request access tothe emotional areas of our brains, but

current events almost always get theright of way.”

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Shortcomings of

Imagination Imagination tends to add and remove details,

but people do not realize that key details may befabricated or missing from the imagined

scenario.

Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like thepresent than they actually will be (or were).

Imagination fails to realize that things will feeldifferent once they actually happen.

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Relevance to Ecological

Economics How to imagine, simulate, and prepare for the

future

How to analyze those simulations

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why _are_we_happy.html