The door is already swinging shut as a flash of horror hits me. Clunk.

There they are, my car keys, dangling from the side of the steering wheel, a few feet away and impossibly out of reach. The chill autumn evening is fading to dark; I’m in a rest stop 150 miles from home; and I’ve just locked my keys in my car. Right now I hate myself so much. Where’s my brain!?

The fact is, though, we all make dumb mistakes from time to time. Hitting “send” instead of “delete”; driving right past the exit you meant to take; calling your wife by your ex-girlfriend’s name. In the moment, you feel as though your brain has been replaced with a particularly uncerebral variety of brick. But it turns out that screwing up is a surprisingly subtle and nuanced phenomenon, one that results not despite our brain’s sophistication but because of it. Psychologists hope that by understanding how our brains go wrong, they can help us avoid snafus in the future.

The critical research began decades ago, when aviation experts began trying to understand the alarming rate of crashes that then plagued the industry. It was clear that a high proportion of the accidents were due not to mechanical failures but to human error. Researchers found that just as machines tend to break in certain specific ways—“failure modes,” as engineers put it—humans also tend to screw up in a limited number of predictable ways. To put it another way, there’s an order to our irrationality.

Our brains, it turns out, are much more like machines than we realize. As we roam around negotiating our world, it feels like we’re rational creatures who consciously control our behavior. But most of our actual behavior is carried out beyond our consciousness. “Human cognition can be divided between those processes that are automatic and those that are controlled,” explains Dr. Matthew Lieberman, a psychologist at the University of California Los Angeles. Controlled processes, like writing a sonnet or planning a trip, take mental effort. Automatic processes tend to feel effortless, so much so we’re often hardly aware of them at all. “You have no problem opening your eyes and simultaneously experiencing all the objects that are in front of you,” Lieberman points out, even though quite a lot of complex processing is needed to achieve this feat. It just feels easy because all the work is being carried out behind the scrim of awareness.

Automatic brain systems govern both instinctive behavior and well-learned habits—anything you can do quickly and easily, such as brushing your teeth, recognizing your name amid the burble of strangers’ conversation, or jumping at the sound of a loud noise. The automatic brain is a powerful engine, speedy and efficient. But there’s a trade-off for all that speed. The automatic brain is dumb. When faced with multiple possibilities, it doesn’t reason through its options. Instead, it follows very simple rules of thumb, which psychologists call heuristics. The simplicity of these mental programs makes them lightning fast, but when they encounter something they’re not geared for, it’s like a band saw running into a nail.

One automatic routine I find particularly vexatious involves my ATM card. After years of using the cash machine down the block, my brain has developed a deeply ingrained habit: Swipe my card; put card in wallet; enter PIN; select amount of cash; pocket cash; walk away. Easy and effortless! The problem comes when I visit my parents’ home in Florida. The ATM at the bank closest to their house works a little differently: It’s designed to keep the card until the transaction is done. I swipe the card, but don’t return it to my wallet. The rest of the habit unfolds as always: I get the money, put it in my pocket, and walk away. Ten seconds later, the ATM spits out my card. But I’m not there.

I would have stopped making the mistake if I had learned a new habit for taking money out of that particular ATM. But one of the characteristics of the automatic brain is that it’s slow to learn. In 2009, a team led by psychologist Dr. Phillippa Lally at University College of London recruited volunteers who wanted to teach themselves a new habit, such as eating a piece of fruit every day at breakfast or going for a short jog. Every day the subjects were asked to record whether they’d carried out their tasks or not, and to rate whether a task seemed effortless or even “hard not to do,” as a fully ingrained habit can seem. When the results came in, Lally and her colleagues found most of the volunteers’ self-reports followed a similar pattern: The tasks were hard to do at first, but quickly became much easier, and then reached a plateau as the habit took hold. Getting there took persistence. Depending on the person and the habit they were trying to learn, automaticity took anywhere from 18 days to eight months to set in. Consistency turned out to be key. Those who kept blowing off their tasks were less likely to ever form the habit at all. In my case, I just don’t spend enough time in Florida to form a new pattern of behavior.

Many brain hiccup errors occur in a similar fashion—when the conscious and automatic parts of the brain get in each other’s way. When I forget my wife’s birthday, for instance, it’s not because I don’t love her; it’s because I’ve failed to pre-establish a cue that will trigger my conscious memory. When I miss the exit for my in-laws’ house and instead barrel along as if I’m driving to work—which happens to be two exits down the same highway—again, it’s not for lack of love for my in-laws. (No really!) It’s because distraction prevented me from consciously overriding my well-learned habit of going to the office.

In each case, the solution involves identifying where the automatic brain is going wrong and figuring out a way to interrupt that robotic behavior on your own. In the case of my wife’s birthday, I’ve set up a reminder in my iPhone. To avoid missing my in-laws’ exit, I now explicitly ask my wife to remind me when we’re getting close. (Since she doesn’t drive to my office as much as I do, she doesn’t suffer from the same deep behavioral groove.) And when I’m visiting my parents and need cash, I put my wallet back into a different pocket than usual after inserting the card in the ATM. When I reach the end of the routine, the strange sensation of an empty wallet-pocket cues me that something’s amiss and my conscious brain reengages.

Understanding how our brains make mistakes doesn’t mean we’ll never screw up again. But it should, hopefully, improve the odds that we don’t make the same mistakes too many times in a row.

Illustration by Gianpalo Pagni.

Brain Hiccups The Saturday Evening Post

As scientists find more medical conditions that respond to placebos just as well as to drugs and even surgery, they are gaining a healthy respect for the mind’s amazing ability to heal. Illustration by Shout.

Maybe you have comforted a crying child by kissing her scraped knee to “make it all better”—and seen her tears turn to a smile and the pain recede. Perhaps you’ve stumbled to the medicine cabinet, half-asleep at 2 a.m., taken an acetaminophen for the headache that woke you, felt better—and discovered in the morning that you had actually taken a calcium pill.

Or maybe you took your arthritic knee to a hospital where you were prepped for arthroscopic surgery, wheeled into the operating room, and had a completely fake procedure in which the surgeon made a few incisions but did not remove the cartilage whose deterioration causes osteoarthritis—after which you had less pain and were walking better than you had in years.

Okay, you have probably never experienced the last one. But scores of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee did. They volunteered for one of the more astounding medical studies in recent years, in which researchers performed true arthroscopic surgery on some volunteers, flushing out the joint and removing cartilage, and sham surgery on others. The sham surgery is a form of placebo, an intervention that has no physical effect (inert sugar pills are the best-known placebos). In the groundbreaking study, when patients with osteoarthritis of the knee merely thought they had received arthroscopic surgery the intensity, frequency, and duration of their knee pain diminished as much as in patients who actually received the highly touted $5,000 procedure.

It is tempting to say that “mere thought” or “mere belief” caused these patients to feel and function better, just as the child’s trust in her mother made her knee feel better and our belief that little white pills will relieve a headache made the calcium tablet do so, even though it contained not a speck of headache-fighting medication. But if doctors and scientists have learned one thing about the placebo response or placebo effect, it is this: There is nothing “mere” about how thoughts, beliefs, and the power of the mind affect the body.

As researchers find more and more conditions that respond to placebos, they are gaining new respect for the power of mind. They are also learning how a belief or expectation can travel from the brain to arthritic knees, asthmatic airways, hypertensive blood vessels, and sites of pain. Understanding these mechanisms holds out the promise of tapping the placebo response more systematically, so more illnesses can be treated not with pills and operations (which almost always come with side effects or other risks) but with the power of the mind. “What we believe and expect can significantly influence the outcome of a disease, how much pain we feel, even whether Parkinson’s symptoms diminish,” says neuroscientist Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal, who examines the brain basis for the placebo response in his 2012 book, Brain Wars.

To investigate placebos, scientists typically take patients with the same condition and give half of them a real treatment and the other half a placebo. Crucially, all the patients believe they are receiving the real treatment. Studies like these have shown that placebos can successfully treat pain and other problems, including angina, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, hypertension, gastric reflux, psoriasis, anxiety, and depression.

But while anecdotes are not science, it is stories of the placebo response that drive home its awesome power—much more so than reports in dry research papers. Placebos burst into the medical literature in 1955, with an article by Harvard Medical School anesthesiologist Henry Beecher, who had served as a medic in World War II. One day, when his field hospital was running out of morphine, a desperate Beecher had injected some of the suffering soldiers with a saline solution, assuring them that it would vanquish their pain. Miraculously, it did. With that, placebos had entered the medical mainstream as worthy of study and, increasingly, clinical use.

Placebo Power The Saturday Evening Post

March is the time when vasectomies increase by 50 percent thanks to the much-anticipated opportunity for patients to “recover” in front of their TVs.

March is also the time when workplaces do some real number-crunching: on the expected loss in employee productivity (estimated at 8.4 million hours and $192 million last year); on money bet on office pools (a hefty chunk of the $2.5 billion in total sports wagering each year); and even on the number of times workers hit the so-called “Boss Button” (computer software that instantly hides live video of games with a phony business spreadsheet), which was activated more than 3.3 million times during the first four days of last year’s tournament.

But mostly, the NCAA Basketball Championship—better known as “March Madness” or “The Big Dance”—is a time that gives us something to cheer about beyond the game itself. If history and science hold true, no matter the outcome of the three-week tournament that begins in March, most of the millions who will follow its hard-court action will emerge as winners. “That’s because in the long run it’s really not the games that matter,” says Daniel Wann, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Murray State University in Kentucky and author of Sports Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Spectators. “Being a fan gives us something to talk about, to share and bond with others. And for the vast majority of people, it’s psychologically healthier when you can increase social connections with others.”

After conducting some 200 studies over the past two decades, Wann, a leading researcher on “sports fandom,” finds consistent results: people who identify themselves as sports fans tend to have lower rates of depression and higher self-esteem than those who don’t. Blame it on our primal nature. “Sports fandom is really a tribal thing,” says Wann, a phenomenon that can help fulfill our psychological need to belong—providing similar benefits to the social support achieved through religious, professional, or other affiliations. “We’ve known for decades that social support—our tribal network—is largely responsible for keeping people mentally sound. We really do have a need to connect with others in some way.”

But when it comes to opportunities to connect, the Big Dance may have a foothold over other sporting events. “The beauty of March Madness is that it attracts people of all levels of sports fandom—and for different reasons,” says Edward Hirt, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Indiana University who researches how fanship affects social identity.

Some watch, whether or not they usually follow sports, because they are alumni or have another previous affiliation to these “tribal networks”—the 60-plus participating college teams. Others connect on the spot, perhaps because it’s easier to form emotional allegiances with gutsy amateur athletes who compete with heart and soul (and while juggling mid-term exams) rather than for the paychecks collected by millionaire pros.

Also consider the unique nature of the tournament itself—a series of back-to-back games over the course of several weeks with little to no idle time in between during which a casual fan might lose interest. “I have not seen any empirical evidence to support that March Madness is necessarily better than other sports events” for promoting mood and mindset enhancements. “But theoretically I expect it could be,” says Wann.

“There are only a couple of events—the Super Bowl also comes to mind—that seem to transcend typical fandom into being akin to a national holiday … a reason for people to get together. But with the Super Bowl, everything leads to one game—and most of the time it’s an anticlimatic one that’s over by half-time.”

TV sports as therapy? Passionate fans tend to have lower rates of depression and higher self-esteem than the rest of us. Illustrations by Kagan Mcleod.

With March Madness, however, Wann notes, “there’s a longer, more drawn out event that provides more opportunities to engage in social opportunities and connections. And bonds tend to be stronger with a longer passage of time.”

Do the math: More games + more time = more opportunities to share for better bonding. “Because upsets are a normal occurrence, and you get runs by Cinderella teams knocking off the perennial favorites, there’s enough uncertainty and unpredictability in this tournament to get people excited—and keep them excited,” adds Hirt. “Early games affect later decisions; there’s a cascading effect, as opposed to a one-time pick … and that allows for the pride that comes with someone with no sports expertise being able to win the office pool.”

Maybe that’s why despite a short-term productivity loss many experts believe that March Madness actually benefits the workplace in the long term. Bonds formed in office pools and post-game water-cooler chatter build morale and inspire teamwork. At afterwork get-togethers in front of the tube, buddies can share chicken wings—and their emotions. “You have guys hugging each other, cursing at the ref, and bonding by sharing a sense of commonality,” says Hirt. “Where else can guys express their emotions like that?”

And those other relationships? Although studies show that two to four percent of marriages are negatively affected when one spouse is an ardent fan (think of the so-called “football widow”), sports fandom has a positive or neutral effect on nearly half of relationships, says Wann. “It gives many couples something to do together or allows one to have time to go off and do their own thing.”

Even if you watch in solitude, March Madness and other sporting events provide a diversion from the woes of everyday life—if only for a few hours. “Older people, especially when widowed or physically incapacitated, are more likely than others to relate to televised events,” says Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D., senior editor of the Journal of Media Psychology and a California State University, Los Angeles, professor emeritus of psychology. “Watching sports helps us get outside ourselves.”

With the thrill of victory, many fans experience bona fide joy—complete with hormonal and other physiological changes such as increased pulse and feelings of elation. And with defeat, the overwhelming majority may initially feel sadness and disappointment, but usually rebound within a day or two, studies show.

However, lest we present too rosy a picture, it must be said that sports fandom can also be a health hazard. In a 2008 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that on days when Germany’s soccer team played in the World Cup, cardiac emergencies more than tripled for German men and nearly doubled for women. Of course, European soccer fans are an extreme bunch; but even in the U.S., although visits to hospital emergency rooms tend to decrease during a much-anticipated sports game, there’s a higher-than-usual surge immediately after the game ends. The explanation: To see a game’s final outcome, some die-hard fans delay making that trip to the ER.

And, of course, no story about March Madness would be complete without mention of gambling. The odds of predicting all game winners are about 9.2 quintillion to one. Yet when it comes to sports betting, nothing turns John Q. Fan into Jimmy the Greek more than the NCAA tournament. Workplace camaraderie is one reason. But there’s another important factor.

Bragging rights.

With Super Bowl pools there’s just a series of boxes with different scores. If you’re lucky enough to pick the right one, you win. “But it’s a more complex task in filling out all the March Madness brackets, and a seductive pleasure in trying to predict the upsets,” says psychologist Edward Hirt.

Another reason why nearly twice as much money is wagered on March Madness than the Super Bowl: More than in other events, NCAA tournament fans simultaneously root for more than one team, triggering a greater likelihood of making multiple bets.

With other sports championships you have to wait a week or at least several days between games, but this sports soap opera—with its David versus Goliath battles—continues night and day, providing a stronger hook.

So let the games begin. Whatever the final outcome, odds are good that the overall advantage—for mind, body, and spirit—is definitely in your court.

Are Sports Fans Happier? The Saturday Evening Post

"This goes right back to my abandonment issues."
From January/February 2011

Sure, therapy is serious business. But sometimes you just have to laugh.

"It's dark in here—let there be light!"
From December 1983

Whoa! We know what this guy’s problem is. But if you think he’s a control freak…

"...and when did you start feeling that you had to be in complete control of every situation?"
From September/October 2003

Sometimes it’s best just to go along. But admit it, Mr. My Way is reminding you of someone you know.

"For your manic–depression
I’m going to put you on lithium batteries."
From November/December 2011

The right medication is so important.

"I never realized how empty my life was until I started tweeting about it."
From November/December 2011

And you thought social networking served no purpose.

From January 19, 1963

Hey, cleaning ladies have problems, too. I found this cute cartoon in a 1963 issue of the Post.

From December 1983

Now this is therapy.

"You must remember that the doctors slap all babies at birth!"
From April 1, 1950

Cartoons: The Shrink’s Couch The Saturday Evening Post

As Hope entered her 50s, though, something clicked in her, and she felt somehow replenished.

“When I was young,” she says, speaking by phone from her office at a small college in upstate New York, “I used to drive like an old lady. I drive faster now. I don’t worry so much about what other people think. I speak my mind. I don’t know if it was anything in particular. It was just a gradual awakening after I turned 50.”

She compares her age to her favorite season, autumn. “It’s when the trees are full of color and have their most extreme beauty, just before winter,” she says. “That’s the same season for being in your 50s.”

Two years ago, Hope got engaged. But she doesn’t attribute happiness to late love. Rather, she attributes late love to happiness. In a sense, time wedged an opening—like a stream of water cracking open a big boulder—that made it possible for someone to come into her life.

Hope’s growing happiness may be more the rule than an exception, with a number of recent reports suggesting that just when people start needing glasses to read a restaurant menu, life begins to come into clearer focus.

Most recently there was the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a survey of 1.2 million Americans between 18 and 85, as well as a separate Gallup poll of 340,000. Both surveys produced similar findings—that people’s sense of well-being follows a U-shaped trend, starting high in youth, dipping in one’s 30s and 40s, hitting a low point at 50, then beginning to gather momentum.

“We don’t know why well-being seems to rise with age,” says Nikki Duggan, Healthways’ director of operations and analytics. “Though one trend we see is that over time people feel more respected.”

Other factors, say experts, may be that over time people become more realistic about their expectations, more accepting about what they have or haven’t achieved, and more resilient when things don’t pan out. For many, there’s a growing appreciation of life that may be missing in the years of striving and stress typical of one’s 30s and 40s.

The topic of happiness has blossomed into an industry—from the positive psychology movement to new ways of approaching mental health treatment to happiness skill-building to a book-publishing niche that has almost become its own genre. There are international conferences that look at what happiness means to business and to national and global economics; the south Asian kingdom of Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness Index; Britain recently started a project to measure the national GWB, or general well-being, and this year, Australia hosted the 5th annual World Happiness Forum.

Happiness is particularly relevant in the U.S., which was, after all, the first country to make the happiness of its citizens part of its core mission, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson substituted what must have seemed an ethereal notion, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” for a more common phrase of the time, “life, liberty and property.” The ideal of happiness was truly radical at a time when humans were generally presumed to be subjects whose sole purpose was to serve the state and its rulers.

The topic is no less important now than it was then, but the recent efforts to compare the relative happiness of the different ages is more relevant than ever: It is projected that life expectancy in the U.S. will rise to 79.5 years by 2020. According to the 2010 census, 40.3 million Americans, 13 percent of the population, are 65 or older. That number is expected to reach 72 million by 2030 and more than double to 89 million, 20 percent of the population, by 2050.

To be sure, happiness is an elusive topic, a vague term for something we seek without necessarily having a definite idea of what it is we’re after.

llustrations by Koren Shadmi.

“There’s a lot of confusion between happiness and pleasure,” says Matthieu Ricard, author of Why Meditate? Working With Thoughts and Emotions and the French translator for the Dalai Lama. “Happiness is about well-being, a sense of fulfillment. That’s different from how happiness is promoted—it’s all about do this or use that and you’ll find happiness. That is more of a recipe for exhaustion than flourishing. It has to be more a way of being than a momentary pleasant stage. In that sense, pleasure can contribute to happiness, but it can also undermine it, if, for example, it becomes a destructive obsession.”

Many experts prefer the term “well-being” because it describes an overall condition rather than a fleeting feeling of pleasure. Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist whom many regard as the father of positive psychology, called his latest book Flourish, and introduced an acronym, PERMA, to describe the elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

The recent studies suggest that as people age they get better at all of the above. Reported in a series of graphs, Gallup-Healthways’ survey showed that as the years go by Americans are more satisfied and feel more respected at work. They smoke less and eat a healthier diet. Older Americans worry less and are less sad and depressed than people in other age groups, and that trend rises into their 60s despite less robust physical health.

“As you age, you realize that you can be happy in the present,” says Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage. “You don’t have to wait until you achieve something more. It’s something you cultivate in the present by connecting to social support networks and paying attention to what’s happening in your life right now.”

Another factor may be the ability to bounce back from adversity or just to keep things in perspective.

“My sense is that unless people change their attitudes and behavior, they remain with the optimal levels of happiness they have,” Achor says. “But what they do gain over time is resilience. They can experience stress and failure and find they’re able to overcome.”

The flip side of the age issue is that unhappiness—a deep, fundamental sense that life has gone off the rails—is occurring at younger ages, with depression occurring earlier than in the past. The mean onset of depression diagnoses in the 1970s was 29. In 2006, it was 14.5. Achor blames technology for this phenomenon. He describes what has happened to modern citizens as a “connection paradox” caused by the urgency to be always linked up and wired in. You can’t be happy if you’re compulsively trying to connect because of a feeling—or fear—of being disconnected or disengaged.

“People are doing too many things,” Achor says. “They’re stressed, running after everything possible. Their brains, even in down moments, are not down. They’re connected to virtual worlds and multitasking. But what we know from research is that the more personal projects a person has on their plate, the more their brain’s resources are spread out, and they don’t get to enjoy them. The more multi-tasking we do, the less happy we are.”

Focus and self-discipline improve with age, and there may be some advantage for people who didn’t grow up mesmerized and conditioned by omnipresent flashing screens, say the experts.

Age, especially for people who have enjoyed a moderate level of success, may also ease the disappointment of youthful high hopes of fame and fortune.

For Roger Stewart, now retired, contentment came from accepting that what he had achieved in his career—a highly rewarding post as an executive editor at a big-city newspaper—was more than adequate professionally, even though he’d started in journalism with the goal of becoming well-known on a national scale.

“When I was in my 30s, I remember listening to an older man I looked up to who was a professor of philosophy, saying, ‘Hey, there are certain stars in the world of philosophy, and I know now I’m never going to be one of them, but I’m comfortable with who I am,’” Roger recalls. “I remember feeling shocked by that. How could he accept being anything but number one? Today, I get it. Making it to the so-called ‘top of your profession’ is not the key to happiness.”

“As you get older, your outlook certainly does change,” says Hope Ferguson, the communications specialist. A number of factors come into play, and one of the biggest is the inescapable experience of living through enough triumphs and setbacks to put things in perspective. “You see the passage of time. You’ve lost people. You see that life has an end, and that makes you want to seize the moment.”

None other than Aristotle asserted that happiness is the goal of goals. But, in researching The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, Howard S. Friedman, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, came to the conclusion that perhaps happiness ought not to be a goal at all.

Friedman wasn’t even looking at happiness per se. Rather he was analyzing factors that influence longevity. What he found was that “certain behaviors that resulted in happiness also added to people’s longevity.”

In other words, there’s a correlation between happiness and health, and therefore lifespan. But what’s unique about Friedman’s discovery is that “happiness was really just a byproduct of certain habits” rather than an end in itself. For this reason, Friedman doesn’t believe in the happiness skill-building exercises advocated by many positive psychologists because those habits are not sustainable over time and, more important, because they are less vital than the basic healthy habits that we all know are good for us.

“The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of doing meaningful things,” Friedman says. “Happy people have certain behaviors. They’re active, they’re socially engaged, they have good relationships and are involved in their communities. They’re absorbed by their work and careers. If they want to do something, they don’t worry that it’s going to take too much effort or be too stressful. They’re persistent. They’re not impulsive. They don’t drink too much. They’re not attracted by destructive relationships. They’re not vain or self-centered. What we found is that happiness is what you get when you live a thriving life.”

Out of Friedman’s research comes a word of warning to those who are happy now, and a word of encouragement to those who are still reaching for it: People who have good habits can lose them and people who don’t can get them.

Even though happiness may naturally rise in one’s 50s—a reward for a life well lived—each of us has to keep earning that reward at every age.

The Pursuit of Happiness The Saturday Evening Post