Are You Really Happy or Just "Fake" Happy?

My friend Anya brought up our recent conversation about happiness. I had carelessly thrown around comments about "synthesized happiness," an idea that Dan Gilbert talks about in his book, Stumbling on Happiness.

To my shame, I'm not much of a book-reader and and I should point out right now that I haven't read Stumbling. My narrow view of the book's contents comes from Gilbert's talk on TED and the only slightly less academic episode on happiness from Ze Frank's the Show.

This idea of "synthesized happiness" refers to the brain's ability to create "fake" happiness. And it feels just as real as if it had been triggered by some external event like winning the lottery or successfully shooting the paper ball into the waste bin in the far corner of the room. (Score!)

So if you go to jail or become paraplegic, your brain will eventually bring you back up to your "normal" level of happiness, despite the fact that you're in a situation popularly considered, "unhappy." Gilbert even mentions people in situations like these claiming it's the best thing that's happened to them. And they believe it, too.

Photo by tanakawho

Having heard all kinds of crazy ideas, I'm often skeptical about this kind of thing. However, it's not too hard to imagine that the brain uses homeostasis to control your emotional state since your body regulates temperature and blood chemistry using the same mechanism. Homeostasis in the body allows us to live in different environments: we don't need to live in a world exactly at 37³ C (body temp) because our body automatically adapts to external temperature changes.

Perhaps in the same way, we can survive a broader range of situations since our emotional state is regulated. So dropping and breaking your iPod might make you sad for a little while but it doesn't mean you become depressed. You either get over it or buy a new one.

This has got me thinking... does the ability to synthesize happiness make "real happiness" less important?