The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (2 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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.) The book, subtitled very aptly “A Fairy Tale for Younger Research Scientists,” was about the daily life of applied magicians who work wonders by running experiments and solving equations. Whether or not this book contributed to my own eventual choice of career, I enjoyed it immensely. The poem, in contrast, must have gone right over my head—I have no recollection of it from that reading. As I discovered much later, it was an excerpt from Logue’s “Epitaph”:
You ask me:
What is the greatest happiness on earth? Two things:
changing my mind
as I change a penny for a shilling;
and
listening to the sound of a young girl
singing down the road
after she has asked me the way.
 
In subsequent rereadings of the book (once every few years ever since that first time), I have found myself becoming more and more intrigued by the poem. Maybe this is because happiness, with which it deals so deftly, is presented in the book as a challenge to the leading character, who works as the head of the computing center at the National Research Institute for Miracles and Magic. (By that time I was a computer scientist myself, albeit with very little magic and no miracles at all to my credit.) The challenge is implicit in a complaint voiced by an elderly graduate student, Magnus, who for decades now has been writing a dissertation for the Department of Linear Happiness and who offers Logue’s poem as an example of the difficulties he faces:
Magnus sighed.
—Some say one thing, others—another.
—Tough,—I said with sympathy.
—Isn’t it? How would you make sense of all this? To listen to the sound of a girl singing. . . . And not just any singing, but the girl is supposed to be young, down the road from him, and that too only after having asked him the way. . . . Is this any way to behave? As if such things could be algorithmized, huh?
 
For many years, I let those questions be. As a little boy, I was pretty happy not understanding algorithms, or girls. As a teenager, I was too busy trying to actually get a live girl to ask me the way. (As this was still in the USSR, I was unaware that the pursuit of happiness, along with life and liberty, is an inalienable human right, or I would have felt more relaxed about it.) As a computer scientist, I may have been mildly intrigued by whether or not happiness could be captured by an algorithm, but by then I had my own dissertation to worry about. Then I became a professor of psychology (a natural career move for a certain type of computer scientist . . . stick around and you’ll see why), and things gradually took an unexpected turn.
I now had an excuse to think, on company time, about anything at all having to do with the human condition—a development that made me feel like a bear that wakes from hibernation to learn that a natural foods store specializing in bulk trail mix and artisanal honey has been built over its den. My research interests, which for many years had been confined to just a couple of the mind’s faculties—mostly vision, then also language—began to broaden. Having discovered the same principles at work in both, I became curious about the rest.
By then, I was teaching a big introductory course on cognition, which, I felt, had to encompass everything that’s known about how the mind works. Teaching, when taken seriously, does wonders to one’s capacity for critical thinking; I realized that although the existing psychology textbooks were up to the moment on facts, they were decades behind on understanding. I ended up writing a text of my own, which I subtitled “How the Mind Really Works.”
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For a while, the possibility of understanding things for myself with sufficient clarity to enable me to share my understanding with others made me vaguely happy. Then I perceived that the mandate that I claimed for myself came with a rider. If I truly grasped how the mind works, I should be able also to transcend all the usual vague intuitions about when, why, and how a person feels happy and replace them with sound scientific insight.
To my dismay, I realized that I would have no peace until the possibility of happiness being amenable to a scientific—perhaps even algorithmic—treatment was given, if not a decisive resolution, then at least a fair hearing. This book is my attempt at cajoling my conscience into letting me off that particular hook.
A Journey Is Mapped Out
 
To forestall the crushing skepticism that people tend to develop soon after hearing about someone embarking on this kind of project, let me explain why I think it is both timely and feasible. In the past several decades, tremendous progress has been made in understanding the mind/brain. It turns out that the principles that determine how the brain gives rise to the mind are very general, are statable in a pretty concise form, and have everything to do with computation. Given that the brain is the organ with which people experience happiness, understanding the brain offers for the first time a real chance for understanding how and why happiness happens, and perhaps for developing some recipes—algorithms!—for pursuing it more effectively.
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