Stumbling on Happiness Read online

  Given the importance of feelings, it would be nice to be able to say precisely what they are and how one might measure them. As we have seen, we can’t do that with the kind of precision that scientists covet. Nonetheless, if the methodological and conceptual tools that science has developed do not allow us to measure the feelings of a single individual with pinpoint accuracy, they at least allow us to go stumbling in the dark with pickled rulers to measure dozens of individuals again and again. The problem facing us is a difficult one, but it is too important to ignore: Why do we so often fail to know what will make us happy in the future? Science offers some intriguing answers to this question, and now that we have a sense of the problem and a general method for solving it, we are ready to inspect them.

  PART III

  Realism

  realism (rī•ăliz´m)

  The belief that things are in reality

  as they appear to be in the mind.

  CHAPTER 4

  In the Blind Spot

  of the Mind’s Eye

  And as imagination bodies forth

  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  THIS MUCH WE KNOW for sure: Adolph Fischer did not organize the riot. He did not incite the riot. In fact, he was nowhere near the riot the night the policemen were killed. But his labor union had challenged the stranglehold that Chicago’s powerful industrialists had on the men, women, and children who toiled in their sweatshops toward the end of the nineteenth century, and that union needed to be taught a lesson. So Adolph Fischer was tried and, on the basis of paid and perjured testimony, sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit. On November 11, 1887, he stood on the gallows and surprised everyone with his last words: “This is the happiest moment of my life.” A few seconds later the trapdoor beneath his feet fell away, the rope snapped his neck, and he was dead.1

  Fortunately, his dreams of equity in the American workplace were not so easily exterminated. One year after Fischer was hanged, a bright young fellow perfected the process of dry photography, launched his revolutionary Kodak camera, and instantly became one of the richest men in the world. In the decades that followed, George Eastman developed a revolutionary management philosophy as well, giving his employees shorter hours, disability benefits, retirement annuities, life insurance, profit sharing, and, ultimately, one third of the stock in his company. On March 14, 1932, the beloved inventor and humanitarian sat down at his desk, wrote a brief note, neatly capped his fountain pen, and smoked a cigarette. Then he surprised everyone by killing himself.2

  Fischer and Eastman are a fascinating contrast. Both men believed that common laborers have a right to fair wages and decent working conditions, and both dedicated much of their lives to bringing about social change at the dawn of the industrial age. Fischer failed abysmally and died a criminal, poor and reviled. Eastman succeeded absolutely and died a champion, affluent and venerated. So why did a poor man who had accomplished so little stand happily at the threshold of his own lynching while a rich man who had accomplished so much felt driven to take his own life? Fischer’s and Eastman’s reactions to their respective situations seem so contrary, so completely inverted, that one is tempted to chalk them up to false bravado or mental aberration. Fischer was apparently happy on the last day of a wretched existence, Eastman was apparently unhappy on the last day of a fulfilling life, and we know full well that if we had been standing in either of their places, we would have experienced precisely the opposite emotions. So what was wrong with these guys? I will ask you to consider the possibility that there was nothing wrong with them but that there is something wrong with you. And with me too. And the thing that’s wrong with both of us is that we make a systematic set of errors when we try to imagine “what it would feel like if.”

  Imagining “what it would feel like if” sounds like a fluffy bit of daydreaming, but in fact, it is one of the most consequential mental acts we can perform, and we perform it every day. We make decisions about whom to marry, where to work, when to reproduce, where to retire, and we base these decisions in large measure on our beliefs about how it would feel if this event happened but that one didn’t.3 Our lives may not always turn out as we wish or as we plan, but we are confident that if they had, then our happiness would have been unbounded and our sorrows thin and fleeting. Perhaps it is true that we can’t always get what we want, but at least we feel sure that we know what to want in the first place. We know that happiness is to be found on the golf course and not on the assembly line, with Lana but not with Lisa, as a potter but not as a plumber, in Atlanta but not in Afghanistan, and we know these things because we can look forward in time and simulate worlds that do not yet exist. Whenever we find ourselves on the front end of a decision—Should I have another fish stick or go directly for the Ding Dongs? Accept the job in Kansas City or stay put and hope for a promotion? Have the knee surgery or try the physical therapy first?—we imagine the futures that our alternatives provide and then imagine how we would feel in each of them (“If the surgery didn’t work, I’d always regret not having given the physical therapy a chance”). And we don’t have to imagine very hard to know that we would be happier as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company than as the deadweight on a hangman’s rope. Because we are the ape that looked forward, we don’t actually have to live Adolph Fischer’s or George Eastman’s lives to know how it would feel to walk a mile in their shoes.

  There’s just one catch: The owners of the shoes didn’t seem to agree with our conclusions. Fischer claimed to be happy, Eastman acted like a man who was not, so unless these guys were wrong about how it felt to live their own lives, we are forced to consider the possibility that the mistake is ours—that when we tried to imagine how it would feel to be in Fischer’s or Eastman’s situations, our imaginations failed us in some curious way. We are forced to consider the possibility that what clearly seems to be the better life may actually be the worse life and that when we look down the time line at the different lives we might lead, we may not always know which is which. We are forced to consider the possibility that we did something fundamentally wrong when we mentally slipped out of our shoes and into theirs, and that this fundamental mistake can cause us to choose the wrong future.

  What might this mistake be? Imagination is a powerful tool that allows us to conjure images from “airy nothing.” But like all tools, this one has its shortcomings, and in this and the next chapter I’ll tell you about the first of them. The best way to understand this particular shortcoming of imagination (the faculty that allows us to see the future) is to understand the shortcomings of memory (the faculty that allows us to see the past) and perception (the faculty that allows us to see the present). As you will learn, the shortcoming that causes us to misremember the past and misperceive the present is the very same shortcoming that causes us to misimagine the future. That shortcoming is caused by a trick that your brain plays on you every minute of every hour of every day—a trick that your brain is playing on you right now. Let me tell you the brain’s dirty little secret.

  Little Big Head

  There is a marvelous moment in most of the early Marx Brothers films in which Harpo, the cherubic mime, reaches deep into the folds of his floppy trench coat and pulls out a flügelhorn, a steaming cup of coffee, a bathroom sink, or a sheep. By the age of three, most of us have learned that big things can’t go inside little things, and that understanding is violated to comic effect when someone pulls plumbing or livestock from his pockets. How can a flügelhorn fit inside a raincoat? How can that tiny car hold all those merry clowns? How can the magician’s assistant get folded up inside that little box? They can’t, of course, and we know that, which is why we are so appreciative of the illusion that they do.

  Filling in Memory

  The human brain creates a similar illusion. If you’ve ever tried to store a full
season of your favorite television show on your computer’s hard drive, then you already know that faithful representations of things in the world require gobs of space. And yet, our brains take millions of snapshots, record millions of sounds, add smells, tastes, textures, a third spatial dimension, a temporal sequence, a continuous running commentary—and they do this all day, every day, year after year, storing these representations of the world in a memory bank that seems never to overflow and yet allows us to recall at a moment’s notice that awful day in the sixth grade when we teased Phil Meyers about his braces and he promised to beat us up after school. How do we cram the vast universe of our experience into the relatively small storage compartment between our ears? We do what Harpo did: We cheat. As you learned in the previous chapters, the elaborate tapestry of our experience is not stored in memory—at least not in its entirety. Rather, it is compressed for storage by first being reduced to a few critical threads, such as a summary phrase (“Dinner was disappointing”) or a small set of key features (tough steak, corked wine, snotty waiter). Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating—not by actually retrieving—the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory.4 This fabrication happens so quickly and effortlessly that we have the illusion (as a good magician’s audience always does) that the entire thing was in our heads the entire time.

  But it wasn’t, and that fact can be easily demonstrated. For example, volunteers in one study were shown a series of slides depicting a red car as it cruises toward a yield sign, turns right, and then knocks over a pedestrian.5 After seeing the slides, some of the volunteers (the no-question group) were not asked any questions, and the remaining volunteers (the question group) were. The question these volunteers were asked was this: “Did another car pass the red car while it was stopped at the stop sign?” Next, all the volunteers were shown two pictures—one in which the red car was approaching a yield sign and one in which the red car was approaching a stop sign—and were asked to point to the picture they had actually seen. Now, if the volunteers had stored their experience in memory, then they should have pointed to the picture of the car approaching the yield sign, and indeed, more than 90 percent of the volunteers in the no-question group did just that. But 80 percent of the volunteers in the question group pointed to the picture of the car approaching a stop sign. Clearly, the question changed the volunteers’ memories of their earlier experience, which is precisely what one would expect if their brains were reweaving their experiences—and precisely what one would not expect if their brains were retrieving their experiences.

  This general finding—that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event—has been replicated so many times in so many different laboratory and field settings that it has left most scientists convinced of two things.6 First, the act of remembering involves “filling in” details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.7 Indeed, this phenomenon is so powerful that it happens even when we know someone is trying to trick us. For example, read the list of words below, and when you’ve finished, quickly cover the list with your hand. Then I will trick you.

  Bed

  Rest

  Awake

  Tired

  Dream

  Wake

  Snooze

  Blanket

  Doze

  Slumber

  Snore

  Nap

  Peace

  Yawn

  Drowsy

  Here’s the trick. Which of the following words was not on the list? Bed, doze, sleep, or gasoline? The right answer is gasoline, of course. But the other right answer is sleep, and if you don’t believe me, then you should lift your hand from the page. (Actually, you should lift your hand from the page in any case, as we really need to move along). If you’re like most people, you knew gasoline was not on the list, but you mistakenly remembered reading the word sleep.8 Because all the words on the list are so closely related, your brain stored the gist of what you read (“a bunch of words about sleeping”) rather than storing every one of the words. Normally this would be a clever and economical strategy for remembering. The gist would serve as an instruction that enabled your brain to reweave the tapestry of your experience and allow you to “remember” reading the words you saw. But in this case, your brain was tricked by the fact that the gist word—the key word, the essential word—was not actually on the list. When your brain rewove the tapestry of your experience, it mistakenly included a word that was implied by the gist but that had not actually appeared, just as volunteers in the previous study mistakenly included a stop sign that was implied by the question they had been asked but that had not actually appeared in the slides they saw.

  This experiment has been done dozens of times with dozens of different word lists, and these studies have revealed two surprising findings. First, people do not vaguely recall seeing the gist word and they do not simply guess that they saw the gist word. Rather, they vividly remember seeing it and they feel completely confident that it appeared.9 Second, this phenomenon happens even when people are warned about it beforehand.10 Knowing that a researcher is trying to trick you into falsely recalling the appearance of a gist word does not stop that false recollection from happening.

  Filling in Perception

  The powerful and undetectable filling in that suffuses our remembrances of things past pervades our perceptions of things present as well. For instance, if on one particularly slow Tuesday you took it upon yourself to dissect your eyeball, you would eventually come across a spot on the back of your retina where your optic nerve leaves your eye and wends its way toward your brain. The eyeball cannot register an image at the point at which the optic nerve attaches, and hence that point is known as the blind spot. No one can see an object that appears in the blind spot because there are no visual receptors there. And yet, if you look out into your living room, you do not notice a black hole in the otherwise smooth picture of your brother-in-law sitting on the sofa, devouring cheese dip. Why? Because your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren’t blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That’s right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn’t consult you about this, doesn’t seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene—and the part of your visual experience of your cheese-dipping brother-in-law that is caused by real light reflecting off of his real face and the part that your brain just made up look exactly alike to you. You can convince yourself of this by closing your left eye, focusing your right eye on the magician in figure 8, and then bringing the book slowly toward you. Stay focused on the magician, but notice that when the earth moves into your blind spot, it seems to disappear. You will suddenly see whiteness where the earth actually is because your brain sees whiteness all around the earth and thus mistakenly assumes there is whiteness in your blind spot as well. If you keep moving the book toward you, the earth will reappear. Eventually, of course, your nose will touch the rabbit and you will commit an unnatural act.

  Fig. 8. If you stare at the magician with your right eye and move the book slowly toward your nose, the earth will disappear into your blind spot.

  The filling-in trick is not limited to the visual world. Researchers tape-recorded the sentence The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city. Then they doctored the tape, substituting a cough for the first s in legislatures.11 Volunteers heard the cough all right, but they heard it happening between the words because they heard the missing s too. Even when they were specifically instructed to listen for the missing sound, and even when they were given thousands of trials of practice, volunteers were unable to name the missing letter that their brains knew ought to be there and had thus helpfu
lly supplied.12 In an even more remarkable study, volunteers listened to a recording of the word eel preceded by a cough (which I’ll denote with *). The volunteers heard the word peel when it was embedded in the sentence “The *eel was on the orange” but they heard the word heel when it was embedded in the sentence “The *eel was on the shoe.”13 This is a striking finding because the two sentences differ only in their final word, which means that volunteers’ brains had to wait for the last word of the sentence before they could supply the information that was missing from the second word. But they did it, and they did it so smoothly and quickly that volunteers actually heard the missing information being spoken in its proper position.