Phil100W - "Stumbling on Happiness"
Daniel Gilbert, the author of "Stumbling on Happiness", questions how a person can have a hard time accurately predicting what can make them happy in the future. Gilbert states that imaginations is what limits our way in understanding happiness. Humans have the ability to imagine the future, but they are really bad at it. We will not know how we feel tomorrow, or next year, or ten years later, we predict the future wrong. Gilbert states that it is our imagination and illusion of foresight which causes us to misinterpret the future and misestimate our satisfaction. Humans only think about the future to help minimize our pain and it is pleasurable. We also think about the future for the feeling of control because it is satisfying.
Because of how a human’s frontal lobe has developed, Gilbert states that we are able to envision and predict possible futures that we think will make us happy. However, Gilbert asserts that we are not the best predictors of future happiness as ______ the future is often illusory just like the present and past can be. One reason for this error, Gilbert explains, is that the feelings people have about past experiences are personal and subject to change the more experiences they have, causing their definition of an emotion such as happiness to change also. Moreover, Gilbert asserts that because it is extremely challenging in trying to recall the exact feeling a person had about a past experience, claims about happy feelings are unreliable. He states we use our imaginations to predict our future happiness but because of flaws in our memory and perception, we are unable to accurately recall our past experiences, which causes us to view the present incorrectly, thereby resulting in our wrongly predicting the happiness of our futures.
Gilbert claims that since our brain compresses experiences into key images, we fill in the rest of the details of an experience when we are attempting to recall it, but also when we are
Because of how a human’s frontal lobe has developed, Gilbert states that we are able to envision and predict possible futures that we think will make us happy. However, Gilbert asserts that we are not the best predictors of future happiness as ______ the future is often illusory just like the present and past can be. One reason for this error, Gilbert explains, is that the feelings people have about past experiences are personal and subject to change the more experiences they have, causing their definition of an emotion such as happiness to change also. Moreover, Gilbert asserts that because it is extremely challenging in trying to recall the exact feeling a person had about a past experience, claims about happy feelings are unreliable. He states we use our imaginations to predict our future happiness but because of flaws in our memory and perception, we are unable to accurately recall our past experiences, which causes us to view the present incorrectly, thereby resulting in our wrongly predicting the happiness of our futures.
Gilbert claims that since our brain compresses experiences into key images, we fill in the rest of the details of an experience when we are attempting to recall it, but also when we are