The document discusses the human prefrontal cortex and its ability to simulate experiences. It notes that while people expect winning the lottery to result in long-term happiness, studies show lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy after 1 year due to impact bias overestimating future events' effects. Happiness can be synthesized through changing one's views, and synthetic happiness is as good as achieved happiness according to experiments. While synthetic happiness seems unnatural, changing one's views is effective. The document advises synthesizing happiness when truly stuck without options, and notes problems arise when preferences drive too hard or fast by overrating differences between futures.

1. The Surprising Science of
- Dan Gilbert

2. Vs.
What’s the difference between YOU and an ANIMAL?

3. Your Prefrontal cortex - capable of an experience
simulator

4. What it means to have an experience simulator?
You can simulate experiences in
head before performing them in
actual life
For example: You would say
‘Yuk!’ to the onion flavored ice-
cream even before tasting it

5. Let’s take a Quiz: Contemplate and choose the futures you
would like to have for yourself
1. Win a Lottery 2. Become paraplegic

6. Your experience simulator starts working and you certainly
choose to win the lottery and expect it to be the source of
happiness

7. The experiment conducted shows that Lottery winners and the
paraplegics are equally happy after 1 year
=
However… The statistics from the experiment shows
different result!

8. Reason: The Impact Bias - The tendency to overestimate the
hedonic impact of future events
This means your simulator works badly, thinks of very
short term
Research says that any traumatic incident whatsoever it is
has impact which lasts not more than 3 months
Why? - Because happiness can be synthesized

9. Humans have non-cognitive process which help us change views about
the world in order to feel better
What is synthetic happiness?
So all you have to do is ‘To change your views about the world/
objects /your life events’

10. Some beliefs about synthetic happiness
Synthetic
happiness is
of an
inferior kind
Synthetic
happiness does
not have the
same quality as
the natural
happiness
But this may
seem fake/
unnatural
/ineffective for
me

11. The experimental data shows that synthetic happiness is as good as the
happiness you get when you achieve what you really wanted
Well it might seem unnatural but it is not ineffective
=

12. All you need to do is ‘Change the views about the events/world’
This concludes that Synthetic happiness is real!

13. Infact it’s not necessary
to synthesize happiness
all the time
So why don’t you synthesize happiness all the time?

14. When you are really stuck
and don’t have any
choice/chance to achieve
what you want
When to synthesize happiness?

15. Yes…we should!
Shouldn’t we have preference in our lives that will lead
us to one future over another?

16. When this preference drives us too hard or too fast there’s a problem
When is there a problem with our preference?

17. The problem is we have over-rated the differences between the
two futures!!
When our ambition is
bounded we tend to work
joyfully! When it is
unbounded we tend to lie,
cheat, hurt others, sacrifice
things of real value
When our fears are
bounded we are
cautious, when they are
unbounded we are
cowardly

18. Project Submitted by -
Neha Dhobale
Student, IIM Lucknow
pgp30254@iiml.ac.in
Under the guidance of –
Prof. Sameer Mathur
Marketing Professor, IIM Lucknow
Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.mbaskills.in/
Thank You!
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU