4 Tricks Your Brain Plays On You

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I’ve finished Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness (as you can tell from my previous post). The book – despite its title – isn’t as much to do with happiness per se as it is to do with the way our mind works and how it enables (or deludes) or disables us from achieving happiness (or the happiness we think we want). Confused? Don’t be. It’s fascinating stuff. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about my brain, it’s this: it’s wily and can’t be trusted.TRICK #1:  What you see is NOT what you get

Life isn’t WYSIWYG; it is WYSINWYG. What you see is not what you get. It isn’t about our eyes transmitting an image of say, two people talking by the watercooler, into our brains. Rather, it’s a complex psychological process that combines what we see with what we already think, feel, know, want and believe. The combination of all these things constructs our perception of reality. So, instead of two people just yapping by the watercooler, it’s two people who dislike you gossiping about your latest fiasco by the watercooler. You feel lousy cos you “saw” the same thing “happen” last week. You feel marginalized, like somebody’s idea of a joke. Everybody hates me, you think. I’m gonna go jump in the lake. Talk about room for misinterpretation.

Unfortunately, WYSINWYG-ing is what adults do. We are idealists – we know that what we see isn’t necessarily what there is. We attach all sorts of significance to things and wind up stressing ourselves up. WYSIWYG-ing, on the other hand, is what kids do and kids are realists. They can’t make the distinction between things in the mind and things in the physical world, so what they see is what they believe. Thing is, realists quickly grow up to become idealists.TRICK #2:  A terminal case of presenteeism

Ever heard of presenteeism? Neither have I, until now. Presenteeism is when our present state (how we feel, think, what we believe, know, etc) influences our imagination of the future. We can’t imagine every single thing, so most of the details of our future are filled in by what we know around us right now. This happens unconsciously pretty much all the time, which means we wind up with lots of wrong predictions.

For instance, they never believed man could fly: “The aeroplane will never fly,” declared Lord Haldane, the British Minister of War in 1907. And the very famous one, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” said Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977 (click here and here for more wrong predictions).

So if you feel crap today, it’s hard to imagine feeling happy tomorrow (although you probably will, unless you’re clinically depressed and suicidal but that’s a different story). And when you’ve eaten too much char kway teow today, you can’t imagine wanting to eat it again tomorrow but … you do! Another common example is the marathon – anyone who’s done it swears “never again” but come next year, they sign up again. Which is also why we can be wrong when predicting what will make us happy – we think we’ll be happy simply cos it’s what will make us happy today but when it happens a year later, it just might not.TRICK #3:  The great summariser

Our brain works like one of those movie synopsis generators – it was a great movie; it was a lousy movie. It remembers only the peaks, valleys and/or ends of a given event and these two generally influence how we think we feel about everything else that went on. This is fine if you’re watching a movie (“Transformers 2’s ending sucked, so the whole movie sucked”), but not so fine if you’re trying to remember stuff. We look back and misremember things as being better or worse than they really were … which would be fine if it were just a case of reminiscing but when we use these faulty memories as a basis for imagining our future, then it’s not so fine.

I was flipping through my old journals the other day and I read some entries about a particular episode which, at that time apparently, was utterly devastating. I was surprised at how surprised I was that it was devastating cos for the last few years, I’d always remembered it as a non-event. In fact, I’d always thought it was rather pleasant, all things considered – okay okay, it was a break-up.  I honestly don’t remember it being as traumatic as it was written in my journal. I guess that was also presenteeism there too – I feel fine about it now and my present feelings have influenced the memory of the past event and made it fine though the facts of the event weren’t so. I’m going to throw away that stupid journal.TRICK #4: Survival mode

We never really see the world as it is. You know what they say: if you saw things as they really are, you’d be depressed and won’t get out of bed. So our mind cleverly tricks us to keep us optimistic enough to keep going. Things like ‘kids are super’ – no they’re not. They’re cute la, but annoying as hell. Think of the sleepless nights, the poop, the diapers, the vomit, the sick days, the whingeing, the screaming, the episodes of public embarrassment, etc. But we need to delude ourselves into this belief so that we’ll keep having kids cos if we don’t, then there will be no people on earth after everyone dies off.

There are other beliefs too – for instance, we must have certain things to be happy. And those certain things are usually really expensive stuff we need to buy. It’s a belief perpetuated to keep us covetous and spending cos if nobody buys stuff, the economy will collapse and the world will be destroyed.

Or this belief that taking a break will be good for us – it’s perpetuated by the travel industry, I tell you! Go take a break, go on a holiday and come back feeling better than ever! Um, no lor. Go on a great holiday and come back feeling worse than ever when you gotta start work again. But it’s a belief we need so that people in the travel industry can keep their jobs. Duh.

A classic one: what doesn’t kill me will make me stronger or suffering will make me wiser – this keeps us going even when what we really want to do is go jump off a cliff. It’s a way our brains trick us so that we carry on with the horrible thing we’re doing and not quit prematurely (like you know, your job or something like that).

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Tags: brain, daniel gilbert, happiness, life, mind, predictions, presenteeism, stumbling, tricks