Your frontal lobe is your bff.

‘I’m glad I wasn’t hired, the paycheck wasn’t enough anyway.’ ‘I’m glad the plans got cancelled, I wanted to stay home anyway.’ ‘I’m glad it’s over, I was not that happy with him anyway.’

Today I learnt that these ‘I’m glads’ and ‘anyways’ aren’t just cutsie pinksie excuses we tell ourselves after we get hit by a bus on the way to a funeral on a rainy day. Or anything that feels like this, you know your favorite show getting cancelled or your hair not looking good, god forbid. These ‘I’m glads’ and ‘anyways’ are actually an immune system, called synthetic happiness, that has developed in human beings over the course of time due to the fact that we have the part called frontal lobe in our brains, which animals don’t. Thanks to this frontal lobe we have the ability to chose between the options of meeting Beyonce or meeting Charles Manson. Or refusing to drink meat flavored vodka before actually trying and vomiting.

These ‘I’m glads’ and ‘anyways’ are completely instinctive, like chewing or sleeping. Harvard professor Dan Gilbert explains this behavior with an experiment he performed on amnesia patients, who are unable to create new memories due to their immediate memory loss. They can’t remember the people they meet or the things they see just five minutes ago.

These patients have been shown 6 paintings and asked to rank them from best to worst. They have also been told that they could have either number 3 or number 4 for keeps. Most of the patients chose number 3, because they thought it was aesthetically better looking. Gilbert left the room and came back 30 minutes later, since these patients were suffering from amnesia, they couldn’t remember ever talking to Gilbert or owning one of the paintings let alone ever seeing them before. They have been asked to rank the paintings one more time, and all of the patients ranked the previous number 3 as number 2, and the previous number 4 as number 5. Even though these patients lack the ability to remember, they still somehow thought that the painting they owned, but didn’t know they owned, was better. And the painting they had to give up looked worse than before they had lost the chance to own it. This is the way synthetic happiness works. It lets us believe that what we have is better than what we lost. And better yet, it releases exactly the same hormones as actual happiness. According to Gilbert, actual happiness is what we experience when we have exactly what we want.

The most important aspect of this new piece of knowledge I’ve learnt is that synthetic happiness does not mean the same thing as deceiving yourself into thinking that you should just give up and feel pleased with whatever happens. It does not mean you should stop being involved in the important decisions that affect and shape your life.

Of course, it would be unhealthy to automatically assume that you’re better off without something that you failed to achieve. It would lead to giving up and quitting working hard towards your dreams. However synthetic happiness, also called personal happiness, comes into play at times when we’re completely stuck and the circumstances don’t stand a chance of any kind of change or improvement.

Synthetic happiness may also be described as personal happiness, because it is the feeling of contentment that is formed within ourselves regardless of the environmental factors surrounding us.

So these ‘I’m glads’ and ‘anyways’ are literally an immune system our frontal lobe activates after a shitty breakup. You just can’t hate your frontal lobe, can you?

I don’t exactly know why, but I was totally blown away by this fact. More than anything I’ve heard or read recently, along with the dog I met the other day. It was literally the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. However, it didn’t make me love myself more yet this information about my brain did. It somehow made me appreciate myself and human beings more as these complicated creatures we are. It is incredibly amazing that our brains have the capacity of developing this kind of mental immunity, when we lack the strength to do it for ourselves. And they do it without us ever knowing what’s happening, hence we are not designed to be stuck in a desperate situation and feel depressed forever. We are designed to develop as human beings. We are designed to learn and improve. We are designed to always aspire for the better. I guess I loved this so much, because it simply reminded me of whom I want to be.

Ironically, I think I felt actual happiness the moment I found out about these facts about synthetic happiness.

Love your brain peeps, like Woody Allen says it’s your second best organ after all.

Also here is a photo of the dog because that dog has to be seen, it has to experience the fame lyfe and bright lights and become the new Kanye and fulfil Kanye’s dreams of marrying Beyonce, because it is just that precious