Stumbling on Happiness
Page 13
Presentism in the Past
Ordinary people are quite scientific in this regard. We have already seen how brains make ample use of the filling-in trick when they remember the past or imagine the future, and the phrase “filling in” suggests an image of a hole (for example, in a wall or a tooth) being plugged with some sort of material (Spackle or silver). As it turns out, when brains plug holes in their conceptualizations of yesterday and tomorrow, they tend to use a material called today. Consider how often this happens when we try to remember the past. When college students hear persuasive speeches that demonstrably change their political opinions, they tend to remember that they always felt as they currently feel.5 When dating couples try to recall what they thought about their romantic partners two months earlier, they tend to remember that they felt then as they feel now.6 When students receive their grades on an exam, they tend to remember being as concerned about the exam before they took it as they currently are.7 When patients are asked about their headaches, the amount of pain they are feeling at the moment determines how much pain they remember feeling the previous day.8 When middle-aged people are asked to remember what they thought about premarital sex, how they felt about political issues, or how much alcohol they drank when they were in college, their memories are influenced by how they think, feel, and drink now.9 When widows and widowers are asked how much grief they felt when their spouse died five years earlier, their memories are influenced by the amount of grief they currently feel.10 The list goes on, but what’s important to notice for our purposes is that in each of these instances, people misremember their own pasts by recalling that they once thought, did, and said what they now think, do, and say.11
This tendency to fill in the holes in our memories of the past with material from the present is especially powerful when it comes to remembering our emotions. In 1992, after announcing on a syndicated television talk show that he would like to live in the White House, Ross Perot became the overnight messiah of a disaffected electorate. For the first time in American history it looked as though a man who had never held office and was not the nominee of a major political party might well win the most powerful job on earth. His supporters were enthusiastic and optimistic. But on July 16, 1992, as suddenly as he had burst onto the scene, Perot withdrew from the race, citing vague concerns about political “dirty tricks” that might spoil his daughter’s wedding. His supporters were devastated. Then, in October of the same year, Perot had yet another change of heart and reentered the race, which he ultimately lost the next month. Between his initial surprising announcement, his even more surprising withdrawal, his unbelievably surprising reentry, and his unsurprising defeat, those who supported him experienced a variety of intense emotions. Fortunately, a researcher was on hand to measure these emotional reactions in July, after Perot’s withdrawal, and then again in November, after his defeat.12 The researcher also asked volunteers in November to recall how they had felt in July, and the findings were striking. Those who remained loyal to Perot throughout his flipping and flopping remembered feeling less sad and angry when he withdrew in July than they actually had been, whereas those who abandoned him when he abandoned them remembered being less hopeful than they had been. In other words, Perot supporters erroneously recalled feeling about Perot then as they felt about him now.
Presentism in the Future
If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no walls. Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick, and if the present lightly colors our remembered pasts, it thoroughly infuses our imagined futures. More simply said, most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today, and we find it particularly difficult to imagine that we will ever think, want, or feel differently than we do now.13 Teenagers get tattoos because they are confident that DEATH ROCKS will always be an appealing motto, new mothers abandon promising law careers because they are confident that being home with their children will always be a rewarding job, and smokers who have just finished a cigarette are confident for at least five minutes that they can easily quit and that their resolve will not diminish with the nicotine in their bloodstreams. Psychologists have nothing on teenagers, smokers, and moms. I can recall a Thanksgiving (well, actually, most Thanksgivings) when I ate so much that I realized only as I swallowed my last bite of pumpkin pie that my breathing had become shallow and labored because my lungs no longer had room to expand. I staggered to the living room, fell flat on the couch, and, as I descended mercifully into a tryptophan coma, was heard to utter these words: “I’ll never eat again.” But, of course, I did eat again—possibly that night, surely within twenty-four hours, and probably turkey. I suppose I knew that my vow was absurd even as I made it, and yet, some part of me seemed sincerely to believe that chewing and swallowing were nasty habits that I could easily renounce, if only because the torpid mass that was winding its way through my digestive tract at the approximate speed of continental drift would supply all my nutritional, intellectual, and spiritual needs forevermore.
I am appropriately embarrassed by this incident on several counts. First, I ate like a pig. Second, although I had eaten like a pig before and should therefore have known from experience that pigs always end up back at the trough, I really did think that this time I might not eat again for days, maybe weeks, maybe ever. I take small comfort in the fact that other pigs seem susceptible to precisely the same delusion. Research in laboratories and supermarkets has demonstrated that when people who have recently eaten try to decide what they will want to eat next week, they reliably underestimate the extent of their future appetites.14 The double-thick milkshakes, chicken-salad sandwiches, and jalapeño sausage pockets that they recently slurped, snarfed, and swallowed do not temporarily lower their intelligence. Rather, these folks just find it difficult to imagine being hungry when they are full and thus can’t bring themselves to provide adequately for hunger’s inevitable return. We go shopping after a breakfast of eggs, waffles, and Canadian bacon, end up buying too few groceries, and then, when the urge for coconut almond ice cream makes its regular nightly visit, we curse ourselves for having shopped so lightly.
What is true of sated stomachs is also true of sated minds. In one study, researchers challenged some volunteers to answer five geography questions and told them that after they had taken their best guesses they would receive one of two rewards: Either they would learn the correct answers to the questions they had been asked and thus find out whether they had gotten them right or wrong, or they would receive a candy bar but never learn the answers.15 Some volunteers chose their reward before they took the geography quiz, and some volunteers chose their reward only after they took the quiz. As you might expect, people preferred the candy bar before taking the quiz, but they preferred the answers after taking the quiz. In other words, taking the quiz made people so curious that they valued the answers more than a scrumptious candy bar. But do people know this will happen? When a new group of volunteers was asked to predict which reward they would choose before and after taking the quiz, these volunteers predicted that they would choose the candy bar in both cases. These volunteers—who had not actually experienced the intense curiosity that taking the quiz produced—simply couldn’t imagine that they would ever forsake a Snickers for a few dull facts about cities and rivers. This finding brings to mind that wonderful scene in the 1967 film Bedazzled in which the devil spends his days in bookstores, ripping the final pages out of the mystery novels. This may not strike you as an act so utterly evil that it would warrant Lucifer’s personal attention, but when you arrive at the end of a good whodunit only to find the whodunit part missing, you understand why people might willingly trade their immortal souls for the dénouement. Curiosity is a powerful urge, but when you aren’t smack-dab in the middle of feeling it, it’s hard to imagine just how far and fast it can drive you.
These problems with forecasting our hungers—whether gustatory, sexual, emotional, social, or intellectual—are
all too familiar. But why? Why are the powers of human imagination so easily humbled? This is, after all, the same imagination that produced space travel, gene therapy, the theory of relativity, and the Monty Python cheese-shop sketch. Even the least imaginative among us can imagine things so wild and weird that our mothers would wash our heads out with soap if only they knew. We can imagine being elected to Congress, dropped from a helicopter, painted purple and rolled in almonds. We can imagine life on a banana plantation and inside a submarine. We can imagine being slaves, warriors, sheriffs, cannibals, courtesans, scuba divers, and tax collectors. And yet, for some reason, when our bellies are stuffed with mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, we can’t imagine being hungry? How come?
Sneak Prefeel
The answer to this question takes us deep into the nature of imagination itself. When we imagine objects, such as penguins, paddleboats, or Scotch-tape dispensers, most of us have the experience of actually seeing a somewhat sketchy picture of the object in our heads. If I were to ask you whether a penguin’s flippers are longer or shorter than its feet, you would probably have the sense of conjuring up a mental image from airy nothing and then “looking” at it to determine the answer. You would feel as though a picture of a penguin just popped into your head because you wanted it to, and you would have the sense of staring at the flippers for a moment, looking down and checking out the feet, glancing back up at the flippers, and then giving me an answer. What you were doing would feel a lot like seeing because, in fact, it is. The region of your brain that is normally activated when you see objects with your eyes—a sensory area called the visual cortex—is also activated when you inspect mental images with your mind’s eye.16 The same is true of other senses. For instance, if I were to ask on which syllable the high note in “Happy Birthday” is sung, you would probably play the melody in your imagination and then “listen” to it to determine where the pitch rises and falls. Again, this sense of “listening with your mind’s ear” is not just a figure of speech (especially since no one actually says this). When people imagine sounds, they show activation in a sensory area of the brain called the auditory cortex, which is normally activated only when we hear real sounds with our ears.17
These findings tell us something important about how the brain imagines, namely, that it enlists the aid of its sensory areas when it wants to imagine the sensible features of the world. If we want to know how a particular object looks when the object isn’t sitting there in front of us, we send information about the object from our memory to our visual cortex, and we experience a mental image. Similarly, if we want to know how a melody sounds when it isn’t currently on the radio, we send information about the object from our memory to our auditory cortex, and we experience a mental sound. Because penguins live in Antarctica and “Happy Birthday” is sung only on birthdays, neither of these things is usually there when we want to inspect it. When our eyes and ears do not feed the visual and auditory cortices the information they require to answer the questions we are asked, we request that the information be sent from memory, which allows us to take a fake look and have a fake listen. Because our brains can do this trick, we are able to discover things about songs (the high note occurs on birth) and birds (the flippers are longer than the feet) even when we are all alone in a closet.
Fig. 10. Visual perception (above) gets information from objects and events in the world, whereas visual imagination (below) gets information from memory.
Using the visual and auditory areas to execute acts of imagination is a truly ingenious bit of engineering, and evolution deserves the Microsoft Windows Award for installing it in every one of us without asking permission. But what do seeing and hearing have to do with Thanksgiving gluttons like us—well, at least like me? As it turns out, the imaginative processes that allow us to discover how a penguin looks even when we are locked in a closet are the same processes that allow us to discover how the future will feel when we are locked in the present. The moment someone asks you how much you would enjoy finding your partner in bed with the mailman, you feel something. Probably something not so good. Just as you generate a mental image of a penguin and then visually inspect it in order to answer questions about its flippers, so do you generate a mental image of an infidelity and then emotionally react to it in order to answer questions about your future feelings.18 The areas of your brain that respond emotionally to real events respond emotionally to imaginary events as well, which is why your pupils probably dilated and your blood pressure probably rose when I asked you to imagine this particular instance of special delivery.19 This is a clever method for predicting future feelings, because how we feel when we imagine an event is usually a good indicator of how we will feel when the event itself transpires. If mental images of rapid breathing and flailing mailbags induce pangs of jealousy and waves of anger, then we should expect a real infidelity to do so with even greater swiftness and reliability.
It doesn’t take something as emotionally charged as infidelity to illustrate this fact. Every day we say things like “Pizza sounds pretty good to me,” and despite the literal meaning of that utterance, we are not commenting on the acoustic properties of mozzarella. Rather, we are saying that when we imagine eating pizza we experience a small, lovely feeling, and that we interpret this feeling as an indicator of the even larger and lovelier feeling we would experience if we could just get the pizza out of our imaginations and into our mouths. When a Chinese host offers us an appetizer of sautéed spider or crispy grasshopper, we don’t have to chew one to know how much we’d dislike the actual experience, because the mere thought of eating bugs causes most North Americans to shudder in disgust, and that shudder tells us that the real thing is likely to induce full-blown nausea. The point here is that we generally do not sit down with a sheet of paper and start logically listing the pros and cons of the future events we are contemplating, but rather, we contemplate them by simulating those events in our imaginations and then noting our emotional reactions to that simulation. Just as imagination previews objects, so does it prefeel events.20
Fig. 11. Both feeling (above) and prefeeling (below) get information from the vision area, but the vision area gets information from different sources.
The Power of Prefeeling
Prefeeling often allows us to predict our emotions better than logical thinking does. In one study, researchers offered volunteers a reproduction of an Impressionist painting or a humorous poster of a cartoon cat.21 Before making their choices, some volunteers were asked to think logically about why they thought they might like or dislike each poster (thinkers), whereas others were encouraged to make their choices quickly and “from the gut” (nonthinkers). Career counselors and financial advisors always tell us that we should think long and hard if we wish to make sound decisions, but when the researchers phoned the volunteers later and asked how much they liked their new objet d’art, the thinkers were the least satisfied. Rather than choosing the poster that had made them feel happy when they imagined hanging it in their homes, thinkers had ignored their prefeelings and had instead chosen posters that possessed the qualities of which a career counselor or financial advisor would approve (“The olive green in the Monet may clash with the drapes, whereas the Garfield poster will signal to visitors that I have a scintillating sense of humor”). Nonthinkers, on the other hand, trusted their prefeelings: They imagined the poster on their wall, noted how they felt when they did so, and assumed that if imagining the poster on their wall made them feel good, then actually seeing it on their wall would probably do the same. And they were right. Prefeeling allowed nonthinkers to predict their future satisfaction more accurately than thinkers did. Indeed, when people are prevented from feeling emotion in the present, they become temporarily unable to predict how they will feel in the future.22
But prefeeling has limits. How we feel when we imagine something is not always a good guide to how we will feel when we see, hear, wear, own, drive, eat, or kiss it. For example, why do you close your eyes whe
n you want to visualize an object, or jam your fingers in your ears when you want to remember the melody of a certain song? You do these things because your brain must use its visual and auditory cortices to execute acts of visual and auditory imagination, and if these areas are already busy doing their primary jobs—namely, seeing and hearing things in the real world—then they are not available for acts of imagination.23 You cannot easily imagine a penguin when you are busy inspecting an ostrich because vision is already using the parts of your brain that imagination needs. Put differently, when we ask our brains to look at a real object and an imaginary object at the same time, our brains typically grant the first request and turn down the second. The brain considers the perception of reality to be its first and foremost duty, thus your request to borrow the visual cortex for a moment is expressly and summarily denied. If the brain didn’t have this Reality First policy, you’d drive right through a red light if you just so happened to be thinking about a green one. The policy that makes it difficult to imagine penguins when we are looking at ostriches also makes it difficult to imagine lust when we are feeling disgust, affection when we are feeling anger, or hunger when we are feeling full. If a friend were to wreck your new car and then offer to make amends by taking you to a baseball game the following week, your brain would be too busy responding to the car wreck to simulate your emotional response to the game. Future events may request access to the emotional areas of our brains, but current events almost always get the right of way.