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Cargando... Stumbling on Happiness (2006 original; edición 2007)por Daniel Gilbert
Información de la obraStumbling on Happiness por Daniel Gilbert (2006)
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This book is about why it's nearly impossible to predict what's going to make you happy. It's pretty ridiculous at times, but full of interesting facts that your friends will get tired of hearing you repeat. ( ) This is one of the better of the current glut of positive psychology books. This book is high quality because Gilbert does not focus on happiness. He rarely talks about happiness directly. He focuses on cognitive tendencies of human beings and their effects on how people interpret how they feel, remember how they felt, and anticipate how they will feel. One cognitive trick that reoccurs throughout the book is that the brain summarizes. Memories of the past are not faithful recordings of the events but reconstructions based on a few key points. Observations of the present only gather a small part of the information around. (Side note: it is my opinion that this is why the faddish "law of attraction" seems to work. Focusing on a desire does not change the world, but it does change your perception of the world.) Summarizing also applies to images of the future (although the exact word choice becomes a little odd). One's predictions tend to focus on a few key points and ignore everything else. For example, most people would feel that they will have a strong and long lasting reaction to the outcome of the next presidential election. Often, people are right about the strength of their reaction, but they are very wrong about the duration. This mistake occurs because predictions of the future leave out the details about the rest of life that tend to very quickly temper your emotions (whether your candidate wins or loses, you will still, for example, have to walk in the rain and will still get to go out to a nice dinner). That is not all there is to this. Although people tend to over estimate their future happiness or unhappiness, the strength of their anticipation tends to color how they remember an event. Thus, if you think you will feel some amount of happiness from event and you actually feel some different amount, the amount of happiness you remember feeling will be somewhere between the two. Gilbert does not give happiness tips, but I will take a stab at using his observations to analyze some common happiness tips. Consider the following (seemingly inconsistent) tips: live in the moment, look forward to the future, do not worry too much about the future, do not dwell on the past, cherish your happy memories. If you compare these tips with what we know about the mind, you can start to see why they all can help. Focusing on the moment raises the happiness you actually experience. Anticipation raises the happiness you will remember having experienced. Remembering past experiences provides material for your mind to use when it is making predictions about the future, so focusing on the happy memories will help you to anticipate that similar future events will bring happiness. This book does not pretend to have all the answers. Instead, it focuses on helping you to understand how the human mind works. With these tools, you can begin to understand why certain bits of common wisdom on happiness work and why they sometimes fail. And, if you are like me, just knowing that makes you a little bit happier.
Gilbert has a serious argument to make about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy. Because of logic-processing errors our brains tend to make, we don't want the things that would make us happy — and the things that we want (more money, say, or a bigger house or a fancier car) won't make us happy. PremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
Psychology.
Science.
Nonfiction.
¿Por qué se le perdona al ser amado antes una infidelidad que dejar los platos sucios en el fregadero? ¿Por qué la gente que ve pagaría más por evitar quedarse ciega que un ciego por recuperar la visión? ¿Por qué la gente que comparte mesa se empeña en pedir platos diferentes en lugar de pedir lo que de verdad les apetece? ¿Por qué los pacientes recuerdan los largos tratamientos médicos como menos dolorosos que los cortos? ¿Por qué los compradores son más felices cuando no pueden devolver algo que han comprado? ¿Por qué no podemos recordar una canción mientras escuchamos otra? ¿Por qué la fila para pagar en el supermercado siempre se ralentiza en cuanto nos incorporamos a ella?... No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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