But none of these hypotheses is especially convincing. The sexual selection theory, for instance, predicts that males ought to have more musical talent than females, but even if teenage boys have been known to spend untold hours jamming in pursuit of the world’s heaviest metal, there’s no compelling evidence that males actually have greater musical talent.[43] There are thousands (or perhaps hundreds of thousands) of happily married women who devote their lives to playing, composing, and recording music. What’s more, there’s no particular reason to think that the alleged seducees (women, in Miller’s account) derive any less pleasure from making music than do the alleged seducers, or that an appreciation of music is in any way tied to fertility. No doubt music can be used in the service of courtship, but the fact that a trait can be used in a particular way doesn’t prove that it evolved for that purpose; likewise, of course, with lullabies.
Instead, many modern pleasures may emerge from the broadly tuned pleasure systems that we inherited from our ancestors. Although music as such — used for purposes of recreation, not mere identification (the way songbirds and cetaceans employ musical sounds) — is unique to humans, many or most of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie music are not. Just as much of language is built on brain circuits that are considerably ancient, there is good reason to think that music relies largely (though perhaps not entirely) on devices that we inherited from our premusical ancestors. Rhythmic production appears in rudimentary form in at least some apes (King Kong isn’t alone in beating his chest), and the ability to differentiate pitch is even more widespread. Goldfish and pigeons have been trained to distinguish musical styles. Music likely also taps into the sort of pleasure we (and most apes) derive from social intimacy, the enjoyment we get from accurate predictions (as in the anticipation of rhythmic timing) and their juxtaposition with the unexpected,[44] and something rather more mundane, the “mere familiarity effect” (mentioned earlier, in the context of belief). And in playing musical instruments (and in singing), we get a sense of mastery and control. When we listen to the blues, we do so, at least in part, so we won’t feel alone; even the most angst-ridden teenager gets some pleasure in knowing that his or her pain is shared.
Forms of entertainment like music, movies, and video games might be thought of as what Steven Pinker calls “pleasure technologies” — cultural inventions that maximize the responses of our reward system. We enjoy such things not because they propagate our genes or because they conveyed specific advantages to our ancestors, but because they have been culturally selected for — precisely to the extent that they manage to tap into loopholes in our preexisting pleasure-seeking machinery.
The bottom line is this: our pleasure center consists not of some set of mechanisms perfectly tuned to promote the survival of the species, but a grab bag of crude mechanisms that are easily (and pleasurably) outwitted. Pleasure is only loosely correlated with what evolutionary biologists call “reproductive fitness” — and for that, we should be grateful.
Given how much we do to orient ourselves to the pursuit of pleasure, you’d expect us to be pretty good at assessing what’s likely to make us happy and what’s not. Here again, evolution holds some surprises.
A simple problem is that much of what makes us happy doesn’t last long. Candy bars make us happy — for an instant — but we soon return to the state of mind we experienced before we had one. The same holds (or can hold) for sex, for movies, for television shows, and for rock concerts. Many of our most intense pleasures are shortlived.
But there’s a deeper issue, which shows up in how we set our long-term goals; although we behave as if we want to maximize our long-term happiness, we frequently are remarkably poor at anticipating what will genuinely make us happy. As the psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have shown, predicting our own happiness can be a bit like forecasting the weather: a pretty inexact science. Their textbook case,[45] which should give pause to assistant professors everywhere, concerns the young faculty member’s inevitable quest for tenure. Virtually every major U.S. institution promises to its finest, most successful young professors a lifetime of academic freedom and guaranteed employment. Slog through graduate school, a postdoc or two, and five or six years of defining your very own academic niche, and if you succeed (as measured by the length of your résumé), you will gain tenure and be set for life.
The flip slide (rarely mentioned) is the slog that fails. Five to ten years spent working on a Ph.D., the postdocs, the half-decade of teaching, unappreciative undergraduates, the interminable faculty meetings, the struggle for grant money — and for what? Without a publication record, you’re out of a job. Any professor can tell you that tenure is fantastic, and not getting tenure is miserable.
Or so we believe. In reality, neither outcome makes nearly as much difference to overall happiness as people generally assume. People who get tenure tend to be relieved, and initially ecstatic, but their happiness doesn’t linger; they soon move on to worrying about other things. By the same token, people who don’t get tenure are indeed often initially miserable, but their misery is usually short-lived. Instead, after the initial shock, people generally adapt to their circumstances. Some realize that the academic rat race isn’t for them; others start new careers that they actually enjoy more.
Aspiring assistant professors who think that their future happiness hinges on getting tenure often fail to take into account one of the most deeply hard-wired properties of the mind: the tendency to get used to whatever’s going on. The technical term for that is adaptation.[46] For example, the sound of rumbling trucks outside your office may annoy you at first, but over time you learn to block it out — that’s adaptation. Similarly, we can adapt to even more serious annoyances, especially those that are predictable, which is why a boss who acts like a jerk every day can actually be less irritating than a boss who acts like a jerk less often, but at random intervals. As long as something is a constant, we can learn to live with it. Our circumstances do matter, but psychological adaptation means that they often matter less than we might expect.
This is true at both ends of the spectrum. Lottery winners get used to their newfound wealth, and others, people like the late Christopher Reeve, find ways of coping with circumstances most of us would find unimaginable. Don’t get me wrong — I’d like to win the lottery and hope that I will never be seriously injured. But as a psychologist I know that winning the lottery wouldn’t really change my life. Not only would I have to fend off all the long-lost “friends” who would come out of the woodwork, but also I’d face the inevitable fact of adaptation: the initial rush couldn’t last because the brain won’t allow it to.
The power of adaptation is one reason why money matters a lot less than most people think. According to literary legend, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said to Ernest Hemingway, “The rich are not like us.” Hemingway allegedly brushed him off with the reply “Yes, they have more money,” implying that wealth alone might make little difference. Hemingway was right. People above the poverty line are
43
All this is with respect to humans. The bird world is a different story; there, males do most of the singing, and the connection to courtship is more direct.
44
Music that is either purely predictable or completely unpredictable is generally considered unpleasant — tedious when it’s too predictable, discordant when it’s too unpredictable. Composers like John Cage have, of course played, with that balance, but few people derive the same pleasure from Cage’s quasi-random (“aleatoric”) compositions that they do from music with a more traditional balance between the predictable and the surprising — a fact that holds true in genres ranging from classical to jazz and rock. (The art of improvisation is to invent what in hindsight seems surprising yet inevitable.)
45
Gilbert has another favorite example: children. Although most people anticipate that having children will increase their net happiness, studies show that people with children are actually less happy on average than those without. Although the highs (“Daddy I wuv you”) may be spectacular, on a moment-by-moment basis, most of the time spent taking care of children is just plain work. “Objective” studies that ask people to rate how happy they are at random moments rank raising children — a task with clear adaptive advantage — somewhere between housework and television, well below sex and movies. Luckily, from the perspective of perpetuating the species, people tend to remember the intermittent high points better than the daily grind of diapers and chauffeur duty.
46
The psychological use of the term is, of course, distinct from the evolutionary use. In psychology,