Stumbling on Happiness

But the neurologist was wrong. In the nineteenth century, knowledge of brain function was based largely on the observation of people who, like Phineas Gage, were the unfortunate subjects of one of nature’s occasional and inexact neurological experiments. In the twentieth century, surgeons picked up where nature left off and began to do more precise experiments whose results painted a very different picture of frontal lobe function. In the 1930s, a Portuguese physician named Antonio Egas Moniz was looking for a way to quiet his highly agitated psychotic patients when he heard about a new surgical procedure called frontal lobotomy, which involved the chemical or mechanical destruction of parts of the frontal lobe. This procedure had been performed on monkeys, who were normally quite angry when their food was withheld, but who reacted to such indignities with unruffled patience after experiencing the operation. Egas Moniz tried the procedure on his human patients and found that it had a similar calming effect. (It also had the calming effect of winning Egas Moniz the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949.) Over the next few decades, surgical techniques were improved (the procedure could be performed under local anesthesia with an ice pick) and unwanted side effects (such as lowered intelligence and bed-wetting) were diminished. The destruction of some part of the frontal lobe became a standard treatment for cases of anxiety and depression that resisted other forms of therapy.[14 - S. M. Weingarten, ‘Psychosurgery’, in Miller and Cummings, Human Frontal Lobes, 446-60.] Contrary to the conventional medical wisdom of the previous century, the frontal lobe did make a difference. The difference was that some people seemed better off without it.

But while some surgeons were touting the benefits of frontal lobe damage, others were noticing the costs. Although patients with frontal lobe damage often performed well on standard intelligence tests, memory tests and the like, they showed severe impairments on any test–even the very simplest test–that involved planning. For instance, when given a maze or a puzzle whose solution required that they consider an entire series of moves before making their first move, these otherwise intelligent people were stumped.[15 - D. R. Weinberger et al., ‘Neural Mechanisms of Future-Oriented Processes’, in Haith et al., Development of Future Oriented Processes, 221-42.] Their planning deficits were not limited to the laboratory. These patients might function reasonably well in ordinary situations, drinking tea without spilling and making small talk about the curtains, but they found it practically impossible to say what they would do later that afternoon. In summarizing scientific knowledge on this topic, a prominent scientist concluded: ‘No prefrontal symptom has been reported more consistently than the inability to plan…. The symptom appears unique to dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex…[and] is not associated with clinical damage to any other neural structure.’[16 - J. M. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex: Anatomy, Physiology, and Neuropsychology of the Frontal Lobe (New York: Lippincott-Raven, 1997), 160-61.]

Now, this pair of observations–that damage to certain parts of the frontal lobe can make people feel calm but that it can also leave them unable to plan–seem to converge on a single conclusion. What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning? Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future. We feel anxiety when we anticipate that something bad will happen, and we plan by imagining how our actions will unfold over time. Planning requires that we peer into our futures, and anxiety is one of the reactions we may have when we do.[17 - A. K. MacLeod and M. L. Cropley, ‘Anxiety, Depression, and the Anticipation of Future Positive and Negative Experiences’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105: 286-89 (1996).] The fact that damage to the frontal lobe impairs planning and anxiety so uniquely and precisely suggests that the frontal lobe is the critical piece of cerebral machinery that allows normal, modern human adults to project themselves into the future. Without it we are trapped in the moment, unable to imagine tomorrow and hence unworried about what it may bring. As scientists now recognize, the frontal lobe ‘empowers healthy human adults with the capacity to consider the self’s extended existence throughout time’.[18 - M. A. Wheeler, D. T. Stuss and E. Tulving, ‘Toward a General Theory of Episodic Memory: The Frontal Lobes and Autonoetic Consciousness’, Psychological Bulletin 121: 331-54 (1997).]? As such, people whose frontal lobe is damaged are described by those who study them as being ‘bound to present stimuli’,[19 - FT Melges, ‘Identity and Temporal Perspective’, in Cognitive Models of Psychological Time, ed. R. A. Block (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990), 255-66.] or ‘locked into immediate space and time’,[20 - P. Faglioni, ‘The Frontal Lobes’, in The Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, ed. G. Denes and L. Pizzamiglio (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 1999), 525-69.] or as displaying a ‘tendency toward temporal concreteness’.[21 - J. M. Fuster, ‘Cognitive Functions of the Frontal Lobes’, in Miller and Cummings, Human Frontal Lobes, 187-95.] In other words, like candy guys and tree climbers, they live in a world without later.

The sad case of the patient known as N.N. provides a window into this world. N.N. suffered a closed head injury in an automobile accident in 1981, when he was thirty years old. Tests revealed that he had sustained extensive damage to his frontal lobe. A psychologist interviewed N.N. a few years after the accident and recorded this conversation:

PSYCHOLOGIST: What will you be doing tomorrow?

N.N.: I don’t know.

PSYCHOLOGIST: DO you remember the question?

N.N.: About what I’ll be doing tomorrow?

PSYCHOLOGIST: Yes, would you describe your state of mind when you try to think about it?

N.N.: Blank, I guess…It’s like being asleep…like being in a room with nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair, and there’s nothing there…like swimming in the middle of a lake. There’s nothing to hold you up or do anything with.[22 - E. Tulving, ‘Memory and Consciousness’, Canadian Psychology 26: 1-12 (1985). The same case is described extensively under the pseudonym ‘K.C.’ in E. Tulving et al, ‘Priming of Semantic Autobiographical Knowledge: A Case Study of Retrograde Amnesia’, Brain and Cognition 8: 3-20 (1988).]

N.N.’s inability to think about his own future is characteristic of patients with frontal lobe damage. For N.N., tomorrow will always be an empty room, and when he attempts to envision later, he will always feel as the rest of us do when we try to imagine nonexistence or infinity. Yet, if you struck up a conversation with N.N. on the subway, or chatted with him while standing in a queue at the post office, you might not know that he was missing something so fundamentally human. After all, he understands time and the future as abstractions. He knows what hours and minutes are, how many of the latter there are in the former, and what before and after mean. As the psychologist who interviewed N.N. reported: “He knows many things about the world, he is aware of this knowledge, and he can express it flexibly. In this sense he is not greatly different from a normal adult. But he seems to have no capacity of experiencing extended subjective time…. He seems to be living in a ‘permanent present…’”[23 - Tulving, ‘Memory and Consciousness’.]

A permanent present–what a haunting phrase. How bizarre and surreal it must be to serve a life sentence in the prison of the moment, trapped forever in the perpetual now, a world without end, a time without later. Such an existence is so difficult for most of us to imagine, so alien to our normal experience, that we are tempted to dismiss it as a fluke–an unfortunate, rare and freakish aberration brought on by traumatic head injury. But in fact, this strange existence is the rule and we are the exception. For the first few hundred million years after their initial appearance on our planet, all brains were stuck in the permanent present, and most brains still are today. But not yours and not mine, because two or three million years ago our ancestors began a great escape from the here and now, and their getaway vehicle was a highly specialized mass of grey tissue, fragile, wrinkled and appended. This frontal lobe–the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature and the first to deteriorate in old age–is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens. No other animal has a frontal lobe quite like ours, which is why we are the only animal that thinks about the future as we do. But if the story of the frontal lobe tells us bow people conjure their imaginary tomorrows, it doesn’t tell us why.

Twisting Fate

In the late 1960s, a Harvard psychology professor took LSD, resigned his appointment (with some encouragement from the administration), went to India, met a guru and returned to write a popular book called Be Here Now, whose central message was succinctly captured by the injunction of its title.[24 - R. Dass, Be Here Now (New York: Crown, 1971).] The key to happiness, fulfilment and enlightenment, the ex-professor argued, was to stop thinking so much about the future.

Now, why would anyone go all the way to India and spend his time, money and brain cells just to learn how not to think about the future? Because, as anyone who has ever tried to learn meditation knows, not thinking about the future is much more challenging than being a psychology professor. Not to think about the future requires that we convince our frontal lobe not to do what it was designed to do, and like a heart that is told not to beat, it naturally resists this suggestion. Unlike N.N., most of us do not struggle to think about the future because mental simulations of the future arrive in our consciousness regularly and unbidden, occupying every corner of our mental lives. When people are asked to report how much they think about the past, present and future, they claim to think about the future the most.[25 - L. A. Jason et al, ‘Time Orientation: Past, Present, and Future Perceptions’, Psychological Reports 64: 1199-1205 (1989).] When researchers actually count the items that float along in the average person’s stream of consciousness, they find that about 12 per cent of our daily thoughts are about the future.[26 - E. Klinger and W. M. Cox, ‘Dimensions of Thought Flow in Everyday Life’, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality 72: 105-28 (1987-88); and E. Klinger, ‘On Living Tomorrow Today: The Quality of Inner Life as a Function of Goal Expectations’, in Psychology of Future Orientation, ed. Z. Zaleski (Lublin, Poland: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 1994), 97-106.]? In other words, every eight hours of thinking includes an hour of thinking about things that have yet to happen. If you spent one out of every eight hours living in my state you would be required to pay taxes, which is to say that in some very real sense, each of us is a part-time resident of tomorrow.

Why can’t we just be here now? How come we can’t do something our goldfish find so simple? Why do our brains stubbornly insist on projecting us into the future when there is so much to think about right here today?

Prospection and Emotion

The most obvious answer to that question is that thinking about the future can be pleasurable. We daydream about hitting a home-run at the company picnic, posing with the lottery commissioner and the door-sized cheque, or making snappy patter with the attractive teller at the bank–not because we expect or even want these things to happen, but because merely imagining these possibilities is itself a source of joy. Studies confirm what you probably suspect: when people daydream about the future, they tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing.[27 - J. L. Singer, Daydreaming and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); E. Klinger, Daydreaming: Using Waking Fantasy and Imagery for Self-Knowledge and Creativity (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1990); G. Oettingen, Psychologie des Zukunftdenkens [On the Psychology of Future Thought] (Gottingen, Germany: Hogrefe, 1997).]

Indeed, thinking about the future can be so pleasurable that sometimes we’d rather think about it than get there. In one study, volunteers were told that they had won a free dinner at a fabulous French restaurant and were then asked when they would like to eat it. Now? Tonight? Tomorrow? Although the delights of the meal were obvious and tempting, most of the volunteers chose to put their restaurant visit off a bit, generally until the following week.[28 - G. F. Loewenstein and D. Prelec, ‘Preferences for Sequences of Outcomes’, Psychological Review 100: 91-108 (1993). See also G. Loewenstein, ‘Anticipation and the Valuation of Delayed Consumption’, Economy Journal 97: 666-84 (1987); and J. Elster and G. F. Loewenstein, ‘Utility from Memory and Anticipation’, in Choice Over Time, ed. G. F. Loewenstein and J. Elster (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 213-34.]? Why the self-imposed delay? Because by waiting a week, these people not only got to spend several hours slurping oysters and sipping Chateau Cheval Blanc ’47, but they also got to look forward to all that slurping and sipping for a full seven days beforehand. Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit. Indeed, some events are more pleasurable to imagine than to experience (most of us can recall an instance in which we made love with a desirable partner or ate a wickedly rich dessert, only to find that the act was better contemplated than consummated), and in these cases people may decide to delay the event forever. For instance, volunteers in one study were asked to imagine themselves requesting a date with a person on whom they had a major crush, and those who had had the most elaborate and delicious fantasies about approaching their heartthrob were least likely to do so over the next few months.[29 - G. Oettingen and D. Mayer, ‘The Motivating Function of Thinking About the Future: Expectations Versus Fantasies’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83: 1198-1212 (2002).]

We like to frolic in the best of all imaginary tomorrows–and why shouldn’t we? After all, we fill our photo albums with pictures of birthday parties and tropical holidays rather than car wrecks and emergency-room visits because we want to be happy when we stroll down Memory Lane, so why shouldn’t we take the same attitude toward our strolls up Imagination Avenue? Although imagining happy futures may make us feel happy, it can also have some troubling consequences. Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur.[30 - A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, ‘Availability: A Heuristic for Judgment Frequency and Probability’, Cognitive Psychology 5: 207-32 (1973).] Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.

For instance, American college students expect to live longer, stay married longer and travel to Europe more often than averages[31 - N. Weinstein, ‘Unrealistic Optimism About Future Life Events’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39: 806-20 (1980).] They believe they are more likely to have a gifted child, to own their own home and to appear in the newspaper, and less likely to have a heart attack, venereal disease, a drinking problem, an auto accident, a broken bone or gum disease. Americans of all ages expect their futures to be an improvement on their presents[32 - P. Brickman, D. Coates and R. J. Janoff-Bulman, ‘Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36: 917-27 (1978).] and although citizens of other nations are not quite as optimistic as Americans, they also tend to imagine that their futures will be brighter than those of their peers.[33 - E. C. Chang, K. Asakawa and L. J. Sanna, ‘Cultural Variations in Optimistic and Pessimistic Bias: Do Easterners Really Expect the Worst and Westerners Really Expect the Best When Predicting Future Life Events?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81: 476-91 (2001).] These overly optimistic expectations about our personal futures are not easily undone: experiencing an earthquake causes people to become temporarily realistic about their risk of dying in a future disaster, but within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of unfounded optimisms.[34 - J. M. Burger and M. L. Palmer, ‘Changes in and Generalization of Unrealistic Optimism Following Experiences with Stressful Events: Reactions to the 1989 California Earthquake’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18: 39-43 (1992).] Indeed, events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can sometimes make us more rather than less optimistic. One study found that cancer patients were more optimistic about their futures than were their healthy counterparts.[35 - H. E. Stiegelis et al, ‘Cognitive Adaptation: A Comparison of Cancer Patients and Healthy References’, British Journal of Health Psychology 8: 303-18 (2003).]

Of course, the futures that our brains insist on simulating are not all wine, kisses and tasty bivalves. They are often mundane, irksome, stupid, unpleasant or downright frightening, and people who seek treatment for their inability to stop thinking about the future are usually worrying about it rather than revelling in it. Just as a loose tooth seems to beg for wiggling, we all seem perversely compelled to imagine disasters and tragedies from time to time. On the way to the airport we imagine a future scenario in which the plane takes off without us and we miss the important meeting with the client. On the way to the dinner party we imagine a future scenario in which everyone hands the hostess a bottle of wine while we greet her empty-handed and embarrassed. On the way to the medical centre we imagine a future scenario in which our doctor inspects our chest X-ray, frowns and says something ominous such as ‘Let’s talk about your options.’ These dire images make us feel dreadful–quite literally–so why do we go to such great lengths to construct them?

Two reasons. First, anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact. For instance, volunteers in one study received a series of twenty electric shocks and were warned three seconds before the onset of each one.[36 - A. Arntz, M. Van Eck and P. J. de Jong, ‘Unpredictable Sudden Increases in Intensity of Pain and Acquired Fear’, Journal of Psychophysiology 6: 54-64 (1992).] Some volunteers (the high-shock group) received twenty high-intensity shocks to their right ankles. Other volunteers (the low-shock group) received three high-intensity shocks and seventeen low-intensity shocks. Although the low-shock group received fewer volts than the high-shock group did, their hearts beat faster, they sweated more profusely and they rated themselves as more afraid. Why? Because volunteers in the low-shock group received shocks of different intensities at different times, which made it impossible for them to anticipate their futures. Apparently, three big jolts that one cannot foresee are more painful than twenty big jolts that one can.[37 - Speaking of electric shock, this is probably a good time to mention that psychological experiments such as these are always performed according to the strict ethical guidelines of the American Psychological Association and must be approved by university committees before they are implemented. Those who participate do so voluntarily, are always fully informed of any risks the study may pose to their health or happiness and are given the opportunity to withdraw at any time without fear of penalty. If people are given any false information in the course of an experiment, they are told the truth when the experiment is over. In short, we’re really very nice people.]

The second reason why we take such pains to imagine unpleasant events is that fear, worry and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives. We motivate employees, children, spouses and pets to do the right thing by dramatizing the unpleasant consequences of their misbehaviours, and so too do we motivate ourselves by imagining the unpleasant tomorrows that await us should we decide to go light on the sunscreen and heavy on the éclairs. Forecasts can be ‘fearcasts.’[38 - M. Miceli and C. Castelfranchi, ‘The Mind and the Future: The (Negative) Power of Expectations’, Theory and Psychology 12: 335-66 (2002).] whose purpose is not to predict the future so much as to preclude it, and studies have shown that this strategy is often an effective way to motivate people to engage in prudent, prophylactic behavior.[39 - J. N. Norem, ‘Pessimism: Accentuating the Positive Possibilities’, in Virtue, Vice, and Personality: The Complexity of Behavior, ed. E. C. Chang and L. J. Sanna (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003), 91-104; J. K. Norem and N. Cantor, ‘Defensive Pessimism: Harnessing Anxiety as Motivation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51: 1208-17 (1986).] In short, we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off.

Prospection and Control

Prospection can provide pleasure and prevent pain, and this is one of the reasons why our brains stubbornly insist on churning out thoughts of the future. But it is not the most important reason. Americans gladly pay millions–perhaps even billions–of dollars every year to psychics, investment advisors, spiritual leaders, weather forecasters and other assorted hucksters who claim they can predict the future. Those of us who subsidize these fortune-telling industries do not want to know what is likely to happen just for the joy of anticipating it. We want to know what is likely to happen so that we can do something about it. If interest rates are going to skyrocket next month, then we want to shift our money out of bonds right now. If it is going to rain this afternoon, then we want to grab an umbrella this morning. Knowledge is power, and the most important reason why our brains insist on simulating the future even when we’d rather be here now, enjoying a goldfish moment, is that our brains want to control the experiences we are about to have.

But why should we want to have control over our future experiences? On the face of it, this seems about as nonsensical as asking why we should want to have control over our television sets and our automobiles. But indulge me. We have a large frontal lobe so that we can look into the future, we look into the future so that we can make predictions about it, we make predictions about it so that we can control it–but why do we want to control it at all? Why not just let the future unfold as it will and experience it as it does? Why not be here now and there then? There are two answers to this question, one of which is surprisingly right and the other of which is surprisingly wrong.

The surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to exercise control–not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective–changing things, influencing things, making things happen–is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.[40 - A. Bandura, ‘Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change’, Psychological Review 84: 191-215 (1977); and A. Bandura, ‘Self-Efficacy: Mechanism in Human Agency’, American Psychologist 37: 122-47 (1982).] Before our butts hit the very first nappy, we already have a throbbing desire to suck, sleep, poo and make things happen. It takes us a while to get around to fulfilling the last of these desires only because it takes us a while to figure out that we have fingers, but when we do, look out world. Toddlers squeal with delight when they knock over a stack of blocks, push a ball or squash a cupcake on their foreheads. Why? Because they did it, that’s why. Look, Mum, my hand made that happen. The room is different because I was in it. I thought about falling blocks, and poof, they fell.

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.[41 - M. E. P. Seligman, Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975).] And occasionally dead. In one study, researchers gave elderly residents of a local nursing home a house-plant. They told half the residents that they were in control of the plant’s care and feeding (high-control group), and they told the remaining residents that a staff person would take responsibility for the plant’s well-being (low-control group).4[42 - E. Langer and J. Rodin, ‘The Effect of Choice and Enhanced Personal Responsibility for the Aged: A Field Experiment in an Institutional Setting’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34: 191-98 (1976); and J. Rodin and E. J. Langer, ‘Long-Term Effects of a Control-Relevant Intervention with the Institutional Aged’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35: 897-902] Six months later, 30 per cent of the residents in the low-control group had died, compared with only 15 per cent of the residents in the high-control group. A follow-up study confirmed the importance of perceived control for the welfare of nursing-home residents but had an unexpected and unfortunate end.[43 - R. Schulz and B. H. Hanusa, ‘Long-Term Effects of Control and Predictability-Enhancing Interventions: Findings and Ethical Issues’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36: 1202-12 (1978).] Researchers arranged for student volunteers to pay regular visits to nursing-home residents. Residents in the high-control group were allowed to control the timing and duration of the student’s visit (‘Please come visit me next Thursday for an hour’), and residents in low-control group were not (‘I’ll come visit you next Thursday for an hour’). After two months, residents in the high-control group were happier, healthier, more active and taking fewer medications than those in the low-control group. At this point the researchers concluded their study and discontinued the student visits. Several months later they were chagrined to learn that a disproportionate number of residents who had been in the high-control group had died. Only in retrospect did the cause of this tragedy seem clear. The residents who had been given control, and who had benefited measurably from that control while they had it, were inadvertently robbed of control when the study ended.

Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.

Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable. For instance, people bet more money on games of chance when their opponents seem incompetent than competent–as though they believed they could control the random drawing of cards from a deck and thus take advantage of a weak opponent.[44 - E. J. Langer, ‘The Illusion of Control’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32: 311-28 (1975).] People feel more certain that they will win a lottery if they can control the number on their tickets,[45 - Ibid.] and they feel more confident that they will win a dice toss if they can throw the dice themselves.[46 - D. S. Dunn and T. D. Wilson, ‘When the Stakes Are High: A Limit to the Illusion of Control Effect’, Social Cognition 8: 305-23 (1991).] People will wager more money on dice that have not yet been tossed than on dice that have already been tossed but whose outcome is not yet known,[47 - L. H. Strickland, R. J. Lewicki and A. M. Katz, ‘Temporal Orientation and Perceived Control as Determinants of Risk Taking’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2: 143-51 (1966).] and they will bet more if they, rather than someone else, are allowed to decide which number will count as a win.[48 - Dunn and Wilson, ‘When the Stakes Are High’.] In each of these instances, people behave in a way that would be utterly absurd if they believed that they had no control over an uncontrollable event. But if somewhere deep down inside they believed that they could exert control–even one smidgen of an iota of control–then their behavior would be perfectly reasonable. And deep down inside, that’s precisely what most of us seem to believe. Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts! Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed,[49 - S. Gollin et al, ‘The Illusion of Control Among Depressed Patients’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 88: 454-57 (1979).] who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situations.[50 - L. B. Alloy and L. Y. Abramson, ‘Judgment of Contingency in Depressed and Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser?’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 108: 441-85 (1979). For a contrary view, see D. Dunning and A. L. Story, ‘Depression, Realism and the Overconfidence Effect: Are the Sadder Wiser When Predicting Future Actions and Events?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61: 521-32 (1991); and R. M. Msetfi et al., ‘Depressive Realism and Outcome Density Bias in Contingency Judgments: The Effect of the Context and Intertrial Interval’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 134: 10-22 (2005).] These and other findings have led some researchers to conclude that the feeling of control–whether real or illusory–is one of the wellsprings of mental health.[51 - S. E. Taylor and J. D. Brown, ‘Illusion and Well-Being: A Social-Psychological Perspective on Mental Health’, Psychological Bulletin 103: 193-210 (1988).] So if the question is ‘Why should we want to control our futures?’ then the surprisingly right answer is that it feels good to do so–period. Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy. The act of steering one’s boat down the river of time is a source of pleasure, regardless of one’s port of call.

Now, at this point you probably believe two things. First, you probably believe that if you never heard the phrase “the river of time” again, it would be too soon. Amen. Second, you probably believe that even if the act of steering a metaphorical boat down a clichéd river is a source of pleasure and well-being, where the boat goes matters much, much more. Playing captain is a joy all its own, but the real reason why we want to steer our ships is so that we can get them to Hanalei instead of Jersey City. The nature of a place determines how we feel upon arrival, and our uniquely human ability to think about the extended future allows us to choose the best destinations and avoid the worst. We are the apes that learned to look forward because doing so enables us to shop among the many fates that might befall us and select the best one. Other animals must experience an event in order to learn about its pleasures and pains, but our powers of foresight allow us to imagine that which has not yet happened and hence spare ourselves the hard lessons of experience. We needn’t reach out and touch an ember to know that it will hurt to do so, and we needn’t experience abandonment, scorn, eviction, demotion, disease or divorce to know that all of these are undesirable ends that we should do our best to avoid. We want–and we should want–to control the direction of our boat because some futures are better than others, and even from this distance we should be able to tell which are which.

This idea is so obvious that it barely seems worth mentioning, but I’m going to mention it anyway. Indeed, I am going to spend the rest of this book mentioning it because it will probably take more than a few mentions to convince you that what looks like an obvious idea is, in fact, the surprisingly wrong answer to our question. We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain–not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight (‘Isn’t it strange how one queue looks longer than the other even though it isn’t?’) and illusions of hindsight (‘Isn’t it strange how I can’t remember taking out the garbage even though I did?’), so too do we experience illusions of foresight–and all three types of illusion are explained by the same basic principles of human psychology.

Onward

To be perfectly honest, I won’t just be mentioning the surprisingly wrong answer; I’ll be pounding and pummelling it until it gives up and goes home. The surprisingly wrong answer is apparently so sensible and so widely believed that only a protracted thrashing has any hope of expunging it from our conventional wisdom. So before the grudge match begins, let me share with you my plan of attack.

• In Part II, ‘Subjectivity’, I will tell you about the science of happiness. We all steer ourselves toward the futures that we think will make us happy, but what does that word really mean? And how can we ever hope to achieve solid, scientific answers to questions about something as gossamer as a feeling?

• We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time. Just as our eyes sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee things as they will not be. Imagination suffers from three shortcomings that give rise to the illusions of foresight with which this book is chiefly concerned. In Part III, ‘Realism’, I will tell you about the first shortcoming: imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently sceptical of its products.

• In Part IV, ‘Presentism’, I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination’s products are…well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present.

• In Part V, ‘Rationalization’, I will tell you about the third shortcoming: imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen.

• Finally, in Part VI, ‘Corrigibility’, I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers. I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.

By the time you finish these chapters, I hope you will understand why most of us spend so much of our lives turning rudders and hoisting sails, only to find that Shangri-la isn’t what and where we thought it would be.

PART II

Subjectivity

subjectivity (sub•dzėk•ti-vĭtee)

The fact that experience is unobservable to everyone but the person having it.

CHAPTER 2

The View from in Here

But, O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!

    Shakespeare, As You Like It

LORI AND REBA SCHAPPEL may be twins, but they are very different people. Reba is a somewhat shy teetotaler who has recorded an award-winning album of country music. Lori, who is outgoing, wisecracking and rather fond of strawberry daiquiris, works in a hospital and wants someday to marry and have children. They occasionally argue, as sisters do, but most of the time they get on well, complimenting each other, teasing each other and finishing each other’s sentences. In fact, there are just two unusual things about Lori and Reba. The first is that they share a blood supply, part of a skull, and some brain tissue, having been joined at the forehead since birth. One side of Lori’s forehead is attached to one side of Reba’s, and they have spent every moment of their lives locked together, face-to-face. The second unusual thing about Lori and Reba is that they are happy–not merely resigned or contented, but joyful, playful and optimistic.[52 - N. L. Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior (New York: Dutton, 1999).] Their unusual life presents many challenges, of course, but as they often note, whose doesn’t? When asked about the possibility of undergoing surgical separation, Reba speaks for both of them: ‘Our point of view is no, straight out no. Why would you want to do that? For all the money in China, why? You’d be ruining two lives in the process.’[53 - N. Angier, ‘Joined for Life, and Living Life to the Full’, New York Times, 23 December 1997, FI.]