The Happy Brain - Where Happiness Comes From, and Why

 

 Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1.   Happiness in the Brain

2.  There’s No Place Like Home

3.   Working on the Brain

4.   Happiness Is Other People

5.   Love, Lust or Bust

6.   You’ve Got to Laugh

7.   The Dark Side of Happiness

8.   Happiness Through the Ages

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author 

 

Introduction

As a wise philosopher once said, ‘Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess.’ Aristotle, I think. Or possibly Nietzsche? Sounds like something he’d say. No matter, the point is valid; happiness is important.

But what makes anyone happy? Why are different people made happy by different things, and at different times? What’s the point of happiness?

Is there one? The reason I was interested was because I was meant to be writing a second book, but I had no idea what it should be about. Everyone I asked gave different suggestions, but eventually always said, ‘Just write about what makes you happy.’ As a very literal, scientifically minded type, I tried to look this up: what does make us happy? But all I found was an avalanche of management fads and techniques, cod philosophy, self-help manuals, life coaches and gurus, all of varying degrees of dubiousness, and all insisting that they definitely knew the secret to happiness, no matter who you are. I wouldn’t mind so much, but barely any of these ‘secrets’ matched up, suggesting that a lot of them might be nonsense.Case in point, here are some real headlines from the UK’s notorious

Daily Mail newspaper: ‘Forget cash – how sex and sleep are the key to happiness’; ‘Key to happiness? Start with £50k a year salary’; ‘Why the secret to happiness is having 37 things to wear’; ‘Is treating yourself like a baby the key to happiness?’; ‘Key to happiness for over- 55s? Buying a new pet and going for a day trip with lunch at a pub every month’; ‘The key to happiness? Handing out cakes on the street’; and so on. Make of that what you will.

Even more annoying for a doctor of neuroscience, science writer and apparent go-to guy for mainstream commentary on brain-based news like me, is that a lot of these so-called secrets invoke my discipline, or constantly refer to some valid-sounding-but-unspecific aspect of the brain’s functioning, like ‘dopamine’ or ‘oxytocin’ or ‘emotion centres’, in support of their claims. If you’re an experienced neurobod, you can easily spot when someone is just borrowing the terminology of your field to sound credible, rather than actually having any useful understanding of it.

And I thought, you know what? If you’re going to exploit my field, at least put some effort into it. Sure, the brain isn’t perfect, I’m often the first person to point that out, but it’s still one of the most fantastically and terrifyingly complex things to study. To truly explain how the brain deals with happiness would take more than a vague two-line summary or as mattering of impressive-sounding terminology, it would take a whole book.......... 

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