TED英语演讲稿我们为什么快乐.docx

1、TED英语演讲稿我们为什么快乐TED英语演讲稿：我们为什么快乐？When you have 21 minutes to speak, 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

2、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 dont just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one

3、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

4、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 dont make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can act

5、ually 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. Its a marvelous adaptation. Its up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things t

6、hat 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 Jerrys doesnt have liver-and-onion ice cream, and its not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, Yuck. Its because, without leaving your armchair, you can

7、 simulate that flavor and say yuck before you make it.Lets see how your experience simulators are working. Lets just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Heres two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one

8、 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 dont feel like you need a moment of thought.Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data o

9、n how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isnt it? But these arent the data. I made these up!These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and youre 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 th

10、e lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.Now, dont 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 ha

11、ve 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 laborator

12、y 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 - thi

13、s 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

14、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 its precisely the same remarkable machinery that a

15、ll 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

16、. 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 dont need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect. Though Im going to show you some ex

17、perimental evidence, you dont 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

18、 better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentally and almost every other way. I dont have one minutes 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 r

19、emember: 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 pow

20、er. 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? Hes pretty much covered them there.Moreese Bickham is somebody youve n

21、ever 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 didnt commit. He was ultimately exonerated, at the age of 78, through DNA evidence. And what did he have to say about his experience? I dont

22、 have one minutes regret. It was a glorious experience. Glorious! This guy is not saying, Well, you know, there were some nice guys. They had a gym. Its glorious, a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience.Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and hes somebody you might ha

23、ve known but didnt, 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, Thats 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 Yor

24、k, asked his brother whos an investment banker to loan him the 3,000 dollars, and his brothers immortal words were, You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers. He wouldnt 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

25、, 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 t

26、our. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed - yes, hes still a drummer; yes, hes a studio musician - he had this to say: Im happier than I would have been with the Beatles.Okay. Theres something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally

27、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

28、 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 didnt have that much in common with h

29、er, 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

30、synthetic happiness is what we make when we dont 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, its very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what w

31、e 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 dont want stuff enough. I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as t

32、he kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. Now, Im a scientist, so Im 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 isnt mine. This is a 50-year-old paradigm called the free choice paradigm. Its very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the