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 The Surprising Science of Happiness

When people discuss happiness, they frequently refer to it as a search—a mission to discover something so elusive and out of reach that there are numerous theories about how to get it. Surprisingly, yet, it might be our freedom to select from among countless wonderful experiences in life that prevents us from being content. Dan Gilbert started his Ted talk by talking about the development of the human brain. 


The speaker in Dan Gilbert's "Surprise Science of Pleasure" examines human happiness from a psychological and neurological perspective. In his studies, he found that humans could mentally test out situations before acting as a result of the prefrontal cortex. This distinguishes humans from other animals. This evolutionary adaption, though, is not without drawbacks. While it might seem that a lottery winner would be happier than a person who had just been paralyzed, a study found that one year later, both new paraplegics and lottery winners are equally content.


Even if a negative incident occurs, a person could be content three months later. This is so that we can create bliss artificially. We synthesize joy, yet we still believe that it must be sought out. People believe that artificial happiness is inferior to natural happiness in quality. 
Natural happiness has freedom as a "friend" since it gives people the ability to make decisions. Freedom, however, is the enemy of artificial happiness since our psychological defense mechanism functions best when we are completely immobilized. Being ignorant of this issue is extremely detrimental to us. When we go to great measures to keep our alternatives open, we choose joylessness. Our prefrontal brain causes us to overthink, and since we can create happiness within ourselves, neither our longings nor our fears are as important as we analyze they are.
Many people haven't given this idea much attention, but I believe it would comfort those who are hesitant to declare a major in college out of concern that they may miss out on other opportunities. It offers the neurological underpinnings for the crucial perspective that many college students lack. While this is a phenomenon that people should be aware of, I believe that if people were more knowledgeable about synthetic happiness, they would become overly dependent on it. People would rationalize being lazy as maintaining a perspective on how meaningless their decisions are. I concur with the speaker that artificial happiness is equally as potent as genuine happiness, and I think it lasts longer because artificial happiness is a state of mind rather than a situational emotion.



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