The Science of Happiness
The video “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” narrated by Dan Gilbert, is about the scientific view and experiment about how people, or human beings in general, handle their happiness, their emotions. As human beings have made a great evolution in over two million years, the brain also has significantly increased in mass and size and gained new structures. One of the new structures that the brain has developed is a part called the frontal lobe, or in particularly, pre-frontal cortex. One of the most crucial activities that pre-frontal cortex does is act as an experience simulator, whereas we can experience certain things in our head before trying them. It is a marvelous tool that distinguishes us from our ancestors …show more content…
However, Dan Gilbert has shown us that even after a year, a lottery winner and a paraplegic are equally content with their lives. This research has proven that we have had misconceptions about what happiness might and can really be. The reason why we have overestimated the effect or duration of a certain future event is because of “impact bias”, which is “the tendency for the simulator to work badly” (Gilbert, 2004). We might believe that we will be devastated if we lose our jobs, or our romantic partners, but it turns out that those experiences will not affect us as much as we expect. In most cases, if the experience happened over three months ago, it has no impact on our …show more content…
It is xbecause we strongly believe that winning is the most vital thing in life; thus it brings joy, excitement, fulfillment and happiness. On the other hand, losing only leaves us unmotivated, desperate, stressed, and discontent. This is what society or the contemporary economic system teaches us. Synthetic happiness is real and it occurs when we experience what you have is better than what we lost. The Monet Prints experiment that was tested on normal people and anterograde amnesia patients has brought us to the idea that synthesized happiness truly changed the aesthetic, affective reactions of people and it is not affected by memory. It is magical that those patients who had amnesia synthesize happiness like normal people do, even though they do not remember
The video “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” narrated by Dan Gilbert, is about the scientific view and experiment about how people, or human beings in general, handle their happiness, their emotions. As human beings have made a great evolution in over two million years, the brain also has significantly increased in mass and size and gained new structures. One of the new structures that the brain has developed is a part called the frontal lobe, or in particularly, pre-frontal cortex. One of the most crucial activities that pre-frontal cortex does is act as an experience simulator, whereas we can experience certain things in our head before trying them. It is a marvelous tool that distinguishes us from our ancestors …show more content…
However, Dan Gilbert has shown us that even after a year, a lottery winner and a paraplegic are equally content with their lives. This research has proven that we have had misconceptions about what happiness might and can really be. The reason why we have overestimated the effect or duration of a certain future event is because of “impact bias”, which is “the tendency for the simulator to work badly” (Gilbert, 2004). We might believe that we will be devastated if we lose our jobs, or our romantic partners, but it turns out that those experiences will not affect us as much as we expect. In most cases, if the experience happened over three months ago, it has no impact on our …show more content…
It is xbecause we strongly believe that winning is the most vital thing in life; thus it brings joy, excitement, fulfillment and happiness. On the other hand, losing only leaves us unmotivated, desperate, stressed, and discontent. This is what society or the contemporary economic system teaches us. Synthetic happiness is real and it occurs when we experience what you have is better than what we lost. The Monet Prints experiment that was tested on normal people and anterograde amnesia patients has brought us to the idea that synthesized happiness truly changed the aesthetic, affective reactions of people and it is not affected by memory. It is magical that those patients who had amnesia synthesize happiness like normal people do, even though they do not remember