Via Jesse Walker, comes this BBC article on the possibility of using beta blockers to blot out bad memories. This makes Jesse think of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I am put in mind of Thomas Schelling’s amazing essay “The Mind as a Consuming Organ.” A selection:
An unavoidable question is whether I could be happier if I could only believe things more favorable, more complimentary, more in line with my hopes and wishes, than what I believe to be true. That might be done by coming to believe things that are contrary to what I know, such as that my reputation or my health or my children’s health is better than it is, my financial prospects or my childrens’ better than they are, and that I have performed ably and bravely on those occasions when I did not. Or it might be accomplished by improving the mix of my beliefs by dropping out–forgetting–some of the things that cause me guilt grief, remorse, and anxiety. [emphasis added]
If the answer is, “Yes, you would be happier,” then what is the correct response? So much the worse for truth? So much the worse for happiness? A subtle and cautious blend?
Just to be clear, as some commenters on Jesse’s post noted, propranolol wouldn’t “blot out” bad memories as what happened in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – it would just lessen the emotions associated with traumatic memories. So, for example, you’d still remember being mugged, but you wouldn’t go into a literal panic attack everytime you saw a gun. It should also be pointed out that the kinds of reactions associated with post-traumatic stress disorder don’t necessarily represent “accurate” memories, as one could argue that the extreme panic responses are disproportionate to the actual badness of the memories. So the trade-off between truth and happiness there is pretty murky, if it exists at all.
Also, there has actually been research showing that depressed people have more accurate assessments of themselves than “normal” people. Apparently, to maintain a normal level of happiness requires a certain amount of (unconscious?) self-deception, probably through exactly the same mechanisms as Schelling describes (though unconscious). So to answer Schelling’s question – yes, you would be happier.
Andrew (and Will): You both mentioned studies tending to show that depressed people have more accurate self-assessments. Can you tell me where to find these, cause I am very curious about how such a conclusion could be established.
I’ll go with (c), the subtle and cautious blend. You need to remember enough — and accurately enough — that you’ll learn the right lessons to avoid repeating your mistakes (or similar ones). But some forgetting is also needed to keep your guilt or trauma from becoming debilitating. The subtle and cautious blend is, I suspect, what most people consciously or unconsciously try to achieve even without pharmocological assistance.
Bill, try these:
Taylor, Shelley E. Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind.
New York: Basic Books, 1989.
Taylor, S.E. and Brown, J.D. “Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological
Perspective on Mental health,” Psychological Bulletin, 1988, 103.
RAMACHANDRAN, V. 1997. The evolutionary biology of self-deception, laughter,
dreaming and
Cool. I’ll check them out. But it would amaze me if they had a convincing method for deciding how accurate a self-assessment is! (That, of course, would seem necessary to proving the thesis.)
If I remember, it’s assessments of efficacy in certain kinds of tasks. Depressed people do better in gauging how much their performance had to do with their effort and ability. Happy folk overestimate how much their skill has to do with it. Try this, too:
Alloy, L.B. and Abramson, L.Y. “Judgment of Contingency in Depressed and
Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser?” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1979,
108: 441-485.
From the Julian Sanchez interview of Robert Nozick in 2001 there’s an interesting exchange about the value of believing the truth. There Nozick says:
Or the literature that seems to show that optimistic or even overly optimistic attitudes towards one’s chances at succeeding at something, or recovering from a disease, or something like that, actually increase the chances. Maybe not up to the level of optimism one feels, but there one would be better off not being a perfectly accurate assessor of chances. In fact there’s some psychological literature that seems to indicate that when people are asked by psychologists what other people in their social circle think of them, and then the psychologists check with these other people about what they actually do think, that the people who have more accurate views of what other people think of them are less happy, less successful in life, cope less well with various things, than the people who have rosier views of what people think of them than is actually the case. Now, here’s another case where one may be better off believing what’s not strictly true. Parents raising children might think: “Well, do I want my child to have a disposition to believe exactly what’s true about other people’s opinions of him or her? Or to have, not an out-of-touch-with-reality view, but a more optimistic than is actual view, a rosier view, of what people think of them, so that their life will go smoother, more easily, and so on?”
18 years as a personal coach (after college teaching and practicing law) convinces me in the “clinical” realm — theory pants dustily along behind — that decelerating the emotional hit from the negative and focusing preferentially on success and satisfaction has palpable results and is the way to go. (Not, of course, pretending your tire isn’t going flat.)
For the most part, it is only a myth that the bad stuff motivates us. More often it paralyzes and discourages us. And may upon examination not even be “bad,” if we widen horizons and re-mix philosophical assumptions. It is possible to do this authentically and quickly with a few cognitive algorithms.
The most learned of those who’ve looked into the practical side of this may be Martin Seligman, recently president of the APA. For example, a questionnaire in The Optimistic Child degeneralizes bad experiences, globalizes successes. There is a balance that keeps a person prudently recognizing where improvement is possible (and fun!), while turning down the volume on fear and pessimism and de-motivation.
Brain science has begun to clarify the routes of the mechanism I’ve described. I suspect conundrums in this area reside in the theory, not the practice, and in arguments over abstract definitions and criteria that are so far only subjectively discernable.
Ethical concerns arise, of course, if “feeling better” mechanisms are activated outside the free choice of the subject himself. This will be a temptation to parents, teachers, employers, all down the continuum of control.
Just to be clear, as some commenters on Jesse’s post noted, propranolol wouldn’t “blot out” bad memories as what happened in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – it would just lessen the emotions associated with traumatic memories. So, for example, you’d still remember being mugged, but you wouldn’t go into a literal panic attack everytime you saw a gun. It should also be pointed out that the kinds of reactions associated with post-traumatic stress disorder don’t necessarily represent “accurate” memories, as one could argue that the extreme panic responses are disproportionate to the actual badness of the memories. So the trade-off between truth and happiness there is pretty murky, if it exists at all.
Also, there has actually been research showing that depressed people have more accurate assessments of themselves than “normal” people. Apparently, to maintain a normal level of happiness requires a certain amount of (unconscious?) self-deception, probably through exactly the same mechanisms as Schelling describes (though unconscious). So to answer Schelling’s question – yes, you would be happier.
Andrew (and Will): You both mentioned studies tending to show that depressed people have more accurate self-assessments. Can you tell me where to find these, cause I am very curious about how such a conclusion could be established.
I’ll go with (c), the subtle and cautious blend. You need to remember enough — and accurately enough — that you’ll learn the right lessons to avoid repeating your mistakes (or similar ones). But some forgetting is also needed to keep your guilt or trauma from becoming debilitating. The subtle and cautious blend is, I suspect, what most people consciously or unconsciously try to achieve even without pharmocological assistance.
Bill, try these:
Taylor, Shelley E. Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind.
New York: Basic Books, 1989.
Taylor, S.E. and Brown, J.D. “Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological
Perspective on Mental health,” Psychological Bulletin, 1988, 103.
RAMACHANDRAN, V. 1997. The evolutionary biology of self-deception, laughter,
dreaming and
Cool. I’ll check them out. But it would amaze me if they had a convincing method for deciding how accurate a self-assessment is! (That, of course, would seem necessary to proving the thesis.)
If I remember, it’s assessments of efficacy in certain kinds of tasks. Depressed people do better in gauging how much their performance had to do with their effort and ability. Happy folk overestimate how much their skill has to do with it. Try this, too:
Alloy, L.B. and Abramson, L.Y. “Judgment of Contingency in Depressed and
Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser?” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1979,
108: 441-485.
From the Julian Sanchez interview of Robert Nozick in 2001 there’s an interesting exchange about the value of believing the truth. There Nozick says:
Or the literature that seems to show that optimistic or even overly optimistic attitudes towards one’s chances at succeeding at something, or recovering from a disease, or something like that, actually increase the chances. Maybe not up to the level of optimism one feels, but there one would be better off not being a perfectly accurate assessor of chances. In fact there’s some psychological literature that seems to indicate that when people are asked by psychologists what other people in their social circle think of them, and then the psychologists check with these other people about what they actually do think, that the people who have more accurate views of what other people think of them are less happy, less successful in life, cope less well with various things, than the people who have rosier views of what people think of them than is actually the case. Now, here’s another case where one may be better off believing what’s not strictly true. Parents raising children might think: “Well, do I want my child to have a disposition to believe exactly what’s true about other people’s opinions of him or her? Or to have, not an out-of-touch-with-reality view, but a more optimistic than is actual view, a rosier view, of what people think of them, so that their life will go smoother, more easily, and so on?”
18 years as a personal coach (after college teaching and practicing law) convinces me in the “clinical” realm — theory pants dustily along behind — that decelerating the emotional hit from the negative and focusing preferentially on success and satisfaction has palpable results and is the way to go. (Not, of course, pretending your tire isn’t going flat.)
For the most part, it is only a myth that the bad stuff motivates us. More often it paralyzes and discourages us. And may upon examination not even be “bad,” if we widen horizons and re-mix philosophical assumptions. It is possible to do this authentically and quickly with a few cognitive algorithms.
The most learned of those who’ve looked into the practical side of this may be Martin Seligman, recently president of the APA. For example, a questionnaire in The Optimistic Child degeneralizes bad experiences, globalizes successes. There is a balance that keeps a person prudently recognizing where improvement is possible (and fun!), while turning down the volume on fear and pessimism and de-motivation.
Brain science has begun to clarify the routes of the mechanism I’ve described. I suspect conundrums in this area reside in the theory, not the practice, and in arguments over abstract definitions and criteria that are so far only subjectively discernable.
Ethical concerns arise, of course, if “feeling better” mechanisms are activated outside the free choice of the subject himself. This will be a temptation to parents, teachers, employers, all down the continuum of control.