Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

define it. Warm guns and warm puppies are merely examples of happiness, not definitions of it.

My dictionary defines happiness as 'pleasure' — and pleasure as a feeling of 'happy satisfaction and enjoyment.' As if that weren't circular enough, when I turn to the word feeling, I find that a feeling is defined as 'a perceived emotion' while an emotion is defined as a 'strong feeling.'

No matter. As the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said about pornography (as opposed to art), it is hard to define, but 'I know it when I see it.' Happiness may mean sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, the roar of the crowd, the satisfaction of a job well done, good food, good drink, and good conversation — not to mention what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of 'flow,' of being so absorbed in something you do well that you scarcely notice the passage of time. At the risk of offending hard-nosed philosophers everywhere, I propose to leave it at that. For my money, the real question is not how we define happiness, but why, from the perspective of evolution, humans care about it at all.

At first glance, the answer seems obvious. The standard story is that happiness evolved in part to guide our behavior. In the words of the noted evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nesse, 'Our brains could have been wired so that [eating] good food, [having] sex, being the object of admiration, and observing the success of one's children were all aversive experiences [but] any ancestor whose brain was so wired would probably not have contributed much to the gene pool that makes human nature what it is now.' Pleasure is our guide, as Freud (and long before him, Aristotle) noted, and without it, the species wouldn't propagate.*

That much seems true. In keeping with the notion that pleasure serves as our guide, we automatically (and often unconsciously) sort just about everything we see into the categories 'pleasant' and 'unpleasant.' If I show you a word like sunshine and then ask you to decide, as quickly as possible, whether the word wonderful is positive, you'll respond faster than you would if shown an unpleasant word instead (say, poison instead of sunshine). Cognitive psychologists call this accelerated response a positive priming effect; it means that we constantly and automatically categorize everything we encounter as good or bad.

This sort of automatic evaluation, largely the domain of the reflexive system, is remarkably sophisticated. Take, for example, the word water; is it pleasant? Depends on how thirsty you are. And sure enough, studies show that thirsty people show a bigger positive prim

*That said, when it comes to reasons for having sex, pleasure and reproduction are, at least for humans, just two motivations among many. The most comprehensive survey ever conducted, reported recently in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, listed a grand total of 237. Seeking pleasure and making babies were definitely on the list, but so were 'it seemed like good exercise,' 'I wanted to be popular,' 'I was bored,' 'I wanted to say thank you,' and 'I wanted to feel closer to God.' One way or another, 96 percent of American adults have at least once found some reason for having sex.

ing effect for the word water than people who are well hydrated. This occurs over the course of a few milliseconds, allowing pleasure to serve as a moment-by-moment guide. Similar findings — and this is the scary part — apply even in our attitudes toward other people: the more we need them, the more we like them. (To rather cynically paraphrase an old expression, from the perspective of the subconscious, a friend we need is a friend perceived.)

But the simple idea that 'if it feels good, it must have been good for our ancestors' runs into trouble pretty quickly. To start with, many — arguably, most — things that give us pleasure don't actually do much for our genes. In the United States, the average adult spends nearly a third of his or her waking hours on leisure activities such as television, sports, drinking with friends — pursuits that may have little or no direct genetic benefit. Even sex, most of the time for most people, is recreational, not procreational. When I spend $100 on a meal at Sushi Samba, my favorite restaurant du jour, I don't do it because it will increase the number of kids I have, or because eating Peruvian-Japanese fusion food is the cheapest (or even most nutritious) way to fill my belly. I do it because, well, I like the taste of yellowtail ceviche — even if, from the perspective of evolution, my dining bills are a waste of precious financial resources.

A Martian looking down on planet Earth might note all this with puzzlement. Why do humans fool around so much when there is, inevitably, work to be done? Although other species have been known to play, no other species goofs around so much, or in so many ways. Only a few other species seem to spend much time having non- procreative sex, and none (outside labs run by inquisitive humans) watch television, go to rock concerts, or play organized sports. Which raises the question, is pleasure really an ideal adaptation, or (with apologies to Shakespeare) is there something klugey in Denmark?

Aha, says our Martian to itself; humans are no longer slaves to their genes. Instead of engaging in the activities that would yield the most copies of their genes, humans are trying to maximize something else, something more abstract — call it 'happiness' — which appears to be a measure of factors such as a human's general well-being, its level of success, its perceived control over its own life, and how well it is regarded by its peers.

At which point, our Martian friend would be even more confused. If people are trying to maximize their overall well-being, why do they do so many things that in the long run yield little or no lasting happiness?

Perhaps nothing would puzzle this Martian more than the enormous amount of time that many people spend watching television. In America, the average is 2-4 hours per day. If you consider that the average person is awake for only 16, and at work for at least 8, that's a huge proportion of the average person's discretionary time. Yet day after day, audiences watch show after show, most containing either stories of dubious quality about fictional people or heavily edited 'reality' portraits of people in improbable situations that the average viewer is unlikely ever to meet. (Yes, public television airs some great documentaries, but they never draw the ratings of Law & Order, Lost, or Survivor.) And here's the kicker: hard-core television watchers are, on average, less happy than those who watch only a little television. All that TV viewing might convey some sort of short-term benefit, but in the long term, an hour spent watching television is an hour that could have been spent doing something else — exercising, working on hobbies, caring for children, helping strangers, or developing friendships.

And then there are, of course, chemical substances deliberately designed to shortcut the entire machinery of reward, directly stimulating the pleasure parts of the brain (for example, the nucleus accumbens). I'm speaking, of course, of alcohol, nicotine, and drugs like cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. What is remarkable about these substances is not the fact that they exist — it would be almost impossible to build a chemically based brain that wouldntbe vulnerable to the machinations of clever chemists — but rather the extent to which people use them, even when they realize that the long-term consequences may be life threatening. The writer John Cheever, for example, once wrote, 'Year after year I read in [my journals] that I am drinking too much .. . I waste more days, I suffer deep pangs of guilt, I wake up at three in the morning with the feelings of a temperance worker. Drink, its implements, environments, and effects all seem disgusting. And yet each noon I reach for the whiskey bottle.'

As one psychologist put it, addictions can lead people down a 'primrose path' in which decisions made in the moment seem — from the strict perspective of temporary happiness — to be rational, even though the long-term consequences are often devastating.