Want to be happier? Stay in the moment | Matt Killingsworth

793,075 views ・ 2012-11-05

TED


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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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So, people want a lot of things out of life,
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but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness.
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Aristotle called happiness "the chief good," the end
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towards which all other things aim.
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According to this view, the reason we want a big house
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or a nice car
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or a good job
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isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable.
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It's that we expect them to bring us
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happiness.
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Now in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten
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a lot of the things that we want. We're richer.
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We live longer. We have access to technology
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that would have seemed like science fiction
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just a few years ago.
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The paradox of happiness is that even though the
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objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically,
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we haven't actually gotten any happier.
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Maybe because these conventional notions of progress
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haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness,
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there's been an increased interest in recent years
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in happiness itself.
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People have been debating the causes of happiness
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for a really long time, in fact for thousands of years,
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but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved.
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Well, as with many other domains in life, I think
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the scientific method has the potential to answer this question.
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In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion
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in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot
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about its demographics, how things like income
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and education, gender and marriage relate to it.
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But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that
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factors like these don't seem to have a particularly strong effect.
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Yes, it's better to make more money rather than less,
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or to graduate from college instead of dropping out,
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but the differences in happiness tend to be small.
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Which leaves the question, what are the big causes of happiness?
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I think that's a question we haven't really answered yet,
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but I think something that has the potential to be an answer
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is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with
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the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences.
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It certainly seems that we're going about our lives,
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that what we're doing, who we're with, what we're thinking about,
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have a big influence on our happiness, and yet
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these are the very factors that have been very difficult,
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in fact almost impossible, for scientists to study.
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A few years ago, I came up with a way to study people's happiness
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moment to moment as they're going about their daily lives
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on a massive scale all over the world, something we'd never
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been able to do before. Called trackyourhappiness.org,
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it uses the iPhone to monitor people's happiness in real time.
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How does this work? Basically, I send people signals
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at random points throughout the day, and then I ask them
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a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience
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at the instant just before the signal.
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The idea is that, if we can watch how people's happiness
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goes up and down over the course of the day,
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minute to minute in some cases,
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and try to understand how what people are doing,
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who they're with, what they're thinking about, and all
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the other factors that describe our day, how those might
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relate to those changes in happiness, we might be able
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to discover some of the things that really have
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a big influence on happiness.
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We've been fortunate with this project to collect
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quite a lot of data, a lot more data of this kind than I think
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has ever been collected before,
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over 650,000 real-time reports
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from over 15,000 people.
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And it's not just a lot of people, it's a really diverse group,
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people from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80s,
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a wide range of incomes, education levels,
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people who are married, divorced, widowed, etc.
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They collectively represent every one of
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86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries.
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What I'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today
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is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we've been
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investigating, and that's mind-wandering.
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As human beings, we have this unique ability
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to have our minds stray away from the present.
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This guy is sitting here working on his computer,
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and yet he could be thinking about
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the vacation he had last month,
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wondering what he's going to have for dinner.
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Maybe he's worried that he's going bald. (Laughter)
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This ability to focus our attention on something other
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than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn
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and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can.
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And yet it's not clear what the relationship is
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between our use of this ability and our happiness.
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You've probably heard people suggest that you should
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stay focused on the present. "Be here now,"
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you've probably heard a hundred times.
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Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely
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immersed and focused on our experience in the moment.
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Maybe these people are right. Maybe mind-wandering
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is a bad thing.
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On the other hand, when our minds wander,
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they're unconstrained. We can't change the physical reality
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in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds.
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Since we know people want to be happy, maybe
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when our minds wander, they're going to someplace happier than the place
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that they're leaving. It would make a lot of sense.
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In other words, maybe the pleasures of the mind
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allow us to increase our happiness with mind-wandering.
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Well, since I'm a scientist, I'd like to try to
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resolve this debate with some data, and in particular
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I'd like to present some data to you from three questions
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that I ask with Track Your Happiness. Remember, this is from
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sort of moment-to-moment experience in people's real lives.
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There are three questions. The first one is a happiness question:
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How do you feel, on a scale ranging from very bad
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to very good? Second, an activity question:
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What are you doing, on a list of 22 different activities
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including things like eating and working and watching TV?
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And finally a mind-wandering question:
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Are you thinking about something other
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than what you're currently doing?
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People could say no -- in other words, I'm focused only on my task --
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or yes -- I am thinking about something else --
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and the topic of those thoughts are pleasant,
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neutral or unpleasant.
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Any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering.
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So what did we find?
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This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis,
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and you can see that bar there representing how happy
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people are when they're focused on the present,
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when they're not mind-wandering.
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As it turns out, people are substantially less happy
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when their minds are wandering than when they're not.
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Now you might look at this result and say, okay, sure,
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on average people are less happy when they're mind-wandering,
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but surely when their minds are straying away
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from something that wasn't very enjoyable to begin with,
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at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us.
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Nope. As it turns out,
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people are less happy when they're mind-wandering
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no matter what they're doing. For example,
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people don't really like commuting to work very much.
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It's one of their least enjoyable activities, and yet
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they are substantially happier when they're focused
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only on their commute than when their mind is going
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off to something else.
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It's amazing.
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So how could this be happening? I think part of the reason,
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a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander,
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we often think about unpleasant things, and they are
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enormously less happy when they do that,
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our worries, our anxieties, our regrets,
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and yet even when people are thinking about something
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neutral, they're still considerably less happy
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than when they're not mind-wandering at all.
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Even when they're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant,
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they're actually just slightly less happy
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than when they aren't mind-wandering.
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If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like
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having the chance to lose 50 dollars, 20 dollars
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or one dollar. Right? You'd never want to play. (Laughter)
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So I've been talking about this, suggesting, perhaps,
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that mind-wandering causes unhappiness, but all
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I've really shown you is that these two things are correlated.
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It's possible that's the case, but it might also be the case
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that when people are unhappy, then they mind-wander.
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Maybe that's what's really going on. How could we ever
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disentangle these two possibilites?
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Well, one fact that we can take advantage of, I think a fact
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you'll all agree is true, is that time goes forward, not
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backward. Right? The cause has to come before the effect.
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We're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person,
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and so we can look and see, does mind-wandering
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tend to precede unhappiness, or does unhappiness
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tend to precede mind-wandering, to get some insight
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into the causal direction.
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As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between
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mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later,
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consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy.
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In contrast, there's no relationship between being unhappy
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now and mind-wandering a short time later.
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In other words, mind-wandering very likely seems to be
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an actual cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness.
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A few minutes ago, I likened mind-wandering
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to a slot machine you'd never want to play.
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Well, how often do people's minds wander?
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Turns out, they wander a lot. In fact, really a lot.
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Forty-seven percent of the time, people are thinking
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about something other than what they're currently doing.
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How does that depend on what people are doing?
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This shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities
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ranging from a high of 65 percent — (Laughter) —
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when people are taking a shower, brushing their teeth,
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to 50 percent when they're working,
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to 40 percent when they're exercising,
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all the way down to this one short bar on the right
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that I think some of you are probably laughing at.
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Ten percent of the time people's minds are wandering
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when they're having sex. (Laughter)
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But there's something I think that's quite interesting in this graph,
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and that is, basically with one exception,
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no matter what people are doing, they're mind-wandering
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at least 30 percent of the time, which suggests, I think,
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that mind-wandering isn't just frequent, it's ubiquitous.
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It pervades basically everything that we do.
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In my talk today, I've told you a little bit about mind-wandering,
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a variable that I think turns out to be fairly important
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in the equation for happiness.
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My hope is that over time, by tracking people's
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moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences
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in daily life, we'll be able to uncover a lot of important causes of happiness,
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and then in the end, a scientific understanding of happiness
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will help us create a future that's not only richer
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and healthier, but happier as well.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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(Applause)
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