Stumbling on Happiness. Daniel Gilbert

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.¹¹ 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.¹² 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.¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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