Liver and Onion Ice Cream
Happiness is subjective, and is felt rather than found. Happiness is composed in the prefrontal lobe, which has a right hemisphere and left hemisphere. The right hemisphere generates sadness and the left side generates happiness. It allows situations to be simulated in the mind before happening. A professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Dan Gilbert, gave his audience a metaphorical question: Would you rather win the lottery or become paraplegic? The ability to choose an option almost immediately without ever having experienced either situation is only one example of how simulation can produce happiness. The production of happiness through simulation is a feeling of happiness rather than an outside gaining of getting what was wanted. The audience didn’t need the experience to happen to feel happiness. Gilbert comedicaly says, “Ben and Jerry’s doesn’t have liver and onion ice cream and it isn’t because they whipped some up, tried it and went yuck…you can simulate that flavor and say yuck before you make it.” Yes, experiencing what it might be like to win the lottery can create a goal for an individual to reach, and acquire that ultimate feeling of happiness. Just as the simulation of what liver and onion ice cream would taste like led Ben and Jerry’s away from attempting it.
Along with simulating happy or sad experiences, only humans have the ability to synthesize happiness: genuinely being happy with what may have been unwanted. This is a defense mechanism. The brain allows the realization that, “Hey, it’s not that bad. I kind of like it.” Being happy with what was unwanted isn’t something pushed upon people, yet it’s something that can be done and is done quite often.
For those who believe that happiness can be found through getting something, please consider suicidal and depressed patients. Depressed and suicidal patients have an overwhelming sense of helplessness and hopelessness. This creates the inability to feel happy, never mind trying to find it. If happiness can be found, mustn’t it be in doing engaging and fun activities, or getting something wanted? This is impossible for those uninterested in daily activities, and can’t find happiness when they get what they want. Concluding that if, (counter claiming) happiness can be found it is forever impossible for depressed and suicidal patients; their mechanism for manufacturing happiness is nonexistent.
Works Cited
The Surprising Science of Happiness
Science Proves Happiness Lies Within– What Does This Mean for Your Happiness?
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Counterintuitive Fall 2022 
Professor Hodges,
I would like some feedback so that I can add and make changes to my essay before Thursday’s class. This is a rough draft I am working on, I am not sure if it is what you’re looking for but please get back to me when you can.
Thank you,
Angela Kotala
Feedback provided. —DSH
Hey Angela. Hope you’re feeling better.
P1. That is a beautiful opening sentence, Angela. I hope its clarity will inform everything that follows. Although nobody ever thought happiness was a thing, like a car, your claim helps us remember that when we think a new car might make us happy, we don’t mean the car is the goal; we mean that the feeling of new car ownership (whether it’s because the car will run better, or break down less, or look good in our driveway giving us pride of accomplishment) is our goal. For some people, the entire joy is delayed until the car is in the driveway. Others are happy just knowing they’re pursuing that car. Either way, the car is not the goal. My reading of your sentence contains all of that.
—You’re not allowed to say “the cause is due to” for the same reason you can’t say “the reason is because.” They’re both redundant (and also “due to” has no value in the language at all). “The cause is the prefrontal lobe” works. So does “the reason for this feeling is found in the prefrontal lobe.”
You’ve said in all your work so far that the pre-frontal lobe allows us to “enact” situations before they occur (You can’t say “re-enact” about things that haven’t happened. You can “re-enact” things from the past.). I accept this premise completely, but you’ve never explained how enacting situations creates happiness. You say one thing, then another, but you don’t connect them.
Your example of Dan Gilbert’s question demonstrates only the first statement. The audience can imagine (enact) winning the lottery, using their pre-frontal cortexes to predict how it would feel, I guess. But does that make them happy? They’re still sitting in the audience. They’re just as poor as they were a minute ago, but now they’re more aware of their poverty, since Gilbert has made them imagine the lottery winnings. They’re not happier. They’ve only imagined a state of future happiness.
What you might be trying to say is that because we can imagine a happy (or just a different) future with our big specialized brains, we can pursue that future. We can work in the present to accomplish a future goal that we think will make us happy. That’s the value of the p-fc. Not that it makes us feel the subjective state of happiness, but that it makes us goal-oriented.
Once you say happiness is a state that can’t be pursued, the pre-frontal lobe’s special characteristic is not involved in happiness at all. It still could impel us toward a future of greater accomplishment, but, apparently, our happiness doesn’t depend on that.
I’m not trying to argue with you, Angela, just with the premises. You don’t have to agree or disagree with me. I only want to clarify your own terms, to make sure you have what you need to draw your own conclusions from them.
P2. P3. Looking at your 2nd and 3rd paragraphs together, I see something you might be missing. Humans have the capacity to synthesize happiness, but that must be an ability we have to varying degrees, as we have different measures of all our abilities.
1) Those with very high ability to synthesize happiness are happy most of the time despite their circumstances. They’re the group who can find a way to be happy despite being paralyzed. They’d be happy to win the lottery, sure, but their happiness doesn’t depend on outward occurrence; it’s internal, as your first sentence says, it’s a feeling they manufacture unconsciously.
2) Those with very low ability to synthesize happiness are clinically depressed. They can’t find a way to be happy even when they win the lottery. Being paralyzed wouldn’t make them any less happy because their lack of happiness can’t be changed by outward occurrence; they have no mechanism for manufacturing the feeling of happiness.
Anyway, that’s the way I make sense of your premises. Use whatever’s useful to you.
I took some of your advice. I added some information and took some of the wordiness out… I also changed my title, I hope it entertains you.
It’s a wonderful title. Reactions to anything else will have to wait.
I edited the rest of my essay some more, trying to make some statements clear. Let me know what you think.
Angela
Feedback provided. —DSH
Hey, Angela!
P1.
S1. —I love the first sentence.
S2. —The second sentence completely changes the topic, so I’m immediately confused, but willing to suspend my concern for a sentence or two.
S3. —It does? It creates happiness by allowing enactments? That’s interesting.
S4. —The example is that Dan Gilbert asked me to imagine winning the lottery? My pre-frontal cortex permitted me to enact that possibility? . . .
. . . Where’s the happiness? I don’t experience extreme happiness from this enactment, Angela. I only imagine I time of happiness. You might as well say: Happiness is subjective, and is imagined rather than achieved. Do you see the problem?
S9. —As soon as you say: “what it might be like to win the lottery . . . is a goal . . . acquire that ultimate . . . happiness,” you’re right back to claiming that happiness is something that can be found; it’s a goal; it’s a future we strive toward. Do you see the problem?
P2. This is a better argument, I think. [You can place IT in the pre-frontal cortex too, if you need a place to put it. 🙂 ]
You sell this essential skill short here though, I think, Angela. Synthetic happiness isn’t accommodating to compromise, is it? It’s achieving contentment by having attainable goals. We don’t decide that the thing we have it “not that bad.” We decide that the thing we have pleases us even though it might not meet our instinctive expectations. In other words, just because our pre-frontal cortex prejudices us to think winning the lottery is the best outcome, our happiness isn’t dependent on satisfying that prediction. Any outcome can produce happiness if it meets some of our needs.
P3. What you appear to be saying is that the clinically depressed cannot synthesize happiness. You should really be specific about this claim, since it connects all three of your paragraphs.
P1: Our pre-frontal cortex helps us imagine what outcome would provide us the most happiness. It DOESN’T PRODUCE happiness, but it predicts happy outcomes.
P2. Despite our predictions, those of us who can synthesize our own happiness, don’t rely on particular outcomes to be happy. We react to outcomes by recognizing which of our needs they meet and taking joy in those met needs.
P3. Some of us can’t synthesize happiness. We call those unfortunates the clinically depressed. No outcome pleases them, even if it matches their predictions of what would make them happy. They see their needs as unmet.
Does this sound like an accurate description of your argument here, Angela?
Grade recorded. Always improvable.