I just listened to a pretty good lecture on happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor, and author of Stumbling on Happiness. The talk was about how the brain is able to synthesize happiness with just about any situation. The corollary is that striving for the best possible outcome usually makes us less happy than just choosing any option and never looking back.
This is the mp3 (about 20 minutes long): http://ted.streamguys.net/ted_gilbert_d_2004.mp3
I thought three points were particularly interesting:
- Experimental evidence seems to say that, if something happened more than three months ago, it generally has no bearing on your current level of happiness, no matter how good or bad it was
- While most people prefer to have freedom to choose between options, and freedom to change their minds later, this tends to lead to less happiness
- An experiment on people with no short-term memory gave evidence that the brain actually re-tools its aesthetic preferences based on the situation it is stuck with. In the first phase, they were made to take their third choice of paintings. Later, even though that had no recollection of the earlier phase, they tended to prefer the paintings they were “stuck” with before.
The talk is short, and entertaining, if you like to think about things like this. I haven’t read the book yet, but it looks interesting.
November 24th, 2006 at 7:22 am
thanks for the link - very interesting stuff
November 25th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Very interesting indeed. Thanks :)
November 25th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
no problem; I’m glad you liked it.
November 26th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
Thank you for the link!
Now, if one has short-term memory loss, wouldn’t they never suffer from long-term memory loss once their short-term memory loss began?
Just a thought.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:49 am
[...] It’s now 50 minutes later, and I see the stock is trading at 38.85. Still not at my target, but I could have had more profit if I had waited. Maybe by the end of day it will hit my target. Then again, maybe not. As a trader, you can’t fret over what could have been, had your choices been different. For one thing, it is a leading cause of unhappiness. Secondly, had I sold at the top I’d be inclined to call myself a genius right now. But, forming an opinion about myself, whether the stock went up or down post-sale, is nonsense. The stock market is a probability game. Think about that! It could have gone either way. This is why I say the only way to measure the quality of a trade is if you followed your plan. [...]