The Science of Happiness

Imagine that scientists could make a happiness machine (baring no use of medical substances).

Yesterday I heard a TED Talk by a guy named Dan Gilbert. Gilbert dug in to the science of happiness… particularly focusing on the frontal lobe. He describes the prefrontal cortex as being an “experience simulator”. Like a pilot using a flight simulator, he observes that the function of our frontal lobe is to simulate experiences prior to them happening… playing it out before it occurs. This adaptation, he determines, creates synthetic happiness.

Gilbert offers two options, as a pop-quiz of sorts; which option would result in a happier person?

1.      Winning the lottery

2.      Being a paraplegic

Using our “experience simulator”, you don’t need a two-hour time limit on this one. It seems pretty easy. The results of his findings, however, are quite startling. Studies done on both categories of people resulted in the same happiness level. He says that our simulator has glitch, in which the impact bias occurs. Essentially the simulator makes you believe that different outcomes are more different that in fact they really are. Whether it is winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion have far less impact than people expect them to have. So in laymen’s terms, we imagine outcomes to be worse or better than they really are when they actually manifest.

Why?

He declares that happiness can be synthesized.

“I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can covert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me.” – Sir Thomas Browne

Human beings have something we can consider a “psychological immune system”. A system of non-conscious cognitive processes that help them change their views of the world so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves.

So the conundrum here is that we think happiness is something that can be found, when in fact, it is something that we can create. So the machine is, in fact, already in existence within ourselves.

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy?language=en