Happiness-related Research
A friend shared this blog post with me over Google Buzz, so I went ahead and watched the following TED talk:
I'm a fairly eager reader/viewer, but it's tough to properly separate good content, as most of you guys must be aware. One little guy whose talks I've always enjoyed so much is Eckhart Tolle. If you're not familiar with his work or "line of thought", so to speak, I'll try to summarize the part that I think relates to the happiness research.
One's mind, emotions, body and experiences are not one's own self. The mystery of what oneself is cannot ever be explained by words, but words can point to it. Some such words are: consciousness, alertness, stillness, god, nothingness, higher self, silent observer and so on.
Now, I'll let my own little mind play around a bit with these concepts.
On one hand, there are several researchers, men of science, just like me. On the other hand, Mr. Eckhart Tolle, who could be accused of being a New Age hipster. I don't think that's relevant. Au contraire, it seems to be that the research of happiness brought the scientists to a point where the self has to be cracked in two (the experiencing self and the remembering self), but one of these is very similar to what is described by Mr. Tolle as consciousness (my personal favorite).
If they stand alone, both of these views strike me as insufficient. For instance, having two selves in one person might not be a strange conception, but that these two selves are entirely separate from each other sounds quite unlikely. Whereas the notion of simply dropping everything and attending to this nothingness is not unlikely, but it isn't even on the table.
If you care to do the math (as I always do), Mr. Daniel Kahneman has dropped some interesting numbers on his lecture.
Just take a full month, and it's quite simple: 30 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 2.592.000 seconds every month. How much of that time are we present? 600.000 psychological presence "moments" x 3 seconds each = 1.800.000 seconds. And then, 1.800.000/2.592.000 = 0.6944..., that is about 69.4%.
This sounds like quite a lot! What about sleep? It should take 8 hours a day, I'm told, and that adds up to 33%. The math is fairly sound, since - in my personal experience - nobody sleeps 8 hours anymore.
Personally, I won't let my stories end on bad notes again, if I can help it.
I'm a fairly eager reader/viewer, but it's tough to properly separate good content, as most of you guys must be aware. One little guy whose talks I've always enjoyed so much is Eckhart Tolle. If you're not familiar with his work or "line of thought", so to speak, I'll try to summarize the part that I think relates to the happiness research.
One's mind, emotions, body and experiences are not one's own self. The mystery of what oneself is cannot ever be explained by words, but words can point to it. Some such words are: consciousness, alertness, stillness, god, nothingness, higher self, silent observer and so on.
Now, I'll let my own little mind play around a bit with these concepts.
On one hand, there are several researchers, men of science, just like me. On the other hand, Mr. Eckhart Tolle, who could be accused of being a New Age hipster. I don't think that's relevant. Au contraire, it seems to be that the research of happiness brought the scientists to a point where the self has to be cracked in two (the experiencing self and the remembering self), but one of these is very similar to what is described by Mr. Tolle as consciousness (my personal favorite).
If they stand alone, both of these views strike me as insufficient. For instance, having two selves in one person might not be a strange conception, but that these two selves are entirely separate from each other sounds quite unlikely. Whereas the notion of simply dropping everything and attending to this nothingness is not unlikely, but it isn't even on the table.
If you care to do the math (as I always do), Mr. Daniel Kahneman has dropped some interesting numbers on his lecture.
- Psychological Presence is said to be about 3 seconds long.
- In a life there's about 6 hundred million of them.
- In a month there's about 600 thousand of them.
Just take a full month, and it's quite simple: 30 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 2.592.000 seconds every month. How much of that time are we present? 600.000 psychological presence "moments" x 3 seconds each = 1.800.000 seconds. And then, 1.800.000/2.592.000 = 0.6944..., that is about 69.4%.
This sounds like quite a lot! What about sleep? It should take 8 hours a day, I'm told, and that adds up to 33%. The math is fairly sound, since - in my personal experience - nobody sleeps 8 hours anymore.
Personally, I won't let my stories end on bad notes again, if I can help it.
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