It’s one of those questions that probably spawned some of humanity’s greatest achievements — one that we’ve pursued for centuries and still don’t quite know how to word the answer to: What is happiness and where do we find it? Storytellers, philosophers, and psychologists have all tried to understand it, to find the right words for it.
This time around, it is pursued by Dean Burnett in “Happy Brain: Where Happiness Comes From, and Why,” the neuroscientist, entertainer, and science educator, who looks at the problem using some of the latest and most intriguing breakthroughs made in his field to address the question from a scientific standpoint.
The opening chapter describes “home,” where he discusses why we crave routine and familiarity. It’s not just where we grew up and how it impacts us — but also why we desire to interact with nature; walks along the beach or a secluded hiking trail not much changed since the days when Henry David Thoreau desired to be alone with his thoughts. It is this environment in which we thrive, because our brains require stability as well as privacy and a closeness to nature.
Burnett sometimes makes a fairly compelling case that happiness, which we think of as an occasional indulgence, may actually be essential to our own well-being meaning that Abraham Maslow was right to place it high on his hierarchy of human needs.
The chapters that follow are a cross-pollination of interviews with experts in their respective fields (Charlotte Church makes an appearance, discussing fame with Burnett), personal anecdotes, and humor. Early in the book, he gives us a brief roadmap of the human brain — the basic regions of the brain like the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala, and explains why no specific region is responsible for processing a specific emotion, rather, they all play parts in the way that our brains receive somatosensory information. He gives us a guide to the basic neurotransmitters, supplementing each with a recent study and then tying their conclusions back to stories from his past.
While some exciting discoveries are being made into how the brain operates, there is a great deal of sensationalism when it comes to communicating neuroscience to the public. Burnett is no stranger to this, understanding that properly communicating science to the public is crucial and also hard to get right.
While he realizes that our brains are wired to appreciate a narrative structure, he is also careful to point out that there are no easy answers to the big questions we have — particularly in neuroscience where brain scans are costly and sample sizes are small — but the journey of discovery can still be an interesting one.
This article was first published in the print edition of Brain World Magazine.
