CHAPTER 21
Daniel Gilbert
A
s a boy, Daniel Gilbert loved poring over a book of optical illusions, such as the Necker cube and the famous vase/faces picture (as on the cover of this book). What amazed him was how easy it was for the eyes and the brain to be fooled. When, many years later, he became a psychologist, he was interested in the regular mistakes and exercises of “filling in” that our brain makes in order to provide us with a quick picture of reality. Just as we could make predictable mistakes with our eyesight, he found, we could also with our foresight. That is, we spend most of our time doing things that we hope will make us happy in the future, but our understanding of that future and how we will feel when we get there is far from reliable. Though people have been puzzling over the question of foresight for thousands of years, Gilbert claims that Stumbling on Happiness is the first book to bring together ideas from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics to provide an answer. This is quite a complex area of psychology in which the author is pre-eminent, yet he spins the material into a fascinating and often fun read. With a style reminiscent of Bill Bryson, there are at least one or two chuckles per page.
Anticipation machines Gilbert notes that most psychology books have somewhere in them the phrase, “Human beings are the only animals that…” In his case, he fills in the sentence by saying that we are the only animals that are able to think about the future. Squirrels may seem like they can do this in the way that they put away acorns for the winter, but in fact it is just their brain’s recording of a reduction in hours of daylight that prompts them to do this. There is no awareness, only a biological instinct. Humans, however, are not only aware of the future, we are veritable “anticipation machines” focused on what is to come almost as much as we are on what is now. How did this happen? Millions of years ago the first type of humans experienced a massive increase in the size of their brains in a relatively short space of time. But not every part of the new brain had grown. Most of the growth was in the frontal lobe region, above the eyes, which partly accounts for why our ancestors had 121