Zheng Shenghui's study and reflection day 2129
About the author
Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, is best known for his research on "emotion prediction" and received the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement. Inspired by his own experiences of experiencing significant life pain and emotional reactions, Gilbert embarked on the path of emotional prediction. He and psychologist Wilson coined the academic term "emotion prediction". Today, Gilbert has become an expert in the field of emotion prediction and has worked tirelessly to educate the masses about it, and this book is a prime example of this.
About the book
In this book, Daniel Gilbert uses a wealth of scientific experiments to explain the myths that people use to predict happiness. Deepen the question by asking one question after another: Why are we so keen to imagine the future, why can't we accurately predict the emotional state of the future, why is it so difficult to correct predictions? It is human nature to pursue happiness and avoid suffering, but what exactly is happiness...... If you're curious about these questions, then this book will surprise you with something to explore.
Core content
Imagining the future is not only determined by the physiological characteristics of the human brain, but also by important psychological reasons. However, there are three inherent shortcomings of imagination that lead us to make mistakes when predicting future emotional states. Even more frustrating is that these prediction errors are difficult to correct due to reasons such as the characteristics of human memory and the illusion of self-uniqueness. However, there is no incurable way to predict future happiness, and there is a very simple way to help us fix our mistakes.
Preface
How classic is the book? We speak with the numbers: it was first published in 2006 and immediately hit the New York Times bestseller list, and in 2007 it won the Royal Society Science Book Award and was included in the 50 Classics of Psychology series, which has so far been translated into more than 30 languages. It can be said that this is a good book, whether it is evaluated by academic or popular standards.
But before introducing the content of this book, I have to remind you that this book is not the "Harvard Happiness Lesson" that became popular in NetEase's open class, nor does it tell us how many steps we should take to achieve happiness. So, what is this book about? Actually, the key word is "emotional prediction," that is, predicting whether the future mood will be painful or happy? This question doesn't sound like much to say, because when good things happen, natural happiness comes, and when bad things come, who doesn't suffer? This is common sense that everyone knows.
But it's actually an illusion. The illusion is that we can't predict exactly what will happen in the future, but we are very sure of our emotional state. For example, we may all have thoughts: "If I win 10 million, I will definitely die of happiness and live happily ever after", or "If I break up with my lover, I will definitely die of pain". See, we're not sure if we're going to win the jackpot or break up, but we seem pretty sure of our emotional response.
This book will shatter this illusion from a scientific point of view, revealing the fact that we are always keen to imagine future happiness or unhappiness, but this emotional prediction is often inaccurate. As a result, a series of related questions arise, why we are so keen on predictions, what are the reasons for the inaccurate predictions, can they be corrected, and more importantly, is there any point in pursuing happiness? See how this book answers.
The author of the book is Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, who is best known for his research on "emotional prediction" and for which he received the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement. Gilbert's research on emotional prediction is related to his personal life experiences. Around 1993, he suffered the most painful thing in his life, his mentor and mother died one after another, his wife divorced, and his son also had problems at school. A year later, when he talked about the experience with his colleague and friend, the psychologist Wilson, he realized that he had thought that these major blows would keep him grieving, but now things were not as bad as he expected, and this phenomenon sparked his and Wilson's research interests and coined the academic term "emotion prediction" together. Today, Gilbert has become an expert in the field of emotion prediction and has worked tirelessly to educate the masses about it, and this book is a prime example of this.
Next, I will give you a detailed explanation of the key points of the book. Let's take a look at why we are so obsessed with imagining the future, especially predicting future happiness, why do we always make mistakes, why are we so difficult to correct, and why are we always wrong again and again?
Part I
The first point is, why are we so obsessed with imagining the future, and what is the essence of happiness?
In the 60s of the 20th century, a professor of psychology at Harvard University named Ram Dass quit his job and went to India to learn how to stop and not think. He declared that the key to happiness was to stop thinking too much about the future, and he wrote a book called "Living in the Present." So, can we not imagine the future? Gilbert, the author of this book, argues that this is impossible, unless the prefrontal lobe of the brain is broken, and asking to stop thinking about the future is as absurd as asking the heart not to beat. Because humans have a brain region that other animals don't have, that is, the prefrontal lobe, one of the most important functions of this particular brain region is to think before and after thinking and predicting the future. Therefore, the typical symptom of patients with damage to the prefrontal lobes of the brain is the inability to imagine the future. Related to this, in patients with depression and anxiety who feel hopeless and fearful about the future, destroying certain frontal lobe tissues becomes a routine treatment when other treatments have not been effective. All these facts show that in predicting the future, it is not a question of whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, but we must imagine it.
The prefrontal lobe of the brain is the physiological basis for imagining the future, which is a neurobiological analysis of why we are keen to imagine the future. How does psychology explain this?
Gilbert analyzes this issue from two perspectives: a sense of pleasure and a sense of control. First of all, he believes that imagination itself is a pleasant thing. For example, scientists have done experiments in which people imagine that they have received a coupon for a free meal at a luxury restaurant and ask them when they would like to have the meal, now or tomorrow? So, the question is, why do people postpone a big meal? The big meal or that big meal, whether it's enjoyed now or next week, objectively speaking, this big meal brings the same satisfaction. Therefore, there must be other reasons why people postpone eating big meals. The reason, Gilbert says, is that people can also increase their sense of well-being by imagining something good coming up until next week. In other words, this happiness is purely brought about by imagination.
Of course, we also imagine terrible things, and although this anticipation is unpleasant, it serves two purposes: on the one hand, it warns us not to act rashly and to be careful about the ship of ten thousand years, and on the other hand, it helps us to prepare for a rainy day. Therefore, the psychological factor of pursuing happiness and avoiding pain makes us enthusiastic about imagining happiness or unhappiness in the future.
Gilbert argues that another psychological factor involved in the desire to imagine the future is related to a sense of control. When we imagine the future, we actually want to control it. So why do we want to control the future? First of all, it's human nature, and people are born with a desire to control. The child knocked the building blocks down, and he didn't mean anything but to let people know, "Look, this is what I did, I want it to fall, and it has to fall." Second, feelings of control are closely related to physical and mental health, and studies of older people in nursing homes have shown that losing a sense of control can have serious consequences. In this study, the researchers sent potted plants to the elderly in the nursing home, and told half of them that they would take care of the potted plants, and to the other half, the staff would help them take care of the potted plants. After six months, 15% of the elderly who took care of the bonsai themselves died, compared to 30% of the elderly who helped to take care of the bonsai.
Therefore, control is not only human nature, but also related to physical and mental health. But how do you get a sense of control? Beyond toppling blocks and taking care of potted plants, it's about imagining the future. In the process of imagining the future, whether the goal will be achieved or not, it can make people feel good just because I am at the helm of my ship.
The prefrontal lobe of the brain forces us to imagine the future, and the sense of pleasure and control makes us enthusiastic about sketching the future. So, what are we looking for in the future? The answer may be strange, but it can all be summed up in one sentence, and that is the pursuit of happiness. Gilbert said that everyone pursues happiness, and if anyone says no, he must be lying. So what is happiness? is another difficult question to answer. Seligman, the father of positive psychology, said in the book "True Happiness" that there are too many definitions of happiness to be clear, and he doesn't want to add another one. The author is also very clever, saying that whether people define happiness as personal self-fulfillment, family responsibility, or social contribution, it is ultimately a subjective, intrinsic feeling of pleasure. Regardless of whether the cause of this sensation is noble or mean, profound or superficial, they all correspond to roughly the same neural activity.
Happiness is a pleasant feeling, and Gilbert's quick explanation can dispel many myths about happiness. For example, what kind of happiness should we pursue? Is there a distinction between true and false happiness? Is there a difference between high and low happiness? In the long history, people have usually equated happiness with wisdom, virtue, hardship, dedication, and so on. The philosopher Mill once wrote, "It is better to be an unsatisfied man than to be a satisfied pig, and to be an unsatisfied Socrates is better than to be a satisfied fool." The philosopher Robert Nochick said: "Some people's emotions are based on extremely irrational and incorrect evaluation criteria, so that no matter how wonderful their feelings may be, we do not want to call them happiness." ”
For these views, Gilbert argues that they all make the same mistake, which is to confuse cause and effect, and to equate the method of achieving happiness with happiness itself. Gilbert made a vivid analogy, saying that pricking a finger with a pin and stimulating a specific area of the brain with an electric current produce pain, and the two causes of pain are different, but the pinprick pain cannot be called real pain, and the current stimulation is called fake pain. In the same way, happiness is essentially a pleasant feeling, and there is no distinction between high and low, and there is no distinction between real and false.
This section is about why we are so keen to imagine the future, and what happiness is. Gilbert analyzes from the perspective of neurobiology and psychology, and the prefrontal lobe of the brain makes us inevitably imagine the future, and the sense of pleasure and control makes us happy to imagine the future. Happiness is essentially a subjective feeling of pleasure, everyone pursues happiness and predicts the future emotional state, but it is usually not accurate, why is this?
Part II
The second point is, why do we always make mistakes when it comes to predicting future emotional states?
Gilbert said that only humans have the prefrontal lobe of the brain, so only humans can imagine the future and create it. Indeed, the clever sparrows still live in the "ancestral house" that has remained unchanged for thousands of years, while humans have created something that this world once did not have based on their imagination. Imagination is great, but it's also full of holes. Gilbert summarizes three shortcomings of imagination that lead to biases in predicting the future and predicting future emotional states.
Gilbert called the first defect of imagination fill-in-and-omission. That is, imagination will add fuel to the prompted information and ignore the information without the prompt. Let's start with imagination, and let's make an analogy for ease of understanding. There is a blind spot in our eyes, where we can't see at all, but our vision will quickly fill in this blind spot according to the surrounding information, so that the picture we see is complete. In addition to visual filling, auditory filling is also filling, and the prefrontal lobe of the brain, which is good at imagination, is a master of filling. Nuwa can fill the gap in the sky, and our imagination can make up a sky according to the gap.
For example, if you imagine hot pot now, I bet that when the simple word "hot pot" comes to mind, your brain immediately cooks a steaming hot pot through your imagination, and along with this image, a wave of joy arises: Wow, that's great. The key to this filling feature of imagination is not to add oil and vinegar when filling, after all, this is the housekeeping skill of imagination, but to fill quietly, just like visual filling blind spots, we are not aware of it at all. This can lead us to take imagined things for granted as the perfect embodiment of reality, and thus make inappropriate emotional predictions.
So, what does the omission of imagination mean? This has to do with the characteristics of our cognition, in which we pay attention to what currently exists, and pay little attention to what does not currently exist. For example, in an old and classic experiment, researchers asked Americans what two countries were more alike: Ceylon and Nepal, or the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR? However, when asked which two countries were more different, most people chose the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. How is this possible, since it is the most similar, it is impossible to be the most different. However, our cognitive process is characterized by thinking about similarities when we ask about similarities, and it is difficult to think of differences, and conversely, when we ask about differences, we think about differences, and it is difficult to think of similarities.
Our imagination suffers from the same problem when it comes to predicting the future. Gilbert made a special survey of those who knew him, asking how they would feel the following year if their children died unexpectedly, and none of the people who were willing to answer, except for those who thought the author was crazy and refused to answer, said anything other than heartbreak. But the obvious fact is that in the course of a year, many things will definitely happen, such as reading books, traveling, visiting relatives and friends, etc., and these things are bound to trigger different emotions, so how can it be that there is only heartbreak, as people predict?
Filling and omission are the first shortcomings of imagination, and what is the second defect of imagination? Gilbert said that imagination pursues the principle of "reality first" and that it is a prisoner of reality. What does this mean? What does it have to do with predicting future emotional states? The author first throws us a question, what is imagination? The author says that imagination is "seeing", we see the real world with our eyes, and in the same way, we look at imaginary things with the eyes of consciousness. For example, if we compare the length of a cat's and a dog's tail with our imagination, our brain will quickly flash an image of a cat and a dog, and we will probably close our eyes and look at the image by imagining it, and then draw conclusions after comparison.
The key point is to look at the imaginary picture in the mind and the real picture with the eyes, these two kinds of "seeing" activate the same brain area. Note that the same brain region is activated, so what if you want to watch it and I want to watch it too? Who does the brain prefer? It prefers reality, and furthermore, it mistakes the feelings of reality for future feelings, which leads us to be inaccurate. For example, "a full man doesn't know that a hungry man is hungry" and "why not eat minced meat", because the feeling of being full has taken over the brain, causing it to be unable to imagine the feeling of hunger. Similarly, a friend asks you to go to the movies tomorrow, but the unpleasant feeling caused by a punctured bicycle tire just now makes it hard for you to imagine what it will be like to watch a movie tomorrow.
Finally, let's look at the third weakness of imagination, which is the inability to imagine what kind of thoughts we will have once something actually happens. Gilbert first cried out for a mental illness, that is, "grief deficiency disorder", what kind of disease is this? That is, a person who has suffered a major accident or blow, such as the instant evaporation of thousands of family fortunes and the death of the love of his life, if this unlucky person does not show pain, sometimes he will be diagnosed with "grief deficiency disorder" and be cured. Fortunately, his wife died, and Zhuangzi, who sang with a basin, lived in ancient times, otherwise he would have felt better. Thankfully, in the face of deep-seated beliefs, Gilbert swims against the tide and says that grief is completely normal.
Why, then, do people make wrong predictions and say that others are abnormal? This is mainly because the imagination simply cannot imagine what it will feel after it actually happens, and after it happens, it is difficult to imagine how it would have felt before it happened. As complicated as it sounds, Gilbert gave an example in which he said that people often think of conjoined people as having miserable lives, so when conjoined people say they are doing well, people say they are either lying or not knowing what happiness tastes like. But in fact, what qualifications do people who are not conjoined have to evaluate the feelings of conjoined children? On the other hand, once the conjoined children are separated, they can no longer experience the feelings they felt before they were separated, so when they are separated, it is better to separate than not to separate, which is also a kind of "sub-non-fish, the joy of Anzhi fish". In the same way, the so-called "grief deficit disorder" makes the same mistake.
Well, this section is talking about three shortcomings of imagination that make us biased in predicting future emotional states, the first is filling and omission, the second is the "reality first" principle, and the third is that imagination can't imagine what happens to our thoughts after something happens. Since it is so unreliable to rely on imagination to predict the future emotional state, is there any way to correct it?
Gilbert said that there are solutions, of course, but it is still difficult to correct, otherwise such a phenomenon would not have occurred. For example, if you vow to never eat a late-night snack again today, or if you make up your mind that you will never have such a boyfriend or girlfriend again, you will find out that they are always the same. Why is that?
Part III
The third important content is, why is it difficult for us to correct the emotional prediction bias, and we are always wrong again and again?
The ancients said that if a person is not a sage, he can be without fault, and if he knows his mistakes, he can change them, and he is very good. What are the usual approaches we take when correcting for sentiment prediction bias? Gilbert says there are usually two approaches, one is to seek experience from history, and the other is to seek experience from others.
Let's start with the first method, which is to ask history for experience. For this method to be effective, it must ensure that the history that is remembered is conducive to us "learning from history". Unfortunately, our memory, whether it is beneficial or not, has its own set of rules for remembering, so what is remembered may not be what we want.
For example, if we want to know what happened often in the past, we recall that what comes to mind may be the most common occurrence, otherwise why do we remember it? But the truth of memory is that who easily remembers whom, and who rarely remembers whom, has nothing to do with whether the sutra happens often. To start by asking, "Who is easier to remember whom?", the researchers asked people to recall more words that start with the letter K or are the words that come in third place in English words? People usually say that there are many words that start with K, but this answer is wrong. This is because, when recalling, words that start with K are easier to remember, and more words are remembered, but that doesn't mean that there are more words that start with K themselves.
Besides, "whoever is rare will remember whom", this refers to the miraculous phenomenon that queues are always lagging behind. The author said that he found that no matter what kind of line he was in, the team he was in was always the slowest to move, and when he told his friends about his troubles, they all said, "Oh, so am I, so am I!" Gilbert thinks that it has to do with memory, and when we are in a slower line, we pay attention to how the line next door is so fast, how the old lady in front of me has such a deep purse, and the people in the queue behind me are gone, it is really a boring torture, why is it always me. Our memories are quickly recorded, and accidents become inevitable.
For example, we think we remember the general feeling about an event, but the truth of memory is that whoever has the last laugh will remember whom. For example, the researchers had a group of students participate in two experiments, one long and one short, in which students immersed their hands in 14-degree ice water for 60 seconds, and a long experiment in which students immersed their hands in 14-degree ice water for 60 seconds and then in 16-degree ice water for 30 seconds. At the end of the experiment, ask the students to evaluate which experiment made them more painful, which experiment would they be more willing to repeat if they had to do it again, and guess what?
Most of the students said that the short experiment was more painful, and 69% would be more willing to repeat the long experiment if they had to do it again. Isn't it strange that in terms of the total amount of pain, the long experiment of 90 seconds of immersion in ice water was more painful, if we remember the overall feeling, we would say that 90 seconds is more painful, but what we remember is the ending, in the last 30 seconds of the 90-second long experiment, the water gets a little hotter, and it is a more comfortable 16 degrees. But the short experiment of 60 seconds was always a cold 14 degrees. So, we think that a short experiment of 60 seconds is more painful. How unreasonable, a person who has done good deeds all his life and finally does a bad deed, he is usually spurned, and a person who has done a bad deed all his life and finally does a good deed, he is usually forgiven. Shakespeare described it as a brilliant one, saying, "Just as the setting sun at dusk, the aftermath of the song and the last sip of wine leave the warmest memories of people, so a man's end is always more remarkable than anything else in his life." ”
Returning to the topic, from the above analysis, we can see that due to memory, relying on historical experience to revise predictions for the future is sometimes unreliable. What about asking for experience from others? Doesn't it mean that "there must be my teacher in a threesome"? In fact, research has shown that taking someone else's individual experience at random is far more reliable than relying on our imagination to make predictions. However, we usually don't use this method well, why?
Gilbert analyzes it from two perspectives. First of all, we are generally reluctant to refer to the experience of others, and always think that we are unique, so how can we predict my experience based on Zhang San's experience? This illusion of self-uniqueness makes us ignore the fact that we have much more in common with others than we have individuality. It is for this reason that we can empathize with others and seek the same thing. Important commonalities are ignored and unimportant differences are remembered, so even though it is more reliable to refer to the experiences of others than to make predictions through imagination, we can still be stubborn and get wrong along the way.
On the other hand, some misconceptions that are widely circulated and regarded as traditional wisdom may become our reference. For example, "wealth can bring happiness" and "money can bring happiness", these concepts are not only the life creed of many people, but also the basis for modern national policymaking. However, two inescapable realities make the correctness of these notions seem questionable. The first is that in many countries there has been an unprecedented increase in wealth, but people's happiness has not increased; It can be seen that the notion that "wealth brings happiness" and "money brings happiness" is not accurate, but so what? These ideas will still be passed down.
Gilbert analyzes that ideas are widely disseminated, either because they are true or unrelated to being right, simply because they are capable of self-replication. For example, the idea that "raising children brings happiness" drives people to pursue happiness and raise children, and as a result, the idea of "raising children does not bring happiness" drives people not to raise children, and as a result, the population is getting smaller and smaller, and this idea gradually disappears. Therefore, the ideas that are passed on by people are not the correct concepts, and when we use these concepts as a reference to predict future happiness, there will inevitably be deviations.
Isn't it a little frustrated? I don't want to imagine, but I can't stop; I imagine the future, but it's full of loopholes; I want to make corrections, so I turn to memory, but the experience provided by memory may not be reliable; I turn to others, but we don't want the experience provided by Zhang San, and the experience provided by Zhang San and Li Si together may be wrong. So, there really is no way to predict accurately, even Socrates has no way. However, Socrates was a wise man, and he said that the only thing he knew was his ignorance. It is paradoxical that knowing that you are ignorant is a kind of wisdom, and it is not necessarily a blessing to know that you have difficulty predicting happiness accurately.
summary
Let's review three of the highlights:
First, the prefrontal lobe of the brain forces us to imagine, the sense of pleasure and control makes us happy to imagine, and happiness is essentially a subjective feeling of emotional pleasure.
Second, the inability to accurately predict future emotional states is mainly related to three shortcomings of imagination. The first is filling and omission, the second is the "reality first" principle, and the third is that the imagination can't imagine how ideas will change after something happens.
Third, it is difficult to correct for biases in predicting future emotions for two reasons: one is that "learning from history" is ineffective due to inaccurate memory, and the other is that we either do not want to listen to other people's experiences or are convinced of widespread false beliefs.
That's the main content of the book "Harvard Happiness Lesson". Gilbert is an expert in the field of "emotional prediction," specializing in why people can't accurately predict their future emotional state. In this book, he uses a lot of cases to prove his views, and uses one question after another to advance the deepening of the problem, and the conclusions he draws seem to be some common sense. For example, imagination is defective, memory is unreliable, happiness is a feeling, it is necessary to refer to the experience of others, and so on. But what is common sense? Common sense is like a luxurious prison, we can't realize its imprisonment on the mind when we enjoy it, and to break this prison, we need to ask more whys about common sense, rather than taking it for granted, and this is exactly what Gilbert does in this book. Therefore, this book focuses on analyzing the problem rather than providing a solution to the problem. If you want to learn how to improve your happiness, you can refer to Seligman's books "True Happiness" and "Lasting Happiness".
In A Brief History of the Future, author Yuval Harari lists happiness as one of the three goals of the future society, and considers it more difficult than immortality. However, the author of this book believes that happiness is actually quite simple. What are your thoughts on this?
Written by: Zhou Yixin, brain map: Liu Yan, source: get APP listening book column