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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Stumbling
on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Imagination If, like me,
you love a book that’s loaded with facts and disrupts your assumptions, you’re
likely to enjoy Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert’s new book, Stumbling
on Happiness. Through an examination of how our minds work, Gilbert provides
a scientific explanation of why we’re so bad at doing things that really make
us happy. Because feeling in control is so powerful, we imagine that we
control more than we actually do, and that often leads to unhappiness. Here’s
an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3, “Outside Looking In,” pp. 55-58: Go to
your bosom; Knock
there, and ask your heart what it doth know. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure There
aren’t many jokes about psychology
professors, so we tend to cherish the few we have. Here’s one. 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. That is, they may
believe what they’re saying, but what they’re saying may be wrong. Before we
can decide whether to accept people’s claims about their happiness, we must
first decide whether people can, in principle, be mistaken about what they
feel. We can be wrong about all sorts of things—the price of soybeans, the
life span of dust mites, the history of flannel-but can we be wrong about our own emotional experience? Can we
believe we are feeling something we aren’t? Are there really folks out there
who can’t accurately answer the world’s most familiar question? Yes, and
you’ll find one in the mirror. Read on. Dazed and Confused But not
just yet. Before you read on, I challenge you to stop and have a nice long
look at your thumb. Now, I will wager that you did not accept my challenge. I
will wager that you went right on reading because looking at your thumb is so
easy that it makes for rather pointless sport—everyone bats a thousand and
the game is called on account of boredom. But if looking at your thumb seems
beneath you, just consider what actually has to happen for us to see an object
in our environment—a thumb, a glazed doughnut, or a rabid wolverine. In the
tiny gap between the time that the light reflected from the surface of the
object reaches our eyes and the time that we become aware of the object’s
identity, our brains must extract and analyze the object’s features and
compare them with information in our memory to determine what the thing is
and what we ought to do about it. This is complicated stuff—so complicated
that no scientist yet understands precisely how it happens and no computer
can simulate the trick—but it is just the sort of complicated stuff that
brains do with exceptional speed and accuracy. In fact, they perform these
analyses with such proficiency that we have the experience of simply looking
leftward, seeing a wolverine, feeling afraid, and preparing to do all further
analysis from the safety of a sycamore. Think for
a moment about how looking ought to
happen. If you were designing a brain from scratch, you would probably design
it so that it first identified
objects in its environment (“Sharp teeth, brown fur, weird little snorting
sound, hot drool—why, that’s a rabid wolverine!”) and then figured out what to do (“Leaving seems like a splendid idea
about now”). But human brains were not designed from scratch. 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.
Indeed, actions such as running away are so vitally important to the
survival of terrestrial mammals like the ones from whom we are descended that
evolution took no chances and designed the brain to answer the “What should I
do?” question before the “What is
it?” question.’ Experiments have demonstrated that the moment we encounter an
object, our brains instantly analyze just a few of its key features and then
use the presence or absence of these features to make one very fast and very
simple decision: “Is this object an important thing to which I ought to
respond right now?” Rabid wolverines, crying babies, hurled rocks, beckoning
mates, cowering prey—these things count for a lot in the game of survival,
which requires that we take immediate action when we happen upon them and do
not dally to contemplate the finer points of their identities. As such, our
brains are designed to decide first whether
objects count and to decide later what those objects are. This means that
when you turn your head to the left, there is a fraction of a second during
which your brain does not know that
it is seeing a wolverine but does know
that it is seeing something scary. But how
can that be? How can we know something is scary if we don’t know what it is?
To understand how this can happen, just consider how you would go about
identifying a person who is walking toward you across a vast expanse of
desert. The first thing to catch your eye would be a small flicker of motion
on the horizon. As you stared, you would soon notice that the motion was that
of an object moving toward you. As it came closer, you would see that the
motion was biological, then you would see that the
biological object was a biped, then a human, then a female, then a fat human
female with dark hair and a Budweiser T-shirt, and then—hey, what’s Aunt
Mabel doing in the The fact
that we can feel aroused without knowing exactly what it is that has aroused
us has important implications for our ability to identify our own emotions. For example, researchers studied the
reactions of some young men who were crossing a long, narrow, suspension
bridge constructed of wooden boards and wire cables that rocked and swayed
230 feet above the Gilbert uses a light and conversational
prose style throughout Stumbling
on Happiness, and his scientific foundations are by no means ponderous. He
goes beyond explaining the problem and supporting it with facts, to offering
some advice on what to do differently. Whether you agree or disagree with his
advice, you’re likely to find some of your current assumptions shaken as a
result of his facts. Steve Hopkins,
September 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Stumbling
on Happiness.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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