Heroes Not Zombies

I’ve been reading some of the happiness literature recently. Not because I’m not happy – I am! But mainly because the area of medicine in which I work is based on two things – taking a holistic view, which really just means engaging with a person instead of just a person’s disease! And, secondly, it’s based on trying to aid recovery and increase resilience, as opposed to just trying to rescue a situation, or repair some damaged tissues. There’s a lot involved in helping someone to get better including enabling self-understanding, instilling hope, encouraging a positive attitude, as well as tackling disease processes. I’m especially interested in an approach to medical care which seeks to understand the uniqueness of each and every patient I see and enabling them to develop in the face of their illnesses – by develop I mean to adapt, to become more creative and to be more fully engaged with their lives (see here)
I read The Happiness Hypothesis and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thought provoking and enlightening. I then moved on to Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert (ISBN 978-0-00-718313-5). These two authors have completely different styles but both are tackling the question of what makes people happy. Gilbert’s book is much more a psychologists approach – in fact, I’d go as far as to say an experimental psychologist’s approach. In the opening chapters he lays out his strong belief that the way to understand how the human mind works is to study phenomena of large numbers of people. He says we can’t rely on the experiences of individuals but we can rely on phenomena which can be demonstrated time and again in group studies. That made me a bit uncomfortable because as a clinician I find that often the statistical “evidence” from group trials turns out not to be appropriate for an individual. Drugs are a great example of this. There isn’t a single painkiller on the market which you can guarantee will take away the pain of a particular patient. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of thousands of people have benefited from a particular treatment, this particular patient today may well turn out to be the one who gets no response at all. We see the same phenomenon with blood pressure pills, sleeping pills, anything really. Obviously a doctor should recommend the safest treatment which seems to have helped a significant number of patients but he or she must remain open to understanding that for this patient this pill just might not work. We are all actually different. I’ll return to this issue shortly.

I really didn’t want to like Gilbert’s book because of the cover. It looks cheap and puerile. However, you can’t judge a book by its cover! Once I started to read it, I loved it. I’ve read criticisms of his familiar, humorous writing style but it really works for me. It’s a treat to read and it often made me laugh. His cultural references, especially to Beatles songs hit the spot for me. The content was fascinating too. OK, many of these studies published by psychologists have been written about in other books, but Daniel Gilbert presented a fair number of interesting studies which I’ve never read anywhere else.

After a while, psychology experiment after psychology experiment begins to feel like a magic show. So often the result is a surprise. I could almost hear “abracadabra!” in the background! This is fun and interesting but its novelty begins to wane. (Actually his section on magic tricks themselves is particularly interesting – check this post) Throughout the book he held my interest, and he made a good, clear case for the claim that memory, perception and imagination are all imperfect representations of reality –

Foresight is just as fallible as eyesight and hindsight.

I have no doubts about that. However, for me, I’m more comfortable with the understanding that memory, perception and imagination are all creative processes – individual, subjective, creative processes.

Having demonstrated that we are not reliable judges of either what did make us happy, or what will make us happy, he ends up with a recommendation that totally baffled me. In his final chapter (the one before the “Afterword”) he seeks to answer the question “how should we decide what to do?” Somewhat astonishingly he says that as we can’t rely on our memories or our imagination, we should rely on the experiences of others. He claims this will work because we have an over-inflated sense of our individuality and uniqueness. He says “What makes us think we’re so damned special?” and argues “Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates……..surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realise just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method…”

Pardon?

The best way to predict how I’m going to feel in a situation is to ask others who have already been in that situation? Yes, I understand the importance of empathy and of sharing stories and learning from others, but, you know something? There’s only ONE Daniel Gilbert! And there’s only ONE me! I liked some of the same Beatles songs as you, Daniel, but I don’t rate statistics and experimental psychology as highly as you do because we’ve lead different lives, in different cultures with a myriad of different experiences.

Just stop for a moment and think about taking his recommendation to rely on the reports of others to predict how you’re going to feel in a certain situation. When was the last time you read a movie review, went to see the movie and had such a different experience from the reviewer that you thought “did we see the same movie?!” In “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” you can go 50/50, phone a friend or ask the audience – you might get some clues from what they say but they don’t always give you the right answer – why not? Well Daniel Gilbert answers that himself – they too are humans with fallible memories, fallible perception and fallible imagination. Why should the report of someone else be more reliable than what I know about myself?

I think there are two crucial elements missing from this exploration of happiness – narrative and the importance of meaning. We experience life through the creation of stories – the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. Storytelling involves using memory, perception and imagination. Through the creation of stories we gain a sense of self AND we make sense of our experiences. Human beings are meaning-seeking, meaning-creating creatures. And two people in the same circumstance will have vastly different experiences because the circumstance is interpreted differently, made sense of differently, means something different to each of them.

Yes, yes, yes, we share more than we often realise. With a bit of empathy we can realise just how much we do share with other people, but I insist, we are all different, all unique and, you know what?

YOU ARE SPECIAL!