Stumbling on Happiness Page 10

  Experiments such as these provide us with a backstage pass that allows us to see how the brain does its marvelous magic act. Of course, if you went backstage at a magic show and got a good look at all the wires, mirrors, and trapdoors, the show would be spoiled when you returned to your seat. After all, once you know how a trick works, you can’t fall for it, right? Well, if you go back and try the trick in figure 8 again, you will notice that despite the detailed scientific understanding of the visual blind spot that you acquired in the last few pages, the trick still works just fine. Indeed, no matter how much you learn about optics and no matter how long you spend nosing up to that rabbit, the trick will never fail. How can that be? I have tried to convince you that things are not always as they appear. Now let me try to convince you that you can’t help but believe that they are.

  The Meat Loaf of Oz

  Unless you skipped over childhood and went straight from strained carrots to mortgage payments, you probably remember the scene in the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy and her pals are cowering before the great and terrible Oz, who appears menacingly as a giant floating head. Toto the dog suddenly breaks loose, knocks over a screen in the corner of the room, and reveals a little man working the controls of a machine. The protagonists are astonished, and the Scarecrow accuses the little man of being a humbug.

  “Exactly so!” declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him. “I am a humbug.” . . .

  “Doesn’t anyone else know you’re a humbug?” asked Dorothy.

  “No one knows it but you four—and myself,” replied Oz. “I have fooled everyone so long that I thought I should never be found out.” . . .

  “But, I don’t understand,” said Dorothy, in bewilderment. “How was it that you appeared to me as a great Head?”

  “That was one of my tricks,” answered Oz. . . .

  “I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy.

  “Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard.”14

  Discovering Idealism

  Toward the end of the eighteenth century, philosophers had approximately the same sort of eye-opening experience that Dorothy had, and concluded (with some reluctance) that while the human brain is a very good organ, it is a very bad wizard. Prior to that time, philosophers had thought of the senses as conduits that allowed information about the properties of objects in the world to travel from the object and into the mind. The mind was like a movie screen in which the object was rebroadcast. The operation broke down on occasion, hence people occasionally saw things as they were not. But when the senses were working properly, they showed what was there. This theory of realism was described in 1690 by the philosopher John Locke:

  When our senses do actually convey into our understandings any idea, we cannot but be satisfied that there doth something at that time really exist without us, which doth affect our senses, and by them give notice of itself to our apprehensive faculties, and actually produce that idea which we then perceive: and we cannot so far distrust their testimony, as to doubt that such collections of simple ideas as we have observed by our senses to be united together, do really exist together.15

  In other words, brains believe, but they don’t make believe. When people see giant floating heads, it is because giant heads are actually floating in their purview, and the only question for a psychologically minded philosopher was how brains accomplish this amazing act of faithful reflection. But in 1781 a reclusive German professor named Immanuel Kant broke loose, knocked over the screen in the corner of the room, and exposed the brain as a humbug of the highest order. Kant’s new theory of idealism claimed that our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains, but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality. “The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing,” Kant wrote. “Only through their union can knowledge arise.”16 The historian Will Durant performed the remarkable feat of summarizing Kant’s point in a single sentence: “The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost—one might say—a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.”17 Kant argued that a person’s perception of a floating head is constructed from the person’s knowledge of floating heads, memory of floating heads, belief in floating heads, need for floating heads, and sometimes—but not always—from the actual presence of a floating head itself. Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.

  This theory was a revelation, and in the centuries that followed, psychologists extended it by suggesting that each individual makes roughly the same journey of discovery that philosophy did. In the 1920s, the psychologist Jean Piaget noticed that the young child often fails to distinguish between her perception of an object and the object’s actual properties, hence she tends to believe that things really are as they appear to be—and that others must therefore see them as she does. When a two-year-old child sees her playmate leave the room, and then sees an adult remove a cookie from a cookie jar and hide it in a drawer, she expects that her playmate will later look for the cookie in the drawer—despite the fact that her playmate was not in the room when the adult moved the cookie to the drawer from the jar.18 Why? Because the two-year-old child knows the cookie is in the drawer and thus expects that everyone else knows this as well. Without a distinction between things in the world and things in the mind, the child cannot understand how different minds can contain different things. Of course, with increasing maturity, children shift from realism to idealism, coming to realize that perceptions are merely points of view, that what they see is not necessarily what there is, and that two people may thus have different perceptions of or beliefs about the same thing. Piaget concluded that “the child is a realist in its thought” and that “its progress consists in ridding itself of this initial realism.”19 In other words, like philosophers, ordinary people start out as realists but get over it soon enough.

  Escaping Realism

  But if realism goes away, it doesn’t get very far. Research shows that even adults act like realists under certain circumstances. For example, in one study, a pair of adult volunteers were seated on opposite sides of a set of cubbyholes, as shown in figure 9.20 Some common objects were placed in several of the cubbies. Some of these cubbies were open on both sides, so that items such as the large truck and the medium truck were clearly visible to both volunteers. Other cubbies were open on only one side, so that items such as the small truck could be seen by one volunteer but not by the other. The volunteers played a game in which the person with the occluded view (the director) told the person with the clear view (the mover) to move certain objects to certain locations. Now, what should have happened when the director said, “Move the small truck to the bottom row”? If the mover were an idealist, she would move the medium truck because she would realize that the director could not see the small truck, hence he must have been referring to the medium truck, which, from the director’s point of view, was the smallest. On the other hand, if the mover were a realist, then she would move the small truck without regard for the fact that the director could not see it as she could, hence could not have been referring to it when he gave his instruction. So which truck did the movers actually move?

  Fig. 9.

  The medium truck, of course. What—did you think they were stupid? These were normal adults. They had intact brains, good jobs, bank accounts, nice table manners—all the usual stuff. They knew that the director had a different point of view and thus must have been talking about the medium truck when he said, “Move the small truck.” But while these normal adults with intact br
ains behaved like perfect idealists, their hands told only half the story. In addition to measuring the mover’s hand movements, the researchers used an eye tracker to measure the mover’s eye movements as well. The eye tracker revealed that the moment the mover heard the phrase “Move the small truck,” she briefly looked toward the small truck—not the medium truck, which was the smallest truck the director could see, but the small truck, which was the smallest truck that she could see. In other words, the mover’s brain initially interpreted the phrase “the small truck” as a reference to the smallest truck from her own point of view, without regard for the fact that the director’s point of view was different. Only after briefly flirting with the idea of moving the small truck did the mover’s brain consider the fact that the director had a different view and thus must have meant the medium truck, at which point her brain sent her hand instructions to move the proper truck. The hand behaved like an idealist, but the eye revealed that the brain was a momentary realist.

  Experiments such as these suggest that we do not outgrow realism so much as we learn to outfox it, and that even as adults our perceptions are characterized by an initial moment of realism.21 According to this line of reasoning, we automatically assume that our subjective experience of a thing is a faithful representation of the thing’s properties. Only later—if we have the time, energy, and ability—do we rapidly repudiate that assumption and consider the possibility that the real world may not actually be as it appears to us.22 Piaget described realism as “a spontaneous and immediate tendency to confuse the sign and the thing signified,”23 and research shows that this tendency to equate our subjective sense of things with the objective properties of those things remains spontaneous and immediate throughout our lives. It does not go away forever, and it does not go away on occasion. Rather, it is brief, unarticulated, and rapidly unraveled, but it is always the first step in our perception of the world. We believe what we see, and then unbelieve it when we have to.

  All of this suggests that the psychologist George Miller was right when he wrote, “The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world.”24 The three-and-a-half-pound meat loaf between our ears is not a simple recording device but a remarkably smart computer that gathers information, makes shrewd judgments and even shrewder guesses, and offers us its best interpretation of the way things are. Because those interpretations are usually so good, because they usually bear such a striking resemblance to the world as it is actually constituted, we do not realize that we are seeing an interpretation. Instead, we feel as though we are sitting comfortably inside our heads, looking out through the clear glass windshield of our eyes, watching the world as it truly is. We tend to forget that our brains are talented forgers, weaving a tapestry of memory and perception whose detail is so compelling that its inauthenticity is rarely detected. In a sense, each of us is a counterfeiter who prints phony dollar bills and then happily accepts them for payment, unaware that he is both the perpetrator and victim of a well-orchestrated fraud. As you are about to see, we sometimes pay a steep price for allowing ourselves to lose sight of this fundamental fact, because the mistake we make when we momentarily ignore the filling-in trick and unthinkingly accept the validity of our memories and our perceptions is precisely the same mistake we make when we imagine our futures.

  An Embarrassment of Tomorrows

  When John Lennon asked us to “imagine there’s no countries,” he was quick to add, “it isn’t hard to do.” Indeed, imagination is usually effortless. When we think about the pastrami on rye that we intend to have for lunch, or the new pair of flannel pajamas that Mom swears she mailed last week, we do not have to set aside a block of time between other appointments, roll up our sleeves, and get down to the serious work of conjuring up images of sandwiches and sleepwear. Rather, the moment we have the slightest inclination to consider these things, our brains effortlessly use what they know about delis and lunches and parcels and moms to construct mental pictures (warm pastrami, dark rye, tartan-plaid pajamas with bunny feet) that we experience as the products of imagination. Like perceptions and memories, these mental pictures pop into our consciousness fait accompli. We should be grateful for the ease with which our imaginations provide this useful service, but because we do not consciously supervise the construction of these mental images, we tend to treat them as we treat memories and perceptions—initially assuming that they are accurate representations of the objects we are imagining.

  For instance, right now you can probably imagine a plate of spaghetti and tell me how much you would enjoy eating it for dinner tomorrow evening. Fine. Now notice two things. First, this wasn’t particularly taxing. You could probably imagine pasta all day long without ever breaking a sweat, letting your brain do the heavy construction work while you lounge around in your new pajamas. Second, notice that the spaghetti you imagined was much richer than the spaghetti I asked you about. Perhaps your imaginary spaghetti was the goopy slop from the can, or perhaps it was fresh basil-rosemary pasta topped with a silky bolognaise. The sauce could have been tomato, cream, clam, or even grape jelly. The noodles might have been piled beneath a pair of traditional meatballs, or sprinkled with a half-dozen slivers of duck sausage studded with capers and pine nuts. Maybe you imagined eating the spaghetti while standing at your kitchen counter with a newspaper in one hand and a Coke in the other, or maybe you imagined that your waiter had given you the small table near the fireplace at your favorite trattoria and poured you a fat 1990 Barolo to start. Whatever you imagined, it’s a pretty good bet that when I said spaghetti, you did not have an unrequited urge to interrogate me about the nuances of sauce and locale before envisioning a single noodle. Instead, your brain behaved like a portrait artist commissioned to produce a full-color oil from a rough charcoal sketch, filling in all the details that were absent from my question and serving you a particular heaping helping of imaginary pasta. And when you estimated your enjoyment of this future spaghetti, you responded to this particular mental image as you respond to particular memories and particular perceptions—as though the details had been specified by the thing you were imagining rather than fabricated by your brain.

  In so doing, you made an error that your future spaghetti-eating self may regret.25 The phrase “spaghetti for dinner tomorrow evening” does not describe an event so much as it describes a family of events, and the particular member of the family that you imagined influenced your predictions about how much you’d enjoy eating it. Indeed, trying to predict how much you will enjoy a plate of spaghetti without knowing which plate of spaghetti is like trying to predict how much you will pay for a car without knowing which car (Ferrari or Chevy?), or trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?), or trying to predict how sad you will be when a relative dies without knowing which relative (dear old Dad or cranky Great Uncle Sherman on Cousin Ida’s side twice removed?). There are endless variations on spaghetti, and the particular variation you imagined surely influenced how much you expected to enjoy the experience. Because these details are so crucial to an accurate prediction of your response to the event you were imagining, and because these important details were not known, you would have been wise to withhold your prediction about spaghetti, or at least to temper it with a disclaimer such as “I expect to like the spaghetti if it is al dente with smoked pomodoro.”

  But I’m willing to bet that you didn’t withhold, you didn’t disclaim, and that you instead conjured up a plate of imaginary spaghetti faster than Chef Boyardee on Rollerblades, then made a confident prediction about the relationship you expected to have with that food. If you didn’t do that, then congratulations. Give yourself a medal. But if you did, then know you are not alone. Research suggests that when people make predictions about their reactions to future events, they tend to neglect the fact that their brains have performed the filling-in trick as an integral part of the act of i
magination.26 For example, volunteers in one study were asked to predict what they would do in a variety of future situations—how much time they would be willing to spend answering questions in a telephone survey, how much money they would be willing to spend to celebrate a special occasion at a restaurant in San Francisco, and so on.27 Volunteers also reported how confident they were that each of these predictions was correct. Before making predictions, some volunteers were asked to describe all the details of the future event they were imagining (“I am imagining eating wine-braised short ribs with roasted root vegetables and parsley coulis at Jardiniere”) and were then told that they should assume that each of these details was perfectly accurate (the assumers). Other volunteers were not asked to describe these details and were not told to make any assumptions (nonassumers). The results showed that nonassumers were every bit as confident as assumers were. Why? Because when they were asked about dinner, the nonassumers quickly and unconsciously generated a mental image of a particular dish at a particular restaurant, and then assumed that these details were accurate, rather than having been conjured from airy nothing.

  We all find ourselves in the same fix from time to time. Our spouse asks us to attend a party next Friday night, our brains instantly manufacture an image of a cocktail party in the penthouse of a downtown hotel with waiters in black tie carrying silver trays of hors d’oeuvres past a slightly bored harpist, and we predict our reaction to the imagined event with a yawn that sets new records for duration and jaw extension. What we generally fail to consider is how many different kinds of parties there are—birthday celebrations, gallery openings, cast parties, yacht parties, office parties, orgies, wakes—and how different our reactions would be to each. So we tell our spouse that we’d rather skip the party, our spouse naturally drags us along anyhow, and we have a truly marvelous time. Why? Because the party involved cheap beer and hula hoops rather than classical music and seaweed crackers. It was precisely our style, and we liked what we predicted we’d hate because our prediction was based on a detailed image that reflected our brain’s best guess, which was in this case dead wrong. The point here is that when we imagine the future, we often do so in the blind spot of our mind’s eye, and this tendency can cause us to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences we are attempting to weigh.