The Happiness Hypothesis

The mind is a confederation of modules capable of working independently and even, sometimes, at cross-purposes.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Controlled processing requires language. You can have bits and pieces of thought through images, but to plan something complex, to weigh the pros and cons of different paths, or to analyze the causes of past successes and failures, you need words.

This is an interesting study done on delayed gratification.
Mischel discovered that the successful children were those who looked away from the temptation or were able to think about other enjoyable activities. These thinking skills are an aspect of emotional intelligence—an ability to understand and regulate one’s own feelings and desires. An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.

Whenever I am on a cliff, a rooftop, or a high balcony, the imp of the perverse whispers in my ear, “Jump.” It’s not a command, it’s just a word that pops into my consciousness.

When that goal is an action in the world (such as arriving at the airport on time), this feedback system works well. But when the goal is mental, it backfires. Automatic processes continually check: “Am I not thinking about a white bear?” As the act of monitoring for the absence of the thought introduces the thought, the person must try even harder to divert consciousness. Automatic and controlled processes end up working at cross purposes, firing each other up to ever greater exertions.

Moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment. When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it.

Usually when two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other.

If you listen closely to moral arguments, you can sometimes hear something surprising: that it is really the elephant holding the reins, guiding the rider. It is the elephant who decides what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly.

Riches and fame bring anxiety and avarice, not peace and happiness.

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”

Epiphanies can be life-altering, but most fade in days or weeks. The rider can’t just decide to change and then order the elephant to go along with the program. Lasting change can come only by retraining the elephant, and that’s hard to do.

This feels like bullshit. Can't relate personally but, can verify later.
People named Dennis or Denise are slightly more likely than people with other names to become dentists.

What can we learn from the design skills of natural selection? (See Steven Pinker12 on how natural selection designs without a designer.)

Bad is stronger than good. Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.
Principle: Negativity bias

On just about every trait that has been studied, identical twins (who share all their genes and spend the same nine months in the same womb) are more similar than same-sex fraternal twins (who share only half their genes and spend the same nine months in the same womb).

“No,” she said, “I can be unhappy anywhere.” She might as well have quoted John Milton’s paraphrase of Aurelius: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

There are many kinds of meditation, but they all have in common a conscious attempt to focus attention in a nonanalytical way. It sounds easy: Sit still (in most forms) and focus awareness only on your breathing,
This practice sounds very similar to Vipassana

Because Rachel wants to be respected, she lives in constant vigilance for signs of disrespect, and she aches for days after a possible violation. She may enjoy being treated with respect, but disrespect hurts more on average than respect feels good.

For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing.

This perspective is interesting. It does acknowledge the concern I had that taking away the spice of life might make it boring and bland. But it puts it such that suffering 80% of the time to gain 20% temporary pleasure might not be a smart idea.

“The child is father to the man.” Whatever ails you is caused by events in your childhood, and the only way to change yourself now is to dig through repressed memories, come up with a diagnosis, and work through your unresolved conflicts.

But the psychiatrist Aaron Beck challenged this approach to eventually succeed in finding the cognitive therapy as an alternate solution.

Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.” A depressed person’s mind is filled with automatic thoughts supporting these dysfunctional beliefs, particularly when things goes wrong.

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.
Vampire bats, for example, will regurgitate blood from a successful night of bloodsucking into the mouth of an unsuccessful and genetically unrelated peer. Such behavior seems to violate the spirit of Darwinian competition, except that the bats keep track of who has helped them in the past, and in return they share primarily with those bats.

The logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size. In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals.

Random thought: Should someone with a larger head be more social by default?

Individuals who could share social information, using any primitive means of communication, had an advantage over those who could not.
Maybe why socialising is quite important to build network and valuable bonds.

Gossip

Gossip elicits gossip, and it enables us to keep track of everyone’s reputation without having to witness their good and bad deeds personally. Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information.

1. When people pass along high-quality (“juicy”) gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what’s wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.

2. In a world with no gossip, people would not get away with murder but they would get away with a trail of rude, selfish, and antisocial acts, often oblivious to their own violations.

3. Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.

4. Much of what we gossip about is the value of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

5. Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life.

Gossip seems like an interesting topic to write or research about

Concession leads to concession. In financial bargaining, too, people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast.

This is similar to the anchor bias theory shown in Coglode cards.

Relationships are exquisitely sensitive to balance in their early stages, and a great way to ruin things is either to give too much (you seem perhaps a bit desperate) or too little (you seem cold and rejecting). Rather, relationships grow best by balanced give and take, especially of gifts, favors, attention, and self-disclosure.

Mimicry

When we interact with someone we like, we have a slight tendency to copy their every move, automatically and unconsciously.

1. If the other person taps her foot, you are more likely to tap yours.

2. If she touches her face, you are more likely to touch yours.

3. It’s not just that we mimic those we like; we like those who mimic us. People who are subtly mimicked are then more helpful and agreeable toward their mimicker, and even toward others. Waitresses who mimic their customers get larger tips.

Mimicry is a kind of social glue, a way of saying “We are one.”

A theme of the rest of this book is that humans are partially hive creatures, like bees, yet in the modern world we spend nearly all our time outside of the hive. Reciprocity, like love, reconnects us with others.