Working in Movement

Early in an interview on Edge.org, psychologist Martin Seligman tells about the changes in his profession over the years. When he started, psychology was all about reducing the reducing the misery of mental disorders. In fact, says Seligman, prior to about 1950 there were no useful interventions or cures for such disorders. Now 14 major types of mental illness are treatable, and two curable. But the focus of the profession is still largely on reducing misery.

Seligman's focus is different--enhancing happiness. His interests lie more in the idea of helping people get from +2 to +6, rather from -8 to -5. Presumably these are on some sort of psychometric a scale of -10 to +10. Indeed, at Seligman's Authentic Happiness website you can take assessment tests until your eyes are crossed. (But they can also be revealing, even helpful.)

Seligman puts forth three levels of happiness as he sees it:

First, "there is the pleasant life — having as many of the pleasures as you can and the skills to amplify them — and the good life — knowing what your signature strengths are and recrafting everything you do to use them a much as possible. But there's a third form of life, and if you're a bridge player like me, or a stamp collector, you can have eudaemonia; that is, you can be in flow."

Learning plays a big part in all this, of course, and Seligman offers a couple of great stories to show the link the learning and happiness and to chronicle how he came to these ideas. The first involves his daughter and his changing views on parenting. And it perfectly champions the idea that the human nervous system is a self-organizing, self-correcting system:

The second part of the epiphany was that I realized that my theories of child rearing were wrong. The theories of child rearing that the last two generations have been raised with in psychology are remedial. They basically say the job of the parent is to correct the kid's errors, and somehow out of the correction of errors an exemplary child rises. But if you think about Nicky, she corrected her own error, and my job was to take this extraordinary strength she had just shown, see into the soul, name it — social intelligence — help her to live her life around it, and to use it as a buffer against troubles. If you think about your own life, your success has not been because you've corrected your weaknesses, but because you found out a couple of things you were really good at, and you used those to buffer you against troubles. So the second thing I realized was that with any program whose aim is to correct what's wrong, even if it's asymptotically successful, the best it can ever get to is zero. And yet when you lie in bed at night you're not thinking about how to go from -5 to -2; you're generally thinking about how to go from +2 to +6 in life. It was interesting to me that there was no science for that. All of the science was remedial, correcting the negatives.

The second story concerns a pet lizard, and illustrates the vital importance of environment to the learning process, and how there's no substitute for it.

Flow, however, doesn't have shortcuts. When I was an undergraduate one of my teachers, Julian Jaynes, a peculiar but wonderful man, was a research associate at Princeton when I was an undergraduate. Some people said he was a genius; I didn't know him well enough to know. He was given a South American lizard as a laboratory pet, and the problem about the lizard was that no one could figure out what it ate, so the lizard was dying. Julian killed flies, and the lizard wouldn't eat them; blended mangos and papayas, the lizard wouldn't eat them; Chinese take-out, the lizard had no interest. One day Julian came in and the lizard was in torpor, lying in the corner. He offered the lizard his lunch, but the lizard had no interest in ham on rye. He read the New York Times and he put the first section down on top of the ham on rye. The lizard took one look at this configuration, got up on its hind legs, stalked across the room, leapt up on the table, shredded the New York Times, and ate the ham sandwich. The moral is that lizards don't copulate and don't eat unless they go through the lizardly strengths and virtues first. They have to hunt, kill, shred, and stalk. And while we're a lot more complex than lizards, we have to as well. There are no shortcuts for us to reach flow. We have to indulge in our highest strengths in order to get eudaemonia. So can there be a shortcut? Can there be a pharmacology of it? I doubt it.

It's interesting to me that Seligman is offering us some distinctions in states of happiness. There's not just one thing, state, called happiness. It's turning out to be much more than that. And all of them involve learning.