Stumbling on Happiness summary This is my book summary of Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book. The greatest ability of the human brain is to imagine, to see the world as it has never been before. “What makes humans different from every other animal is that they think about the future.” Our brain makes predictions incredibly quickly and about nearly everything in life. When our experiences don't match what our brain expects, we feel surprised. The frontal lobe is responsible for planning and anxiety — two key future-oriented functions. Our frontal lobe is what allows us to be the only animal that experiences and envisions the future as we do. We like to daydream because the mere dream itself can be a joy. Within a few weeks even earthquake survivors tend to return to previous levels of optimism. If we don
Welcome, I'm excited to introduce all of you to psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. And also the researcher who developed this technique WOOP that we talk about in the course. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. So what we wanted to do today was just to hear in your own words what is this technique WOOP. Students have already heard about it a little bit in class, but we thought that since you discovered that you can kind of give us some context and talk a little bit about it. So what is WOOP? It's a strange word, but. What is WOOP? 0:34 WOOP is an acronym for four steps which is Wish, Outcome, Obstacle and Plan. And WOOP is a tool. 0:48 WOOP is like, you know, a bicycle, or a hammer, or any tool you might use in your life to get by in a better way. 1:03 And WOOP is a tool which is relati