east, and sailed merrily up the bay as the sun broke through the mists and made the tossing waters sparkle around us. We were a curious-looking party on that bright morning, but we were feeling happy. We even broke into song, and, but for our Robinson Crusoe appearance, a casual observer might have taken us for a picnic party sailing in a Norwegian fjord or one of the beautiful sounds of the west coast of New Zealand.30
Could Shackleton really have meant what he said? Could his happy be our happy, and is there any way to tell? As we’ve seen, happiness is a subjective experience that is difficult to describe to ourselves and to others, thus evaluating people’s claims about their own happiness is an exceptionally thorny business. But don’t worry–because before business gets better, it gets a whole lot thornier.
Go to your bosom;
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
THERE AREN’T MANY JOKES about psychology professors, so we tend to cherish the few we have. Here’s one. What do psychology professors say when they pass each other in the hallway? ‘Hi, you’re fine, how am I?’ I know, I know. The joke isn’t that funny. But the reason it’s supposed to be funny is that people shouldn’t know how others are feeling but they should know how they’re feeling themselves. ‘How are you?’ is overly familiar for the same reason that ‘How am I?’ is overly strange. And yet, strange as it is, there are times when people seem not to know their own hearts. When conjoined twins claim to be happy, we have to wonder if perhaps they just think they’re happy. That is, they may believe what they’re saying, but what they’re saying may be wrong. Before we can decide whether to accept people’s claims about their happiness, we must first decide whether people can, in principle, be mistaken about what they feel. We can be wrong about all sorts of things–the price of soybeans, the life span of dust mites, the history of flannel–but can we be wrong about our own emotional experience? Can we believe we are feeling something we aren’t? Are there really people out there who can’t accurately answer the world’s most familiar question?
Yes, and you’ll find one in the mirror. Read on.
Dazed and Confused
But not just yet. Before you read on, I challenge you to stop and have a nice long look at your thumb. Now, I will wager that you did not accept my challenge. I will wager that you went right on reading because looking at your thumb is so easy that it makes for rather pointless sport–everyone bats a thousand and the game is called on account of boredom. But if looking at your thumb seems beneath you, just consider what actually has to happen for us to see an object in our environment–a thumb, a glazed doughnut or a rabid wolverine. In the tiny gap between the time that the light reflected from the surface of the object reaches our eyes and the time that we become aware of the object’s identity, our brains must extract and analyse the object’s features and compare them with information in our memory to determine what the thing is and what we ought to do about it. This is complicated stuff–so complicated that no scientist yet understands precisely how it happens and no computer can simulate the trick–but it is just the sort of complicated stuff that brains do with exceptional speed and accuracy. In fact, they perform these analyses with such proficiency that we have the experience of simply looking leftward, seeing a wolverine, feeling afraid and preparing to do all further analysis from the safety of a sycamore tree.
Think for a moment about how looking ought to happen. If you were designing a brain from scratch, you would probably design it so that it first identified objects in its environment (‘Sharp teeth, brown fur, weird little snorting sound, hot drool–why, that’s a rabid wolverine!’) and then figured out what to do (‘Leaving seems like a splendid idea about now’). But human brains were not designed from scratch. Rather, their most critical functions were designed first, and their less critical functions were added on like bells and whistles as the millennia passed, which is why the really important parts of your brain (e.g., the ones that control your breathing) are down at the bottom and the parts you could probably live without (e.g., the ones that control your temper) sit above them, like ice cream on a cone. As it turns out, running with great haste from rabid wolverines is much more important than knowing what they are. Indeed, actions such as running away are so vitally important to the survival of terrestrial mammals like the ones from whom we are descended that evolution took no chances and designed the brain to answer the ‘What should I do?’ question before the ‘What is it?’ question.1 Experiments have demonstrated that the moment we encounter an object, our brains instantly analyse just a few of its key features and then use the presence or absence of these features to make one very fast and very simple decision: ‘Is this object an important thing to which I ought to respond right now?’2 Rabid wolverines, crying babies, hurled rocks, beckoning mates, cowering prey–these things count for a lot in the game of survival, which requires that we take immediate action when we happen upon them and do not dally to contemplate the finer points of their identities. As such, our brains are designed to decide first whether objects count and to decide later what those objects are. This means that when you turn your head to the left, there is a fraction of a second during which your brain does not know that it is seeing a wolverine but does know that it is seeing something scary.
But how can that be? How can we know something is scary if we don’t know what it is? To understand how this can happen, just consider how you would go about identifying a person who is walking toward you across a vast expanse of desert. The first thing to catch your eye would be a small flicker of motion on the horizon. As you stared, you would soon notice that the motion was that of an object moving toward you. As it came closer, you would see that the motion was biological, then you would see that the biological object was a biped, then a human, then a female, then a fat human female with dark hair and a Budweiser T-shirt, and then–hey, what’s Aunt Mabel doing in the Sahara? Your identification of Aunt Mabel would progress–that is, it would begin quite generally and become more specific over time, until finally it terminated in a family reunion. Similarly, the identification of a wolverine at your elbow progresses over time–albeit just a few milliseconds–and it too progresses from the general to the specific. Research demonstrates that there is enough information in the early, very general stages of this identification process to decide whether an object is scary, but not enough information to know what the object is. Once our brains decide that they are in the presence of a threat, they instruct our glands to produce hormones that create a state of heightened physiological arousal–blood pressure rises, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, muscles tense–which prepares us to spring into action. Before our brains have finished the full-scale analysis that will allow us to know that the object is a wolverine, they have already put our bodies into their ready-to-run-away modes–all pumped up and raring to go.
The fact that we can feel aroused without knowing exactly what it is that has aroused us has important implications for our ability to identify our own emotions.3 For example, researchers studied the reactions of some young men who were crossing a long, narrow suspension bridge constructed of wooden boards and wire cables that rocked and swayed 230 feet above the Capilano River in North Vancouver.4 A young woman approached each man and asked if he would mind completing a survey, and after he did so, the woman gave
