Your Brain Was Not Built for Bliss
Grammar: Inversion
A Level 6 English lesson exploring psychology.
What's in this lesson
A Level 6 (proficiency) ESL lesson on psychology, practising inversion. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary, a grammar reference with practice and discussion questions.
From the reading: Your Brain Was Not Built for Bliss
Here is a thought that should give any philosopher pause. You spend years studying Aristotle, practising equanimity, constructing a telos worthy of your radical freedom — and then a psychologist in Jerusalem politely informs you that you have two selves, and they disagree. Such is the paradox at the heart of Daniel Kahneman's most unsettling finding: the experiencing self lives in the present moment, registers pleasure and pain second by second, and promptly forgets almost all of it; the remembering self edits, narrates, and decides what your life means — and it is a compulsive liar.
Vocabulary
- affective forecasting
- bear in mind
- hedonic adaptation
- presence of mind
Grammar: Inversion
- Fronted predicative
- Gone is the comfortable assumption that happiness accumulates. — subject follows predicative adjective/past participle for emphasis
- Such / So inversion
- Such is the paradox that even philosophers hesitate. — fronted such or so inverts subject and verb for rhetorical punch
Discussion questions
- Imagine you could choose: a life of daily small pleasures you will barely remember, or a life of struggle with a magnificent ending — which would you pick?
- If a machine could perfectly simulate every sensation of a happy life, would living inside it count as living well?
- What would you do if science proved that your idea of your own happiness was statistically wrong?
Your Brain Was Not Built for Bliss
Grammar: Inversion
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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