Preface
During my undergraduate years, one of my friends recommended me a book named ”How to be happier?” by Prof. Ben Tal-Shahar, Harvard University. The book provideded a brand new perspecitive towards our knowledge of well-being and happiness, from which I gained a lot a inspiration . Luckily enough, a few weeks ago, I came across the online open course presented by Prof. Tal-Shahar. After watching several lectures and combining with the materials from the book that I have read before, I tended to come up with some thoughts toward these abstract concepts, which indeed are intrinsically correlated with our lives. Therefore, I decided to write down those occationally shining sparks within our minds.
Chapter 1. Introduction of Positive Psychology and Happiness
Currently popular self-help movement are always over promising and under delivering, while acdemic research are rigrous and systematic, yet sometimes too professional and not well received. On average, a journal artical is only read by 7 people.
The goal of Positive Psychology is to build a bridge between academia and self-help movements, to deliver science that works.
Some study tips to gain better understanding of happiness:
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Take active notes and engage in the material
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Time-ins to introspect into your inner mind, cause silence and reflection can help to retain the memory and gain the deepest thoughts.
Positive Psychology is descendented from humanistic psychology and psychoanalysis, related more to humanistic view, which focus on spirit and soul that assign more dignity and value to human, than behavoristic view which studies the response of human to outside simulation. It’s more about kindness, goodness, and optimism, focus on health and salutogenesis (the origin of health).
5 essential elements of being happy:
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Physically and mentally healthy
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Loving social relationships
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A self-concordant life goal
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Grateful attitude to the take-for-granted, resillience to unavoidable negative emotions
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External material conditions to cover basic needs, like food and shetlter
Happiness is more concerned with our state of mind, instead of the status of bank account. It’s diffcult to decide whether you are happy or not right now, but it’s possible your level of happiness increases gradually through the time. That’s why we are asking “how to become happier”.
Concerned with cultural difference in pursuing happiness, we were focusing too much on difference, while ignoring the more similarity between them, there are much in common across cultures.
Our brain is just like a container, when information is drawn from outside and filled in, the form of our brain decides the shape of the world we perceive. To different minds, the same information can have different interpretations, such interpretation is in fact a kind of transformation of our minds. So in order to change the perceived world, we need to reshape the form of our brain.
The sole grows more by subtraction than addition. Chip away the limitations, and our potentials emerge.
The biggest mistakes in the process of pursuing happiness is not asking the right questions, but always seeking the right answers.
Charateristic of successful and happy people:
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Deep faith in themselves
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Always asking new questions, strong curiosity
From the figures we could see that our algorithm works best for dog and dance and relatively worse for Van Gogh and Mona Lisa, while medium for the lady set, since for the first two sets, the difference between the foreground and background is relatively larger than the latter two.
