The Big Brain & the Pursuit of Happiness

Dan Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard, and author of Stumbling on Happiness. In this memorable talk on the evolution of the human brain and the pre-frontal cortex and our ability to simulate the future. Gilbert would like to outfit this metaphor with a side-view mirror, one reading: "Objects in future appear much larger than they are." A pioneer in the research of affective forecasting, Dr. Gilbert has illuminated a startling and fundamental mistake that both men and women make: we overestimate how future successes and failures will affect their happiness, for the better or worse. Posted by Jason McManus

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