two million years seems like a really long time.

But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing.

And yet in two million years the human brain has nearly tripled in mass,

going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis,

to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears.

What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?

Well, it turns out when brains triple in size,

they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures.

And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part,

called the "frontal lobe." And particularly, a part called the "pre-frontal cortex."

Now what does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify

the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time?

Well, it turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things,

but one of the most important things it does

is it is an experience simulator.

Flight pilots practice in flight simulators

so that they don't make real mistakes in planes.

Human beings have this marvelous adaptation

that they can actually have experiences in their heads

before they try them out in real life.

This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do,

and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation.

It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language

as one of the things that got our species out of the trees

and into the shopping mall.

Now -- (Laughter) -- all of you have done this.

I mean, you know,

Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream,

and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "Yuck."

It's because, without leaving your armchair,

you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it.

Let's see how your experience simulators are working.

Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk.

Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate,

and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer.

One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars.

And the other is becoming paraplegic.

So, just give it a moment of thought.

You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.

Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people,

data on how happy they are.

And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it?

But these aren't the data. I made these up!

These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture.

Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs,

and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics

are equally happy with their lives.

Now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz,

because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time.

The research that my laboratory has been doing,

that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing,

have revealed something really quite startling to us,

something we call the "impact bias,"

which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly.

For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes

are more different than in fact they really are.

From field studies to laboratory studies,

we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner,

getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test,

on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration

than people expect them to have.

In fact, a recent study -- this almost floors me --

a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people

suggests that if it happened over three months ago,

with only a few exceptions,

it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.

Why?

Because happiness can be synthesized.

Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, "I am the happiest man alive.

I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity.

I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me."

What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head?

Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have.

Human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system."

A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes,

that help them change their views of the world,

so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves.

Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine.

Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it. (Laughter)

We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found.

Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness,

I suspect. Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence,

you don't have to look very far for evidence.

As a challenge to myself, since I say this once in a while in lectures,

I took a copy of the New York Times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness.

And here are three guys synthesizing happiness.

"I am so much better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentally

and almost every other way." "I don't have one minute's regret.

It was a glorious experience." "I believe it turned out for the best."

Who are these characters who are so damn happy?

Well, the first one is Jim Wright.

Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives

and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich

found out about a shady book deal he had done.

He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country,

he lost everything.

He lost his money; he lost his power.

What does he have to say all these years later about it?

"I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally

and in almost every other way."

What other way would there be to be better off?

Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there.

Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of.

Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released.

He was 78 years old. He spent 37 years

in a Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit.

He was ultimately exonerated,

at the age of 78, through DNA evidence.

And what did he have to say about his experience?

"I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience."

Glorious! This guy is not saying,

"Well, you know, there were some nice guys. They had a gym."

It's "glorious,"

a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience.

Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have known

but didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper

about a hamburger stand owned by these two brothers named McDonalds.

And he thought, "That's a really neat idea!"

So he went to find them. They said,

"We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks."

Harry went back to New York, asked his brother who's an investment banker

to loan him the 3,000 dollars,

and his brother's immortal words were,

"You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers."

He wouldn't lend him the money, and of course six months later

Ray Croc had exactly the same idea.

It turns out people do eat hamburgers,

and Ray Croc, for a while, became the richest man in America.

And then finally -- you know, the best of all possible worlds --

some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best,

who was the original drummer for the Beatles,

until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away

and picked up Ringo on a tour.

Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed

-- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician --

he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles."

Okay. There's something important to be learned from these people,

and it is the secret of happiness.

Here it is, finally to be revealed.

First: accrue wealth, power, and prestige,

then lose it. (Laughter)

Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can.

(Laughter) Third: make somebody else really, really rich. (Laughter)

And finally: never ever join the Beatles. (Laughter)

OK. Now I, like Ze Frank, can predict your next thought,

which is, "Yeah, right." Because when

people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done,

we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say,

"Yeah right, you never really wanted the job."

"Oh yeah, right. You really didn't

have that much in common with her,

and you figured that out just about the time

she threw the engagement ring in your face."

We smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness

is not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness."

What are these terms?

Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted,

and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted.

And in our society, we have a strong belief

that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.

Why do we have that belief?

Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine

would keep churning

if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it?

With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard,

a shopping mall full of Zen monks

is not going to be particularly profitable

because they don't want stuff enough.

I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness

is every bit as real and enduring

as the kind of happiness you stumble upon

when you get exactly what you were aiming for.

Now, I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric,

but by marinating you in a little bit of data.

Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used

to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness

among regular old folks. And this isn't mine.

This is a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm."

It's very simple.

You bring in, say, six objects,

and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked.

In this case, because the experiment I'm going to tell you about uses them,

these are Monet prints.

So, everybody can rank these Monet prints

from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least.

Now we give you a choice:

"We happen to have some extra prints in the closet.

We're going to give you one as your prize to take home.

We happen to have number three and number four,"

we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice,

because neither one is preferred strongly to the other,

but naturally, people tend to pick number three

because they liked it a little better than number four.

Sometime later -- it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days --

the same stimuli are put before the subject,

and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli.

"Tell us how much you like them now."

What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized.

This is the result that has been replicated over and over again.

You're watching happiness be synthesized.

Would you like to see it again? Happiness!

"The one I got is really better than I thought!

That other one I didn't get sucks!"

(Laughter) That's the synthesis of happiness.

Now what's the right response to that? "Yeah, right!"

Now, here's the experiment we did,

and I would hope this is going to convince you that

"Yeah, right!" was not the right response.

We did this experiment with a group of patients

who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients.

Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome,

a polyneuritic psychosis that -- they drank way too much,

and they can't make new memories.

OK? They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself,

and then leave the room,

when you come back, they don't know who you are.

We took our Monet prints to the hospital.

And we asked these patients to rank them

from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least.