Friday, May 8, 2009

"Synthetic Happiness" - Every Bit As Real And Enduring As "Natural Happiness" Which Is The Happiness We Stumble Upon - Daniel Gilbert, Harvard

Note From Jim: Funny, intriguing, and most importantly good for you.... Create your own "Synthetic Happiness".... It's as real and enduring as "Natural Happiness", which by definition is the type of happiness that one just happens to stumble upon.

Video, Daniel Gilbert, Ph.D, Professor or Psychology - TED 21 minutes http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

Why are we happy? Filmed Feb 2004
About this talk Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned.

About Dan Gilbert Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and... Full <http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/dan_gilbert.html> bio and more links

Why you should listen to him: Dan Gilbert believes that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes -- and fool everyone’s eyes in the same way -- Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.

The premise of his current research -- that our assumptions about what will make us happy are often wrong -- is supported with clinical research drawn from psychology and neuroscience. But his delivery is what sets him apart. His engaging -- and often hilarious -- style pokes fun at typical human behavior and invokes pop-culture references everyone can relate to. This winning style translates also to Gilbert’s writing, which is lucid, approachable and laugh-out-loud funny. The immensely readable Stumbling on Happiness, published in 2006, became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages.

In fact, the title of his book could be drawn from his own life. At 19, he was a high school dropout with dreams of writing science fiction. When a creative writing class at his community college was full, he enrolled in the only available course: psychology. He found his passion there, earned a doctorate in social psychology in 1985 at Princeton, and has since won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for his work at Harvard. He has written essays and articles for The New York Times, Time and even Starbucks, while continuing his research into happiness at his Hedonic Psychology Laboratory."Gilbert's elbow-in-the-ribs social-science humor is actually funny. ... But underneath the goofball brilliance, [he] has a serious argument to make about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy."New York Times Book

Watch Full Video: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
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This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.

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