"Miswanting": Do You Think You Know What Makes You Happy?

It is!

So I didn't miswant this book. :-D

In an even more remarkable study, volunteers listened to a recording of the word eel preceded by a cough (which I'll denote with *). The volunteers heard the word peel when it was embedded in the sentence "The *eel was on the orange" but they heard the word heel when it was embedded in the sentence "The *eel was on the shoe." This is a striking finding because the two sentences differ only in their final word, which means the volunteers' brains had to wait for the last word of the sentence before they could supply the information that was missing from the second word. But they did it, and they did it so smoothly and quickly that volunteers actually heard the missing information being spoken in its proper position.

Why do you close your eyes when 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. You cannot easily imagine a penguin when you are busy inspecting an ostrich because vision is already using the part 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 of a green one.

Very, very cool article in the NYT Mag:

"The Futile Pursuit of Happiness" by Jon Gertner

I have been trying to summarize the most interesting points, but it is so long, and there are so many of them, that I have just deleted most of what was turning out to be a very long post. I'll just say what came to mind for me when I read it, and will provide some excerpts later if it looks like people don't have the patience to read the whole article.

[quote]''Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.''