This isn’t a self-help book, though it looked to this reviewer as if it was inside the cover of one. Rather, Professor Gilbert of Harvard University writes about supposed deficiencies of the human brain, though always within a context of how vital these are to survival. And survival is probably the end-all, but it may not be the be-all.
Human beings manufacture futures, in ways no other creature does, and it’s why we get to wear high heels and not just splash around on lily pads or dig burrows or spin webs. We use our frontal lobe to do this and we’re the only species that has one each. Phineas Gage surgically removed most of his with a tamping iron in 1848 and survived, but didn’t have the ability to plan any more. But with this piece of kit we escape from a permanent here and now which other conscious beings are pretty much trapped in. Thinking about the future can be enjoyable. It can also alleviate the adverse impact of bad stuff (perhaps just by dispersing it through time). But at least as important, doing this provides the feeling of control. Which is as good to us as is actual control. But it is usually very far away from the latter, of which we don’t have anything like as much as we think we do. We think we enjoy control because we’re then better able to influence what the future is (and to make it a happy one). But that’s wrong—we suck at doing that. It doesn’t really matter though, being able to steer the boat regardless of port of call is the thing. The feeling of losing control that you had is, moreover, worse than that of never having had it.
Happiness is something the author ends up defining as the emotional experience someone has when they say they are happy. Erm, yes. This has long been the principal problem scientists have with it--it is subjective and rather hard to measure. But that’s equivalent to voting down Winston Churchill’s 1947 characterisation of democracy as being the least worst government ever tried. In other words, self-reporting is the only thing that can get close to being a gold standard measure of happpiness. So if conjoined twins, or the seven-months-shipwrecked crew of Endurance declare themselves to be happy, second-guessing is, well, a distant second. This is why we don’t predict correctly that Adolph Fischer (hanged in 1887 for something he was innocent of) died happy, or that George Eastman (Mr Kodak, and pioneer of workers’ rights) committed suicide in despair after achieving what would be great things in anyone (else)’s estimation.
More central to the book’s thesis is that a person isn’t very good at predicting what would make herself happy either. Or actually at predicting how a future experience will make her feel at all. Or even at remembering how she felt during a prior experience. This is because of the unique human ability to construct futures, which—in fact—is also used to remember pasts. Brains don’t record the past in 4K high definition, even though they can summon memories, and imagine things in renderings that seem to be of this quality. (Try imagining a plate of spaghetti, is an exercise Gilbert advances, and then observe how much richer the picture is than that three word instruction was). Really—our memories of the past are a wall with many holes, and (poetically) that isn’t too different from the future which is a hole with not many walls. A “filling-in trick” which borrows from the present, fills the holes in both time directions. There is more fabrication that retrieval going on when we remember and when we predict. Not to mention absences (things the brain unavoidably leaves out), which are even harder to discern than invented presences. Again—we could not experience what we know as reality without these tricks. They’re just not perfect.
This is why, for example, scientific predictions of the future are erroneous in the direction of being too similar to present. And, we can’t feel good about the future while feeling bad about the present, even if the two are unrelated. And it’s why it is hard to judge historical racism, sexism or other contemporary moral transgressions, very leniently today. We also under-estimate the extent to which we will be unhappy should some tragedy happen to us. Things look and feel different once they have happened, and the brain systematically refuses to get this too. Thinking outside the box is difficult because nobody really has a good handle on how big the box is.
There is a fix for this, incidentally, which is to ask someone else who has had an experience similar to the one that one is wondering about. But we are highly averse to proxying somebody else’s fact for our own imagination, and this doesn’t change, but apparently when test subjects are forced to rely on surrogate predictions from strangers, these are more accurate. It doesn’t happen because everyone, according to themselves, is better than average at more than an average number of things. Or even if someone doesn’t see herself as superior, she does see herself as unique. But it’s only her experience of herself that is uniquely different from her experience of everyone else. The ability to sustain such a position without succumbing to challenge comes from an inbuilt mechanism to reinforce Panglossianism. In short “we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words we put in the mouths of people who we have already preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear”. All well and good . . . OK not so good. But from the last line of Professor Gilbert’s afterword: “if our great big brains [frontal lobe and all] do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble”.
Human beings manufacture futures, in ways no other creature does, and it’s why we get to wear high heels and not just splash around on lily pads or dig burrows or spin webs. We use our frontal lobe to do this and we’re the only species that has one each. Phineas Gage surgically removed most of his with a tamping iron in 1848 and survived, but didn’t have the ability to plan any more. But with this piece of kit we escape from a permanent here and now which other conscious beings are pretty much trapped in. Thinking about the future can be enjoyable. It can also alleviate the adverse impact of bad stuff (perhaps just by dispersing it through time). But at least as important, doing this provides the feeling of control. Which is as good to us as is actual control. But it is usually very far away from the latter, of which we don’t have anything like as much as we think we do. We think we enjoy control because we’re then better able to influence what the future is (and to make it a happy one). But that’s wrong—we suck at doing that. It doesn’t really matter though, being able to steer the boat regardless of port of call is the thing. The feeling of losing control that you had is, moreover, worse than that of never having had it.
Happiness is something the author ends up defining as the emotional experience someone has when they say they are happy. Erm, yes. This has long been the principal problem scientists have with it--it is subjective and rather hard to measure. But that’s equivalent to voting down Winston Churchill’s 1947 characterisation of democracy as being the least worst government ever tried. In other words, self-reporting is the only thing that can get close to being a gold standard measure of happpiness. So if conjoined twins, or the seven-months-shipwrecked crew of Endurance declare themselves to be happy, second-guessing is, well, a distant second. This is why we don’t predict correctly that Adolph Fischer (hanged in 1887 for something he was innocent of) died happy, or that George Eastman (Mr Kodak, and pioneer of workers’ rights) committed suicide in despair after achieving what would be great things in anyone (else)’s estimation.
More central to the book’s thesis is that a person isn’t very good at predicting what would make herself happy either. Or actually at predicting how a future experience will make her feel at all. Or even at remembering how she felt during a prior experience. This is because of the unique human ability to construct futures, which—in fact—is also used to remember pasts. Brains don’t record the past in 4K high definition, even though they can summon memories, and imagine things in renderings that seem to be of this quality. (Try imagining a plate of spaghetti, is an exercise Gilbert advances, and then observe how much richer the picture is than that three word instruction was). Really—our memories of the past are a wall with many holes, and (poetically) that isn’t too different from the future which is a hole with not many walls. A “filling-in trick” which borrows from the present, fills the holes in both time directions. There is more fabrication that retrieval going on when we remember and when we predict. Not to mention absences (things the brain unavoidably leaves out), which are even harder to discern than invented presences. Again—we could not experience what we know as reality without these tricks. They’re just not perfect.
This is why, for example, scientific predictions of the future are erroneous in the direction of being too similar to present. And, we can’t feel good about the future while feeling bad about the present, even if the two are unrelated. And it’s why it is hard to judge historical racism, sexism or other contemporary moral transgressions, very leniently today. We also under-estimate the extent to which we will be unhappy should some tragedy happen to us. Things look and feel different once they have happened, and the brain systematically refuses to get this too. Thinking outside the box is difficult because nobody really has a good handle on how big the box is.
There is a fix for this, incidentally, which is to ask someone else who has had an experience similar to the one that one is wondering about. But we are highly averse to proxying somebody else’s fact for our own imagination, and this doesn’t change, but apparently when test subjects are forced to rely on surrogate predictions from strangers, these are more accurate. It doesn’t happen because everyone, according to themselves, is better than average at more than an average number of things. Or even if someone doesn’t see herself as superior, she does see herself as unique. But it’s only her experience of herself that is uniquely different from her experience of everyone else. The ability to sustain such a position without succumbing to challenge comes from an inbuilt mechanism to reinforce Panglossianism. In short “we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words we put in the mouths of people who we have already preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear”. All well and good . . . OK not so good. But from the last line of Professor Gilbert’s afterword: “if our great big brains [frontal lobe and all] do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble”.