{"product_id":"stumbling-on-happiness-isbn-9781400077427","title":"Stumbling on Happiness","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Bringing to life scientific research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, this witty, accessible book reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e • Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e • Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e • Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e • Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can’t we remember one song while listening to another; and why does the line at the grocery store always slow down the moment we join it? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this brilliant book, renowned Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions. With penetrating insight and sparkling prose, Gilbert explains why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.“Think you know what makes you happy? This absolutely fantastic book that will shatter your most deeply held convictions about how your own mind works.”  —Steven D. Levitt, author of \u003ci\u003eFreakonomics \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives.... You ought to read it. Trust me.”  —Malcolm Gladwell, author of \u003ci\u003eBlink \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A fascinating new book that explores our sometimes misguided attempts to find happiness.”  —\u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A witty, insightful and superbly entertaining trek through the foibles of human imagination.”  —\u003ci\u003eNew Scientist \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Gilbert’s book has no subtitle, allowing you to invent your own. I’d call it ‘The Only Truly Useful Book on Psychology I’ve Ever Read.’”  —James Pressley, \u003ci\u003eBloomberg News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003eDANIEL GILBERT is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Director of the Social Cognition and Emotion Lab. He is generally considered the world's foremost authority in the fields of affective forecasting and the fundamental attribution error. He has published numerous scientific articles and chapters, several short works of fiction, and is the editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Handbook of Social Psychology. \u003c\/i\u003eHe has been awarded the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology by the American Psychological Association, fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2002, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin listed Gilbert as one of the fifty most influential social psychologists of the decade, and in 2003 one of his research papers was chosen by the editors of P sychological Inquiry as one of four \"modern classics\" in social psychology.\u003c\/p\u003eJourney to Elsewhen  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eO, that a man might know  The end of this day’s business ere it come!  Shakespeare, Julius Caesar  Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do   no harm, and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed  rounds despite snow, sleet, and split infinitives. Few people realize that  psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point   in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at  least an article that contains this sentence: “The human being is   the only animal that . . .” We are allowed to finish the sentence any way  we like, of course, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us  wait until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn  obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists  will ignore all the other words that we managed   to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remem-  ber us mainly for how we finished The Sentence. We also know that the  worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those  psychologists who finished The Sentence with “can use language” were  particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate  with hand signs. And when researchers   discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks to extract tasty ter-  mites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the head now and  then), the world suddenly remembered the full name   and mailing address of every psychologist who had ever finished   The Sentence with “uses tools.” So it is for good reason that most  psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can,  hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid  being publicly humiliated by a monkey.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I have never before written The Sentence, but I’d like to do so now, with  you as my witness. The human being is the only animal that thinks about  the future. Now, let me say up front that I’ve   had cats, I’ve had dogs, I’ve had gerbils, mice, goldfish, and crabs (no,  not that kind), and I do recognize that nonhuman animals   often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future. But  as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, act-  ing as though you have something and actually having it are not   the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference. For  example, I live in an urban neighborhood, and every autumn   the squirrels in my yard (which is approximately the size of two  squirrels) act as though they know that they will be unable to eat later  unless they bury some food now. My city has a relatively   well-educated citizenry, but as far as anyone can tell its squirrels are  not particularly distinguished. Rather, they have regular squirrel brains  that run food-burying programs when the amount of sun-  light that enters their regular squirrel eyes decreases by a critical  amount. Shortened days trigger burying behavior with no intervening  contemplation of tomorrow, and the squirrel that stashes a nut in my yard  “knows” about the future in approximately the same way that a falling rock  “knows” about the law of gravity—which is to say, not really. Until a  chimp weeps at the thought of growing   old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer vacation, or   turns down a taffy apple because it already looks too fat in shorts,   I will stand by my version of The Sentence. We think about the future in a  way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and   this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our  humanity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Joy of Next  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you were asked to name the human brain’s greatest achievement, you  might think first of the impressive artifacts it has produced—the Great  Pyramid of Giza, the International Space Station, or perhaps the Golden  Gate Bridge. These are great achievements indeed, and our brains deserve  their very own ticker-tape parade for producing them. But they are not the  greatest. A sophisticated machine could design and build any one of these  things because designing and building require knowledge, logic, and  patience, of which sophisticated machines have plenty. In fact, there’s  really only one achievement so remarkable that even the most sophisticated  machine cannot pretend to have accomplished it, and that achievement is  conscious experience. Seeing the Great Pyramid or remembering the Golden  Gate or imagining the Space Station are far more remarkable acts than is  building any one of them. What’s more, one of these remarkable acts is  even more remarkable than the others. To see is to experience the world as  it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to  imagine—ah, to imagine is to experience the world as   it isn’t and has never been, but as it might be. The greatest achievement  of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do  not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us  to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an  “anticipation machine,” and “making future” is the most important thing it  does.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But what exactly does “making future” mean? There are at least two ways in  which brains might be said to make future, one of which we share with many  other animals, the other of which we share with none. All brains—human  brains, chimpanzee brains, even regular food-burying squirrel brains—make  predictions about the immediate, local, personal, future. They do this by  using information about current events (“I smell something”) and past  events (“Last time I smelled this smell, a big thing tried to eat me”) to  anticipate the event that is most likely to happen to them next (“A big  thing is about to ———”). ut notice two features of this so-called  prediction. First, despite the comic quips inside the parentheses,  predictions such as these do not require the brain making them to have  anything even remotely resembling a conscious thought. Just as an abacus  can put two and two together to produce four without having thoughts about  arithmetic, so brains can add past to present to make future without ever  thinking about any of them. In fact, it doesn’t even require a brain to  make predictions such as these. With just a little bit of training, the  giant sea slug known as Aplysia parvula can learn to predict and avoid an  electric shock to its gill, and as anyone with a scalpel can easily  demonstrate, sea slugs are inarguably brainless. Computers are also  brainless, but they use precisely the same trick the sea slug does when  they turn down your credit card because you were trying to buy dinner in  Paris after buying lunch in Hoboken. In short, machines and invertebrates  prove that it doesn’t take a smart, self-aware, conscious, brain to make  simple predictions about the future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The second thing to notice is that predictions such as these are not  particularly far-reaching. They are not predictions in the same sense that  we might predict the annual rate of inflation, the intellectual impact of  postmodernism, the heat death of the universe, or Madonna’s next hair  color. Rather, these are predictions about what will happen in precisely  this spot, precisely next, to precisely me,   and we call them predictions only because there is no better word for them  in the English language. But the use of that term—with its inescapable  connotations of calculated, thoughtful reflection about events that may  occur anywhere, to anyone, at any time—risks ob-  scuring the fact that brains are continuously making predictions about the  immediate, local, personal, future of their owners without their owners’  awareness. Rather than saying that such brains are predicting, let’s say  that they are nexting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yours is nexting right now. For example, at this moment you may be  consciously thinking about the sentence you just read, or about the key  ring in your pocket that is jammed uncomfortably against your thigh, or  about whether the War of 1812 really deserves its own overture. Whatever  you are thinking, your thoughts are surely about something other than the  word with which this sentence will end. But even as you hear these very  words echoing in your very head, and think whatever thoughts they inspire,  your brain is using the word it is reading right now and the words it read  just before to make a reasonable guess about the identity of the word it  will read next, which is what allows you to read so fluently. Any brain  that has been raised on a steady diet of film noir and cheap detective  novels fully expects the word night to follow the phrase It was a dark and  stormy, and thus when it does encounter the word night, it is especially  well prepared to digest it. As long as your brain’s guess about the next  word turns out to be right, you cruise along happily, left to right, left  to right, turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and  concepts, blissfully unaware that your nexting brain is predicting the  future of the sentence at a fantastic rate. It is only when your brain  predicts badly that you suddenly feel avocado.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That is, surprised. See?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Now, consider the meaning of that brief moment of surprise. Surprise is an  emotion we feel when we encounter the unexpected—for example, thirty-four  acquaintances in paper hats standing in our living room yelling “Happy  birthday!” as we walk through the front door with a bag of groceries and a  full bladder—and thus the occurrence of surprise reveals the nature of our  expectations. The surprise you felt at the end of the last paragraph  reveals that as you were reading the phrase it is only when your brain  predicts badly that you suddenly feel . . . , your brain was  simultaneously making a reasonable prediction about what would happen  next. It predicted that sometime in the next few milliseconds your eyes  would come across a set of black squiggles that encoded an English word  that described a feeling, such as sad or nauseous or even surprised.  Instead, it encountered a fruit, which woke you from your dogmatic  slumbers and revealed the nature of your expectations to anyone who was  watching. Surprise tells us that we were expecting something other than  what we got, even when we didn’t know we were expecting anything at all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Because feelings of surprise are generally accompanied by reactions that  can be observed and measured—such as eyebrow arch-  ing, eye widening, jaw dropping, and noises followed by a series of  exclamation marks—psychologists can use surprise to tell them when a brain  is nexting. For example, when monkeys see a researcher drop a ball down  one of several chutes, they quickly look to the bottom of that chute and  wait for the ball to reemerge. When some experimental trickery causes the  ball to emerge from a different chute than the one in which it was  deposited, the monkeys display surprise, presumably because their brains  were nexting. Human babies have similar responses to weird physics. For  example, when babies are shown a video of a big red block smashing into a  little   yellow block, they react with indifference when the little yellow block  instantly goes careening off the screen. But when the little   yellow block hesitates for just a moment or two before careening away,  babies stare like bystanders at a train wreck—as though the delayed  careening had violated some prediction made by their   nexting brains. Studies such as these tell us that monkey brains “know”  about gravity (objects fall down, not sideways) and that baby human brains  “know” about kinetics (moving objects transfer energy to stationary  objects at precisely the moment they contact them and not a few seconds  later). But more important, they tell us that monkey brains and baby human  brains add what they already know (the past) to what they currently see  (the present) to predict what will happen next (the future). When the  actual next thing is different from the predicted next thing, monkeys and  babies experience surprise.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Our brains were made for nexting, and that’s just what they’ll do. When we  take a stroll on the beach, our brains predict how stable the sand will be  when our foot hits it, and then adjust the tension in our knee  accordingly. When we leap to catch a Frisbee, our brains predict where the  disc will be when we cross its flight path, and then bring our hands to  precisely that point. When we see a sand crab scurry behind a bit of  driftwood on its way to the water, our brains predict when and where the  critter will reappear, and then direct our eyes to the precise point of  its reemergence. These predictions are remarkable in both the speed and  accuracy with which they are made, and it is difficult to imagine what our  lives would be like if our brains quit making them, leaving us completely  “in the moment” and unable to take our next step. But while these  automatic, continuous, nonconscious predictions of the immediate, local,  personal, future are both amazing and ubiquitous, they are not the sorts  of predictions that got our species out of the trees and into dress  slacks. In fact, these are the kinds of predictions that frogs make  without ever leaving their lily pads, and hence not the sort that The  Sentence was meant to describe. No, the variety of future that we human  beings manufacture—and that only we manufacture—is of another sort  entirely.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304438354149,"sku":"NP9781400077427","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400077427.jpg?v=1767737469","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/stumbling-on-happiness-isbn-9781400077427","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}