The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (21 page)
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Authors: Shimon Edelman
BOOK: The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life
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As you probably already guessed, the computational framework for making this kind of inferences is Bayesian probability. Cognitive science now views “rational” as synonymous with “Bayesian”; the rational explanation of the mug magic merely does the right thing of taking into account the prior probabilities of the occurrence of magic (vanishingly low) versus sleight of hand (non-negligible) in the sum total of human experience. In a similar vein, our perception of causality is governed by the observed contingency between a suspected cause and an effect, defined as the difference between the conditional probability of the effect given the cause and the conditional probability of the effect in the absence of the cause.
If an opportunity arises for it, intervention—poking the mirage with your finger, as it were—always trumps mere observation. If while hiking along a canyon rim you clap your hands and there is a peal of thunder mixed in with the echo, you may get the impression that you caused the thunder. Before concluding that you have power over the elements, clap your hands a few more times to see if thunder follows in the same close temporal succession; if instead it rumbles at random intervals, you’re powerless in the face of the impending electrical storm (and you better get down from that exposed place quickly).
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Although canyons, universities, and spouses can all be parts of someone’s effective Self, the person in whose brain reside the representations of such diverse factors is usually the entity that is held accountable for actions in which he or she is involved. (This, by the way, is why the claim “Death Valley made me do it” is not going to be an effective defense if you’re charged with grand theft auto after being nabbed driving a stolen car down Emigrant Pass Road.) The shorthand for this highly effective heuristic view of consequential-ity and responsibility is
agency
—a trait that people instinctively attribute to others and to themselves.
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While being inseparable from the web of cause and effect, an agent comprises a sufficiently distinct neighborhood therein—a persistent causal nexus in which many chains of events come within striking distance of each other.
agency
—a trait that people instinctively attribute to others and to themselves.
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While being inseparable from the web of cause and effect, an agent comprises a sufficiently distinct neighborhood therein—a persistent causal nexus in which many chains of events come within striking distance of each other.
The attribution of agency to others is probably the most important kind of causal inference that you can make. Agents—a category that traditionally consisted of other animals and perhaps the odd carnivorous plant but must now be expanded to include artificial autonomous entities such as guided missiles—may be actively out to get you. In comparison, dumb nature’s attempts on your life are always random (it may not be much of a consolation in case you get struck by lightning, but at least you know it’s not personal).
It seems that in discerning agency among nature’s random tricks, people tend to err on the side of caution; “such tricks,” observes Theseus in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, “hath strong imagination”:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, “hath strong imagination”:
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
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Because the bar for inferring agency must be so low, the brain looks out for anything that seems out of the ordinary. An overly regular series of events may trigger an apprehension of agency: an acorn hitting me on the head as I sit under an oak tree I can write off to chance, but getting pelted by half a dozen acorns would start me wondering about scheming mutant squirrels. (And if I run through the grove in a zigzag and still get hit by a bunch of acorns, intentional malice on the part of some tree-dwelling entity is all but certain.) Unpredictable willfulness too is a sign of agency: an object that buzzes past my head on the village green may be a windup toy airplane, but if it changes course and approaches me from another direction, it is either radio-controlled, or (recall p. 82) a hummingbird.
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No less important than the detection of the handiwork of other agents is reliable attribution of agency to Self. This task is more urgent and less straightforward than it may seem. The Self is not a little tin soldier in the skull’s cockpit, but a loose conglomerate of computational processes, some of which, moreover, extend into other people’s heads and into the rest of the external environment. Given the distributed, multiple-process nature of the mind and the complex mechanics of the body, it is crucial for the ruling coalition of those processes to assert control and to ascertain that its control is effective. Unless the causal nexus that is the effective Self is properly labeled as such, no credit or blame can be properly assigned where they are due, and hence no learning from experience can take place. Furthermore, human social functioning depends on the availability of a “person” construct that supports the tracing of interactions and the administration of justice.
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As a clump of pathways of cause and effect that snake through the represented web of possibilities, the basic “person” construct is what we called a concept—a probabilistic model of a small part of the world—which coexists in the mind with other concepts, such as “straight line,” “breakfast,” and “marmot.” These models are all generative: they can be made to produce likely instances of the objects or events they represent. These, in turn, are used to simulate and predict the disposition of the corresponding entities, including other agents, in a given context. The model of the Self is no different in this respect: to plan a course of action, I need merely to weigh and elaborate upon a variety of predictions generated by the computational processes of which I am composed.
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Learning to understand the workings of the world, of other people, and of our Selves by building probabilistic models and using them in simulations is not an easy way to make a living, and yet, as a generalist species selected for smarts, we humans do just that.
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What is it that motivates us? Learning requires an expenditure of personal effort and resources, so one expects that good learners would be well motivated personally (over and above being selected for from one generation to the next). This intriguing thought suggests that there is a connection between effective cognition and happiness.
Flow15
What is it that motivates us? Learning requires an expenditure of personal effort and resources, so one expects that good learners would be well motivated personally (over and above being selected for from one generation to the next). This intriguing thought suggests that there is a connection between effective cognition and happiness.
Those of us who served time as parents or educators of school-age children will attest to the glaring contrast between the ease with which most young students pick up everyday physical and social skills and the hard work that they must put in to master formal knowledge. An indifferent student who long ago embraced the notion that math is hard and who nevertheless wakes up in the morning with a newly acquired passion for calculus would be justified in seeking signs of a covert pharmacological intervention on the part of the usual suspects—the overzealous parents. In the acquisition of life skills, the usual suspect behind the general ease of learning is evolution, which, indeed, is guilty as charged.
Given the volume and the sophistication of computation that goes into physical and social cognition, it would be wrong to assume that we sail effortlessly through everyday learning because the tasks that it encompasses are intrinsically easier. Rather, learning the world feels easier to us because we belong to a species that evolved to be good at it and to feel good about being good. In particular, it feels good to be able to explore new places and meet new people, to discern a pattern in hitherto seemingly random events, to gain deeper understanding by deploying knowledge and honing skills, to anticipate developments while appreciating the unexpected . . . let’s admit it, there is a lot of fun to be had in simply being able to learn new stuff.
The hypothesis that we are naturally predisposed to enjoy everyday learning is supported by two related sets of empirical findings. On the one hand, and perhaps not entirely surprisingly, effective acquisition and use of knowledge and skills contributes to positive affect. On the other hand, positive affect (which may be induced by such simple interventions as being offered a piece of candy before the experiment) promotes association of ideas, pattern detection, decision making, problem solving, and creativity.
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This virtuous circle (a designation intended to highlight the self-reinforcing nature rather than any intrinsic moral value of the phenomenon in question) has all the trappings of an out-of-control evolutionary ploy for taking over the world—a project that our species is, by any account, pretty deep into by now.
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This virtuous circle (a designation intended to highlight the self-reinforcing nature rather than any intrinsic moral value of the phenomenon in question) has all the trappings of an out-of-control evolutionary ploy for taking over the world—a project that our species is, by any account, pretty deep into by now.
The open-endedness of this project is virtually guaranteed by the hedonic advantage of the
process
of learning over its completion—of pursuit over accomplishment. In happiness research, the condition of ongoing enjoyment derived from being engaged in an activity that is challenging, but not frustratingly so, is called
flow
. The likelihood of a person experiencing flow can be estimated as the proportion of time spent above his or her mean level of challenge and mean level of skill. (Within this framework, being above one’s mean skill but below mean challenge is relaxation; high challenge and low skill is anxiety, and low challenge and low skill is apathy.)
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process
of learning over its completion—of pursuit over accomplishment. In happiness research, the condition of ongoing enjoyment derived from being engaged in an activity that is challenging, but not frustratingly so, is called
flow
. The likelihood of a person experiencing flow can be estimated as the proportion of time spent above his or her mean level of challenge and mean level of skill. (Within this framework, being above one’s mean skill but below mean challenge is relaxation; high challenge and low skill is anxiety, and low challenge and low skill is apathy.)
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It seems that flow can be experienced in association with any sufficiently demanding activity that is potentially enjoyable. For my part, this includes going on long solo hikes in the desert, preferably to places I haven’t been to yet;
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brainstorming with my students and colleagues; skiing slopes that are near the limit of my skills (but not pushing it—there is nothing like a broken leg to interrupt your flow, as I know from experience); swimming the last half-dozen pool lengths of my workout quota (when I no longer need to conserve strength and can go all out); and, on rare occasions, writing (which normally feels like hard labor, in the judicial-punitive sense).
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brainstorming with my students and colleagues; skiing slopes that are near the limit of my skills (but not pushing it—there is nothing like a broken leg to interrupt your flow, as I know from experience); swimming the last half-dozen pool lengths of my workout quota (when I no longer need to conserve strength and can go all out); and, on rare occasions, writing (which normally feels like hard labor, in the judicial-punitive sense).
Positive affect has measurable, significant benefits for decision making and problem solving. When experienced as flow, in a task that is meaningful, interesting, or important to the person, positive affect prompts decision making that is both more efficient and more thorough.
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In problem solving, positive emotions make people more likely to switch from stereotyped behavior to novel, more open and creative approaches.
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We can tell what this means in terms of the computations that constitute thinking: within the tangle of representations of cause and effect that form the effective Self, positive affect loosens the associations and deepens the look-ahead into possible futures. As a result, unusual and creative avenues of exploration become available to the processes that analyze the situation and plan ahead by simulating likely chains of events.
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Soul Music19
In problem solving, positive emotions make people more likely to switch from stereotyped behavior to novel, more open and creative approaches.
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We can tell what this means in terms of the computations that constitute thinking: within the tangle of representations of cause and effect that form the effective Self, positive affect loosens the associations and deepens the look-ahead into possible futures. As a result, unusual and creative avenues of exploration become available to the processes that analyze the situation and plan ahead by simulating likely chains of events.
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Any stand-alone information processor that must fend for itself, be it a hamster or a human, has a functional need to distill its experience into an effective Self, but only humans supplement theirs with stories they compose and trade—about their social encounters, their exploits, successes and failures, their aspirations and plans. The growing, often rehearsed, incessantly revised personal anthology is the
narrative Self
.
narrative Self
.
The stories that make up the narrative Self are a conveniently packaged extension of the grammar that embodies one’s knowledge of language and also one’s knowledge of how the world works. In this second capacity, the narrative Self complements the nonverbal behavioral scripts that apply to various common situations. Among the great many scripts at my disposal are those that specify how to get from home to work, how to build a superheterodyne shortwave radio receiver, how to cook
mapo doufu
from scratch—and also how to ask a policeman for directions without getting arrested, how to describe the state of my health if asked, and how to tell my favorite Jewish tailor joke.
mapo doufu
from scratch—and also how to ask a policeman for directions without getting arrested, how to describe the state of my health if asked, and how to tell my favorite Jewish tailor joke.
Many of these narratives codify autobiographical information—self-censored, and often enough tweaked, embellished, or even largely invented, not necessarily with malicious intent—that we deliver to others on various social occasions or recount to ourselves for self-maintenance purposes. Our narratives are complemented by the narratives of our friends and acquaintances in which we happen to figure more or less prominently and by snippets of information about us in external media.
Similarly to the parts of the effective Self being distributed across multiple brains and their physical environment, all of which deliver causal nudges that contribute to its decision making, the narrative Self extends out into the media that can harbor the right kinds of information. (These too can participate in steering behavior.) We know that insofar as minds are persistent, causally effectual information patterns, they can in principle be hosted in any medium with the right dynamics, such as appropriately structured electronic circuits. When we think of minds in terms of distributed effective and narrative Selves, we realize that, in a real and increasingly important sense, parts of our minds already are outsourced.
The first example of an electronically outsourced chunk of my Self that comes to mind is a Google search alert that I confess to having set on my full name a few years ago. I have absolutely no idea where this chunk resides: the physical locations at which copies of the relevant piece of search software and the results they return are hosted would be difficult to pinpoint without detailed knowledge of the architecture of the Google system and its moment-by-moment operation.
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Despite this extreme geographical uncertainty, the search results may get incorporated into my narrative and effective Selves, as when a new review of something I wrote ends up having repercussions for my behavior (such as prompting me to make another resolution to stop reading reviews).
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Despite this extreme geographical uncertainty, the search results may get incorporated into my narrative and effective Selves, as when a new review of something I wrote ends up having repercussions for my behavior (such as prompting me to make another resolution to stop reading reviews).
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