Stumbling on Happiness

Onward

On the morning of 15 May 1916, the arctic explorer Ernest Shackle-ton began the last leg of one of history’s most gruelling adventures. His ship, the Endurance, had sunk in the Weddell Sea, stranding him and his crew on Elephant Island. After seven months, Shackleton and five of his crewmen boarded a small lifeboat in which they spent three weeks crossing eight hundred miles of frigid, raging ocean. Upon reaching South Georgia Island, the starving, frostbitten men prepared to disembark and cross the island on foot in the hope of reaching a whaling station on the other side. No one had ever survived that trek. Facing almost certain death that morning, Shackleton wrote:

We passed through the narrow mouth of the cove with the ugly rocks and waving kelp close on either side, turned to the east, and sailed merrily up the bay as the sun broke through the mists and made the tossing waters sparkle around us. We were a curious-looking party on that bright morning, but we were feeling happy. We even broke into song, and, but for our Robinson Crusoe appearance, a casual observer might have taken us for a picnic party sailing in a Norwegian fjord or one of the beautiful sounds of the west coast of New Zealand.[81 - E. Shackleton, South (1959; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 192.]

Could Shackleton really have meant what he said? Could his happy be our happy, and is there any way to tell? As we’ve seen, happiness is a subjective experience that is difficult to describe to ourselves and to others, thus evaluating people’s claims about their own happiness is an exceptionally thorny business. But don’t worry–because before business gets better, it gets a whole lot thornier.

CHAPTER 3

Outside Looking In

Go to your bosom;

Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

    Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

THERE AREN’T MANY JOKES about psychology professors, so we tend to cherish the few we have. Here’s one. What do psychology professors say when they pass each other in the hallway? ‘Hi, you’re fine, how am I?’ I know, I know. The joke isn’t that funny. But the reason it’s supposed to be funny is that people shouldn’t know how others are feeling but they should know how they’re feeling themselves. ‘How are you?’ is overly familiar for the same reason that ‘How am I?’ is overly strange. And yet, strange as it is, there are times when people seem not to know their own hearts. When conjoined twins claim to be happy, we have to wonder if perhaps they just think they’re happy. That is, they may believe what they’re saying, but what they’re saying may be wrong. Before we can decide whether to accept people’s claims about their happiness, we must first decide whether people can, in principle, be mistaken about what they feel. We can be wrong about all sorts of things–the price of soybeans, the life span of dust mites, the history of flannel–but can we be wrong about our own emotional experience? Can we believe we are feeling something we aren’t? Are there really people out there who can’t accurately answer the world’s most familiar question?

Yes, and you’ll find one in the mirror. Read on.

Dazed and Confused

But not just yet. Before you read on, I challenge you to stop and have a nice long look at your thumb. Now, I will wager that you did not accept my challenge. I will wager that you went right on reading because looking at your thumb is so easy that it makes for rather pointless sport–everyone bats a thousand and the game is called on account of boredom. But if looking at your thumb seems beneath you, just consider what actually has to happen for us to see an object in our environment–a thumb, a glazed doughnut or a rabid wolverine. In the tiny gap between the time that the light reflected from the surface of the object reaches our eyes and the time that we become aware of the object’s identity, our brains must extract and analyse the object’s features and compare them with information in our memory to determine what the thing is and what we ought to do about it. This is complicated stuff–so complicated that no scientist yet understands precisely how it happens and no computer can simulate the trick–but it is just the sort of complicated stuff that brains do with exceptional speed and accuracy. In fact, they perform these analyses with such proficiency that we have the experience of simply looking leftward, seeing a wolverine, feeling afraid and preparing to do all further analysis from the safety of a sycamore tree.

Think for a moment about how looking ought to happen. If you were designing a brain from scratch, you would probably design it so that it first identified objects in its environment (‘Sharp teeth, brown fur, weird little snorting sound, hot drool–why, that’s a rabid wolverine!’) and then figured out what to do (‘Leaving seems like a splendid idea about now’). But human brains were not designed from scratch. Rather, their most critical functions were designed first, and their less critical functions were added on like bells and whistles as the millennia passed, which is why the really important parts of your brain (e.g., the ones that control your breathing) are down at the bottom and the parts you could probably live without (e.g., the ones that control your temper) sit above them, like ice cream on a cone. As it turns out, running with great haste from rabid wolverines is much more important than knowing what they are. Indeed, actions such as running away are so vitally important to the survival of terrestrial mammals like the ones from whom we are descended that evolution took no chances and designed the brain to answer the ‘What should I do?’ question before the ‘What is it?’ question.[82 - J. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).] Experiments have demonstrated that the moment we encounter an object, our brains instantly analyse just a few of its key features and then use the presence or absence of these features to make one very fast and very simple decision: ‘Is this object an important thing to which I ought to respond right now?’[83 - R. B. Zajonc, ‘Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences’, American Psychologist 35: 151-75 (1980); R. B. Zajonc, ‘On the Primacy of Affect’, American Psychologist 39: 117-23 (1984); and ‘Emotions’, in The Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske and G. Lindzey, 4th edn., vol. 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 591-632.] Rabid wolverines, crying babies, hurled rocks, beckoning mates, cowering prey–these things count for a lot in the game of survival, which requires that we take immediate action when we happen upon them and do not dally to contemplate the finer points of their identities. As such, our brains are designed to decide first whether objects count and to decide later what those objects are. This means that when you turn your head to the left, there is a fraction of a second during which your brain does not know that it is seeing a wolverine but does know that it is seeing something scary.

But how can that be? How can we know something is scary if we don’t know what it is? To understand how this can happen, just consider how you would go about identifying a person who is walking toward you across a vast expanse of desert. The first thing to catch your eye would be a small flicker of motion on the horizon. As you stared, you would soon notice that the motion was that of an object moving toward you. As it came closer, you would see that the motion was biological, then you would see that the biological object was a biped, then a human, then a female, then a fat human female with dark hair and a Budweiser T-shirt, and then–hey, what’s Aunt Mabel doing in the Sahara? Your identification of Aunt Mabel would progress–that is, it would begin quite generally and become more specific over time, until finally it terminated in a family reunion. Similarly, the identification of a wolverine at your elbow progresses over time–albeit just a few milliseconds–and it too progresses from the general to the specific. Research demonstrates that there is enough information in the early, very general stages of this identification process to decide whether an object is scary, but not enough information to know what the object is. Once our brains decide that they are in the presence of a threat, they instruct our glands to produce hormones that create a state of heightened physiological arousal–blood pressure rises, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, muscles tense–which prepares us to spring into action. Before our brains have finished the full-scale analysis that will allow us to know that the object is a wolverine, they have already put our bodies into their ready-to-run-away modes–all pumped up and raring to go.

The fact that we can feel aroused without knowing exactly what it is that has aroused us has important implications for our ability to identify our own emotions.[84 - S. Schachter and J. Singer, ‘Cognitive, Social and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State’, Psychological Review 69: 379-99 (1962).] For example, researchers studied the reactions of some young men who were crossing a long, narrow suspension bridge constructed of wooden boards and wire cables that rocked and swayed 230 feet above the Capilano River in North Vancouver.[85 - D. G. Dutton and A. P. Aron, ‘Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30: 510-17 (1974).] A young woman approached each man and asked if he would mind completing a survey, and after he did so, the woman gave the man her telephone number and offered to explain her survey project in greater detail if he called. Now, here’s the catch: the woman approached some of these young men as they were crossing the bridge and others only after they had crossed it. As it turned out, the men who had met the woman as they were crossing the bridge were much more likely to call her in the coming days. Why? The men who met the woman in the middle of a shaky, swaying suspension bridge were experiencing intense physiological arousal, which they would normally have identified as fear. But because they were being interviewed by an attractive woman, they mistakenly identified their arousal as sexual attraction. Apparently, feelings that one interprets as fear in the presence of a sheer drop may be interpreted as lust in the presence of a sheer blouse–which is simply to say that people can be wrong about what they are feeling.[86 - It is also interesting to note that the mere act of identifying an emotion can sometimes eliminate it. See A. R. Hariri, S. Y. Bookheimer and J. C. Mazziotta, ‘Modulating Emotional Response: Effects of a Neocortical Network on the Limbic System’, NeuroReport n: 43-48 (2000); and M. D. Lieberman et al., ‘Two Captains, One Ship: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to Disrupting Automatic Affective Processes’ (unpublished manuscript, UCLA, 2003).]

Comfortably Numb

The novelist Graham Greene wrote: ‘Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love.’[87 - G. Greene, The End of the Affair (New York: Viking Press, 1951), 29.] Indeed, research shows that physiological arousal can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and our interpretation of our arousal depends on what we believe caused it. It is possible to mistake fear for lust, apprehension for guilt,[88 - R. A. Dienstbier and P. C. Munter, ‘Cheating as a Function of the Labeling of Natural Arousal’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17: 208-13] shame for anxiety.[89 - M. P. Zanna and J. Cooper, ‘Dissonance and the Pill: An Attribution Approach to Studying the Arousal Properties of Dissonance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 29: 703-9 (1974).] But just because we don’t always know what to call our emotional experience doesn’t mean that we don’t know what that experience is like, does it? Perhaps we can’t say its name and perhaps we don’t know what made it happen, but we always know what it feels like, right? Is it possible to believe we are feeling something when we are actually feeling nothing at all The philosopher Daniel Dennett put the question this way:

Suppose someone is given the post-hypnotic suggestion that upon awakening he will have a pain in his wrist. If the hypnosis works, is it a case of pain, hypnotically induced, or merely a case of a person who has been induced to believe he has a pain? If one answers that the hypnosis has induced real pain, suppose the post-hypnotic suggestion had been: ‘On awakening you will believe you have a pain in the wrist.’ If this suggestion works, is the circumstance just like the previous one? Isn’t believing you are in pain tantamount to being in pain?[90 - D. C. Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 1981), 218.]

At first blush, the idea that we can mistakenly believe we are feeling pain seems preposterous, if only because the distinction between feeling pain and believing one is feeling pain looks so suspiciously like an artefact of language. But give this idea a second blush while considering the following scenario. You are sitting at a pavement café, sipping a tangy espresso and contentedly browsing the Sunday newspaper. People are strolling by and taking in the fine morning, and the amorous activities of a young couple at a nearby table attest to the eternal wonder of spring. The song of a thrush punctuates the yeasty scent of new croissants that wafts from the bakery. The article you are reading on campaign-finance reform is quite interesting and all is well–until suddenly you realize you are now reading the third paragraph, that somewhere in the middle of the first you started sniffing baked goods and listening to bird chirps, and that you now have absolutely no idea what the story you are reading is about. Did you actually read that second paragraph, or did you merely dream it? You take a quick look back and, sure enough, all the words are familiar. As you read them again you can even recall hearing them spoken a few moments ago by that narrator in your head who sounds astonishingly like you and whose voice was submerged for a paragraph or two beneath the sweet distractions of the season.

Two questions confront us. First, did you experience the paragraph the first time you read it? Second, if so, did you know you were experiencing it? The answers are yes and no, respectively. You experienced the paragraph and that’s why it was so familiar to you when you went back through it. Had there been an eye tracker at your table, it would have revealed that you did not stop reading at any point. In fact, you were smack-dab in the middle of reading’s smooth movements when suddenly you caught yourself…caught yourself…caught yourself what? Experiencing without being aware that you were experiencing–that’s what. Now, let me slow down for a moment and tread carefully around these words lest you start listening for the high-pitched tones of the indigo bunting. The word experience comes from the Latin experientia, meaning ‘to try’, whereas the word aware comes from the Greek horan, meaning ‘to see’. Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event. The two words can normally be substituted in ordinary conversation without much damage, but they are differently inflected. One gives us the sense of being engaged, whereas the other gives us the sense of being cognizant of that engagement. One denotes reflection while the other denotes the thing being reflected. In fact, awareness can be thought of as a kind of experience of our own experience.[91 - J. W. Schooler, ‘Re-representing Consciousness: Dissociations Between Consciousness and Meta-Consciousness’, Trends in Cognitive Science 6: 339-44 (2002)] When two people argue about whether their dogs are conscious, one is usually using that badly bruised term to mean ‘capable of experience’ while the other is using it to mean ‘capable of awareness’. Dogs are not rocks, one argues, so of course they are conscious. Dogs are not people, the other replies, so of course they are not conscious. Both arguers are probably right. Dogs probably do have an experience of yellow and sweet: there is something it is like to be a dog standing before a sweet, yellow thing, even if human beings can never know what that something is. But the experiencing dog is probably not simultaneously aware that it is having that experience, thinking as it chews, ‘Damned fine ladyfinger’.

The distinction between experience and awareness is elusive because most of the time they hang together so nicely. We pop a ladyfinger into our mouths, we experience sweetness, we know we are experiencing sweetness, and nothing about any of this seems even remotely challenging. But if the typically tight bond between experience and awareness leads us to suspect that the distinction between them is an exercise in hand waving, you need only rewind the tape a bit and imagine yourself back at the café at precisely the moment that your eyes were running across the newsprint and your mind was about to mosey off to contemplate the sounds and smells around you. Now hit play and imagine that your mind wanders away, gets lost and never comes back. That’s right. Imagine that as you experience the newspaper article, your awareness becomes permanently unbound from your experience, and you never catch yourself drifting away–never return to the moment with a start to discover that you are reading. The young couple at the nearby table stop pawing each other long enough to lean over and ask you for the latest news on the campaign-finance reform bill, and you patiently explain that you could not possibly know that because, as they would surely see if only they would pay attention to something other than their glands, you are happily listening to the sounds of spring and not reading a newspaper. The young couple is perplexed by this response, because as far as they can see, you do indeed have a newspaper in your hands and your eyeballs are, in fact, running rapidly across the page even as you deny it. After a bit of whispering and one more smooch, they decide to run a test to determine whether you are telling the truth. ‘Sorry to bother you again, but we are desperate to know how many senators voted for the campaign-finance reform bill last week and wonder if you would be good enough to hazard a guess?’ Because you are sniffing croissants, listening to bird calls and not reading a newspaper, you have no idea how many senators voted for the bill. But it appears that the only way to get these strange people to mind their own business is to tell them something, so you pull a number out of thin air. ‘How about forty-one?’ you offer. And to no one’s astonishment but your own, the number is exactly right.

This scenario may seem too bizarre to be real (after all, how likely is it that forty-one senators would actually vote for campaign-finance reform?), but it is both. Our visual experience and our awareness of that experience are generated by different parts of our brains, and as such, certain kinds of brain damage (specifically, lesions to the primary visual cortical receiving area known as Vi) can impair one without impairing the other, causing experience and awareness to lose their normally tight grip on each other. For example, people who suffer from the condition known as blindsight have no awareness of seeing, and will truthfully tell you that they are completely blind.[92 - L. Weiskrantz, Blindsight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).] Brain scans lend credence to their claims by revealing diminished activity in the areas normally associated with awareness of visual experience. On the other hand, the same scans reveal relatively normal activity in the areas associated with vision.[93 - A. Cowey and P. Stoerig, ‘The Neurobiology of Blindsight’, Trends in Neuroscience 14: 140-45 (1991).] So if we flash a light on a particular spot on the wall and ask the blindsighted person if she saw the light we just flashed, she tells us, ‘No, of course not. As you might infer from the presence of the guide dog, I’m blind.’ But if we ask her to make a guess about where the light might have appeared -just take a stab at it, say anything, point randomly if you like–she ‘guesses’ correctly far more often than we would expect by chance. She is seeing, if by seeing we mean experiencing the light and acquiring knowledge about its location, but she is blind, if by blind we mean that she is not aware of having seen. Her eyes are projecting the movie of reality on the little theatre screen in her head, but the audience is in the lobby getting popcorn.

This dissociation between awareness and experience can cause the same sort of spookiness with regard to our emotions. Some people seem to be keenly aware of their moods and feelings, and may even have a novelist’s gift for describing their every shade and flavour. Others of us come equipped with a somewhat more basic emotional vocabulary that, much to the chagrin of our romantic partners, consists primarily of good, not so good and I already told you. If our expressive deficit is so profound and protracted that it even occurs outside of football season, we may be diagnosed with alexithymia, which literally means ‘absence of words to describe emotional states’. When alexithymics are asked what they are feeling, they usually say, ‘Nothing’, and when they are asked how they are feeling, they usually say, ‘I don’t know.’ Alas, theirs is not a malady that can be cured by a pocket thesaurus or a short course in word power, because alexithymics do not lack the traditional affective lexicon so much as they lack introspective awareness of their emotional states. They seem to have feelings, they just don’t seem to know about them. For instance, when researchers show volunteers emotionally evocative pictures of amputations and car wrecks, the physiological responses of alexithymics are indistinguishable from those of normal people. But when they are asked to make verbal ratings of the unpleasantness of those pictures, alexithymics are decidedly less capable than normal people of distinguishing them from pictures of rainbows and puppies.[94 - E. J. Vanman, M. E. Dawson and P. A. Brennan, ‘Affective Reactions in the Blink of an Eye: Individual Differences in Subjective Experience and Physiological Responses to Emotional Stimuli’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24: 994-1005 (1998).] Some evidence suggests that alexithymia is caused by a dysfunction of the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a part of the brain known to mediate our awareness of many things, including our inner states.[95 - R. D. Lane et al., ‘Is Alexithymia the Emotional Equivalent of Blind-sight?’, Biological Psychiatry 42: 834-44 (1997).] Just as the decoupling of awareness and visual experience can give rise to blindsight, so the decoupling of awareness and emotional experience can give rise to what we might call numbfeel. Apparently, it is possible–at least for some of the people some of the time–to be happy, sad, bored or curious and not know it.

Warm the Happyometer

Once upon a time there was a bearded God who made a small, flat earth, and pasted it in the very middle of the sky so that human beings would be at the centre of everything. Then physics came along and complicated the picture with big bangs, quarks, branes and superstrings, and the payoff for all that critical analysis is that now, several hundred years later, most people have no idea where they are. Psychology has also created problems where once there were none by exposing the flaws in our intuitive understandings of ourselves. Maybe the universe has several small dimensions tucked inside the large ones, maybe time will eventually stand still or flow backward, and maybe people like us were never meant to fathom a bit of it. But one thing we can always count on is our own experience. The philosopher and mathematician René Descartes concluded that our experience is the only thing about which we may be completely sure and that everything else we think we know is merely an inference from that. And yet, we have seen that when we say with moderate precision what we mean by words such as happiness, we still can’t be sure that two people who claim to be happy are having the same experience, or that our current experience of happiness is really different from our past experience of happiness, or that we are having an experience of happiness at all. If the goal of science is to make us feel awkward and ignorant in the presence of things we once understood perfectly well, then psychology has succeeded above all others.

But like happiness, science is one of those words that means too many things to too many people and is thus often at risk of meaning nothing at all. My father is an eminent biologist who, after pondering the matter for some decades, recently revealed to me that psychology can’t really be a science because science requires the use of electricity. Apparently shocks to your ankles don’t count. My own definition of science is a bit more eclectic, but one thing about which I, my dad and most other scientists can agree is that if a thing cannot be measured, then it cannot be studied scientifically. It can be studied, and one might even argue that the study of such unquantifiables is more worthwhile than all the sciences laid end to end. But it is not science because science is about measurement, and if a thing cannot be measured–cannot be compared with a clock or a ruler or something other than itself–it is not a potential object of scientific enquiry. As we have seen, it is extremely difficult to measure an individual’s happiness and feel completely confident in the validity and reliability of that measurement. People may not know how they feel, or remember how they felt, and even if they do, scientists can never know exactly how their experience maps onto their description of that experience, and hence they cannot know precisely how to interpret people’s claims. All of this suggests that the scientific study of subjective experience is bound to be tough going.

Tough, yes, but not impossible, because the chasm between experiences can be bridged–not with steel girders or a six-lane toll road, mind you, but with a length of reasonably sturdy rope–if we accept three premises.

Measuring Right

The first premise is something that any carpenter could tell you: imperfect tools are a real pain, but they sure beat pounding nails with your teeth. The nature of subjective experience suggests there will never be a happyometer–a perfectly reliable instrument that allows an observer to measure with complete accuracy the characteristics of another person’s subjective experience so that the measurement can be taken, recorded and compared with another.[96 - The nineteenth-century economist Francis Edgeworth referred to this device as a hedonimeter. See F. Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences (London: Kegan Paul, 1881).] If we demand that level of perfection from our tools, then we better pack up the eye trackers, brain scanners and colour swatches and cede the study of subjective experience to the poets, who did a nice job with it for the first few thousand years. But if we do that, then it is only fair that we hand them the study of almost everything else as well. Chronometers, thermometers, barometers, spectrometers and every other device that scientists use to measure the objects of their interest are imperfect. Every one of them introduces some degree of error into the observations it allows, which is why governments and universities pay obscene sums of money each year for the slightly more perfect version of each. And if we are purging ourselves of all things that afford us only imperfect approximations of the truth, then we need to discard not only psychology and the physical sciences but law, economics and history as well. In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavours, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album. So maybe we just need to accept a bit of fuzziness and stop complaining.

The second premise is that of all the flawed measures of subjective experience that we can take, the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual is the least flawed.[97 - N. Schwarz and F. Strack, ‘Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications’, in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. D. Kahneman, E. Diener and N. Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 61-84; D. Kahneman, ‘Objective Happiness’, in Well-Being, 3-25.] There are many other ways to measure happiness, of course, and some of them appear to be much more rigorous, scientific and objective than a person’s own claims. For example, electromyography allows us to measure the electrical signals produced by the striated muscles of the face, such as the corrugator supercillia, which furrows our brows when we experience something unpleasant, or the zygomaticus major, which pulls our mouths up toward our ears when we smile. Physiography allows us to measure the electrodermal, respiratory and cardiac activity of the autonomic nervous system, all of which change when we experience strong emotions. Electroencephalography, positron-emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging allow us to measure electrical activity and blood flow in different regions of the brain, such as the left and right prefrontal cortex, which tend to be active when we are experiencing positive and negative emotions, respectively. Even a clock can be a useful device for measuring happiness, because startled people tend to blink more slowly when they are feeling happy than when they are feeling fearful or anxious.[98 - R. J. Larsen and B. L. Fredrickson, ‘Measurement Issues in Emotion Research’, in Well-Being, 40-60.]

Scientists who rely on the honest, real-time reports of attentive individuals often feel the need to defend that choice by reminding us that these reports correlate strongly with other measures of happiness. But in a sense, they’ve got it backward. After all, the only reason why we take any of these bodily events–from muscle movement to cerebral blood flow–as indices of happiness is that people tell us they are.