It happens when a phenomenon arises from very large numbers of something, but not smaller versions of it.

For example, billions of neurons lead to a conscious human brain, but two neurons are not a small version of consciousness.

The word happiness is used to refer to three related things:

• Emotional happiness
• Moral happiness
• Judgemental happiness

It’s hard to define emotional happiness, but when we feel it, we have no doubt about...

All claims of happiness are subjective. And are formed from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as context.

Nobody really knows what happiness feels like for others, so that means we can’t say definitely whethe...

The greatest ability of the human brain is to imagine, to see the world as it has never been before.

But imagination has three shortcomings:

• Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may ...

Your experiential background can dramatically change your happiness levels.

Once you know something exists and have experienced pleasure from it, then your definition of happiness changes compared to what it was in the past.

Psychological sciences will always be imperfect because we are trying to observe someone else's subjective experience, but it's the best we've got and the closest an outside observer can get to understanding the inside of someone else's mind.

Negative events affect us but not as long as we expect them. When our psychological immune system is working, we are able to cope with any negative situation that comes our way. 

Explaining events robs them of their emotional impact because it makes the event s...

It refers to judging historical events or people by modern-day standards.

It is largely useless and unfair because you can't expect historical figures to make the same decisions as we do now because they lived in a very different context.

Wealth increases people’s happiness after it removes them from poverty and places them in the middle class.

After that, there is little relation between wealth and happiness.