Instant Genius - The neuroscience of happiness

Episode Date: May 10, 2018

Everyone wants to be happy, it’s an inbuilt part of being human, but what exactly is going on in our brains when we feel happy and what can we do to ensure we live as happy a life as possible? We talk to neuroscientist, comedian and science writer Dean Burnett to find out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when people want something, there are plenty of people who will say they can provide it for little effort in return for some money. And that seems to have really muddied the waters a lot. So, yeah, it's a very murky field. That's one thing I ended up trying to combat with the book, trying to say, look, there's all these different claims, but what does the actual evidence save? You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in pre-year. print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb, Southwell, the production editor of BBC Focus magazine. Everyone wants to be happy. It's an inbuilt part of being human. What exactly is going on in our brains when we feel happy? And what can we do to ensure we live as happier life as possible? In this episode, Jason Goodyear, the commissioning editor of BBC Focus magazine, speaks to Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist, comedian and science writer about his new book, The Happy Brain, The Science of Where Happiness Comes from, and Why. Your latest book's called The Happy Brain, The Science of Where Happiness Comes from and Why. So is there any particular reason you chose this as the topic?

Yes, but it's not the most logical reason. It's quite stupid. It's a bit of elaborate backstory, story, but the first book, The Idiot Brain, that was, well, that came about due to a series of ridiculous circumstances which I never planned. And I assumed my first attempt at a book would be my one and only attempt. I thought, well, someone like me shouldn't be writing books at all. I got this opportunity. I'm just going to splurge on my knowledge in it, hope for the best, and then we'll see. And I assumed it would be like, you know, do some business for a few months, for people who read my blogs and stuff, maybe a few libraries would bite, and then it would all fade into the background, and we'd all move on their lives, pretend it never happened.

That's not how it panned out. It's gone far better than anyone expected and a lot of international success and so on. So it wasn't long before my publishers and agents were saying, so what's the next book about? And like I said, I hadn't planned on the first book, and the second one. So I had that very, very palpable, difficult second album's problem. But I literally had no idea what to write about.

And so I spoke lots of friends and collaborators and fellow writers and scientists and people I know, say, well, what do you think I should write about? And they all give me ideas, but they were all different ideas. And while they were genuinely good ideas, they were all like, they're all things I wouldn't probably put it as a blog post, but nothing I could really think could sustain a whole book. And the one thing that people kept saying when like they kept seeing the ideas and I kept knocking them back was, well, at the end of the day, you just got to write about whatever makes you happy.

And I'm a very literal person, it turns out. So I started taking that absolute face value, looking at what makes you happy? and why and essentially just snowballed from there really. So here we are with the book. I've written all about what makes you happy and why for the most ridiculous reason, I know, but there we go. So there's lots of kind of wishy-washy, self-helpy theories being banded around about how to achieve happiness and where it comes from and so on.

But it's actually incredibly difficult to pin down, isn't it? That's like one of the first things I realised. Because when you look up how to be happy or the science behind happiness and how you science with air quotes there. Like you say, it always comes down to, oh, there's these five tips, or you've just got to train your brain to do this. Or if you're lucky, they'll invoke, you've just got to boost your dopamine or your endorphins or your oxytocin levels.

They'll use a fragment of neuroscience to give it some credibility. But we're not talking about a basic thing here. We're talking about sort of a mental state of being, really. It's a complex emotion, it's a frame of mind, it's a sense of well-being, how you define happiness can be really varied and complex. So the idea that is one simple trick to it is kind of, well, it's misleading. It's an almost simplification. And if I'm being generous, I think a lot of the time it's just a misunderstanding of how complex it is.

I'm not saying there's anyone being actively mendacious about it, but it wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be the case. So yeah, there's lots of, you know, because everyone wants to be happy, even if they don't really realize it. It's like it's a goal. It's something people want to be. and when people want something, there are plenty of people who will say they can provide it for little effort in return for some money. And that seems to have really muddied the waters a lot.

So, yeah, it's a very murky field. That's one thing I ended up trying to combat with the book, trying to say, look, there's all these different claims, but what does the actual evidence say? Because not people don't seem to really get into that that much. And I thought, well, well, I'll do that then. I'll do that. Yeah, well, anyone who does buy the book and picks it up, we'll see that it's really crammed with science, just by looking at the appendices and all of the paper references. Yeah, that was, well, like, my, I did the end note libraries, you know, you used to collect your references as you go along. And for the first book, the Inded Brain, I sort of found I had about 187 references,

which I thought was quite a decent amount, because it's all stuff I saw and new already. It was like, it was my stored-up knowledge for things I like to talk about. And then this book, I checked at the end, I had like 740 references. I really have, it was weird that to sit down after, learn new things. Like, I'm in my 30s now. I've already got a doctorate. I don't, I thought I was done with learning, but no, it just keeps coming. Yeah, so one of the things that you mentioned in the book, which, I mean, some people may find surprising due to the sort of theories that are lobbed around a lot, is this, it's particularly difficult to study because there's no sort of

happiness lobe in the brain that neuroscientists can really concentrate their efforts on. Not really, no. It's one of the things I talk to Professor Chambers about. Like I had initial ideas to think I'll try and track down this happiness low using fMRI scanners, you know, the neuroscientist stock in trade there. But again, it's not that simple. I think the first chapter is dedicated to a whole thing about this notion that the brain works in this sort of rather straightforward modular way.

Like it's a separate bit to do every single thing that it's capable of. and you just put someone in a scanner and make them do something, and the relevant bit of the brain lights up, and you can say, that's the bit of the brain for this, that, and the other. And you see so many studies like this now, and like I think I've quoted, I've seen this one's for,

this is a bit of the brain for buying Apple products. This is the bit of the brain for voting preferences. This is a bit of the brain for belief in certain religions. And like, that's not how it works at all. It's massively extrapolating from, you know, basic raw data. So the first chapter is all about these different techniques, which people claim to able to use, but don't actually work that way.

So, but it's something as complex as happiness. It's not one thing. It's more like an umbrella term for different experiences and sensations and moods. Like you can be euphoric. You're happy if you're in a state of euphoria, but you can also be content, relaxed. There's also a state of happiness. But people are rarely euphorically relaxed. That's not a thing that, you know, the brain really lets us experience.

It's really hard to be in an armchair in front of a fire, like tripping. tripping your intimate parts off. That's not so how it works. It's a very different sensation, but both would come under the umbrella of happiness. So the idea is just one brain bit which supports all that is a misleading assessment of how the brain actually works and operates.

Sure. And I mean, you mentioned this earlier, like to kind of make those sort of floaty theories appear on the surface more scientific. People often mention serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, other chemicals and hormones and things. But they do have a very important part to play in this sort of thing there, don't they?

They do. They are part of it. And that's sort of both, it's both a good in that at least there's that much accuracy in these claims, but it's also unhelpful because, you know, like if you want to tell a really good lie, you should build it around a nugget of truth so it becomes more convincing. And this is a similar thing there. Like the brain does use these chemicals, oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine and so on. for these sort of things.

And so it does, the way I sort of try and explain it is that the brain uses neurotransmitters like language uses letters. There are different combinations, different types mean different things and different words can be constructed in different ways. But that doesn't necessarily mean the letters themselves are intrinsically part of that. The example I use is that if you take the word love, half of it is the letters O and E.

So O and E are technically the end. the most romantic vowels, which, again, this is, it's a similar logic, though, is. Obviously, dopamine is using happiness, but dopamine is a happy chemical. Well, O&E are using love, so O&E are romantic vowels, and therefore, if you want to chat someone up, you should use as many of them as possible. So like, hello, that isn't a way to charm someone. That's very unpleasant and terrifying. That's the sort of logic we apply here.

And just because this chemical is used in the process, doesn't mean it is intrinsically, you know, It's not the main thing that's happening there. It's a tool. It's part of an apparatus. It's like saying a house is made of bricks, which is true, but you get a pile of bricks. You don't have a house. You have a pile of bricks. There's a lot more work.

It's part of a larger process, which results in the end product, which is what we're after. And so one sort of impression I got after finishing the book was social interactions seem to be very much a key item at the base of what makes us happy. Generally, yeah. I mean, this wasn't something I had sort of set out to prove to anyone. I did want to emphasize, I think it came across okay, but I sort of told more people since that I didn't have any particular theories or hypotheses or agendas to promote or access to grind when I started this book.

I would just genuinely, it's genuinely a journey, as they say. Like they wanted something a bit more, quote unquote, Ronson, the publishers used that. So I see what they're saying, yes. And so I thought, well, like, I don't know how this works. Like, I know there's a whole field of positive psychology and workplace motivation. But I don't, I'm not part of that. And I thought, well, I always say, I know how the brain, I have an understanding of what the brain works. I can speak the language, as it were.

But it's not my area. So I thought, well, I look into it from the ground up. And my thoughts were, well, I'll sort of see what I can find based on fundamental neuroscientific principles and the published evidence. And if I can come up with virus, any conclusions or theories which are familiar in the mainstream. That suggests that those are the more accurate ones because there's so many out there. And that was interesting for me to sort of start from scratch and look into it that way.

But one thing which kept coming up a lot was the importance of other people, of our social interactions. Like it's the fact that we are such a social species. A lot of the main theories of why humans became so much more intelligent than or primate cousins or any other species is that we are the most social primates that we depend on the group far more than any other species tends

and that allowed us to dominate the environment but when you when you sort of dominate the environment as part of a group then survival in the group becomes a driving in fact revolution not survival in the wild and being a successful part of a social group is a lot more cognitively complex than just running down prey animals

so we evolve for greater intelligence but then that suggests that if our interaction and socializations are a big driver on intelligence, and the brain, human brain would have a lot of parts delegated to that, and it does, it seems. So, yeah, but obviously you've got to think that, you know, happiness being an emotion or a mood, we have a lot of emotions and moods,

and so many of them are, they only exist in the context of other people, like the sense of guilt, the idea that you wrong someone without other people. That doesn't make any sense. Like, you know, it's not an internal thing. Happiness is internal. You can be happy without other people,

but I mean, other people around makes it more likely, makes it more complex, gives it a lot more flavor. And they say, like, most of the things you think that make you happy, you do as part of a group or at least a couple, you know, even down to the basic raw things like sexual interaction. You need someone else for that. That's sort of the whole point. And, you know, like that was a very tricky chapter to write,

the whole sex and relationships one, because like my previous book was very popular in schools and psychology level courses. So how am I going to address the nittygrity of carnal interaction without alienating half of my potential readership? That was a tricky balancing act, tricky. Yeah, so in this cut sign of friendship and social interaction section of the book, you mentioned something I'd never heard of before called the Phi Complex. So I was just wondering if you'd be able to explain a little bit about that, please.

Well, I tried to explain that as best, because I hadn't heard of it either. It was a new thing for me as well. It's essentially the part of the brain, like the sort of network of neurons, which facilitate communication. When a conversation is happening, our FI complex and the person we're talking to their FI complex essentially sync up. And the way I sort of perceive it,

it's sort of like it's the neurological representation of the conversation itself. It's like this is the interaction that's happening. And obviously then both people involved in it will have essentially the same sort of activity going on in their brains because it's one conversation, which two would contribute. to it, but obviously they're both being privy to the same event.

Like, I think of the way I sort of try to articulate it, and I don't know if this is as a valid an example as I hoped, but because I'm not a technical person, I'm a very much a biology guy. It's sort of like having two games consoles linked up playing the same game. So, you know, if they are like playing the same game remotely via the internet, that game exists on potentially both consoles, like the same game is happening on. both, but from a different perspective. And the fight complex is sort of like that. It's the game that's being played by two consoles simultaneously.

And that's sort of how I could grasp it and get around it. But like I say, it was really intriguing to find stuff like that because it wasn't, this wasn't in my arsenal already. This was something I stumbled upon myself. So yeah, so hopefully I got that across, but I'm sure there'll be plenty of other neuropods out there who know better who will tell me an exquisite detail how wrong I am when it's finally into the shells in a few days. Another thing that struck a chord with me was the effect of home and local environment on somebody's happiness.

You know, I'm very much, I'm not a hermit or whatever, but I'm very much a home body. I, you know, I like spending time in my home. And I was just wondering, you know, if you could explain a little bit about how it evolved in humans. Like, is it a survival mechanism and all that type of thing? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think I looked into it because I thought my first attempt to look at it some sort of, scientific stuff were a bit thwarted by the fact that my ideas were stupid. What was a bit of a downside?

And I sort of went home to think about it and I felt happy when I got home. And that's sort of, you know, the mechanisms were in your head, like the cogwheels fall into place. And it sort of made me think about that. Like the whole, like, I think they didn't make the final cut, but, you know, people accept that home is really important to you. Even the classic wizard of all, like, you know, Dorothy's saying there's no place like home. There's no place like home. even though she's currently in a sort of magical wonderland full of pixies and fairies and sweeps everywhere

and she wants to go back to a dusty barn full of tornadoes. I mean, that doesn't sound like the most logical choice, but because it's home, nobody questions it. So we clearly have this deep-seated instinct to form a home and to make a home. And even you start looking at it, it's such a common natural instinct. Do you think even a beehive would come as a home,

a wasps nest or termite mound or like a tiger's dam and that's a home? Every animal, or not everyone, but most of them have this underlying instinct to form a safe place in which to reside. Because there's so much we do as biological organisms which leaves us vulnerable. We need to sleep. We need to excrete. We need to eat. We need to reproduce.

You look after young. It's a lot easier to do all these things. And you have a safe environment which you recognize as familiar and are able to map out accurately. Even things like elephants, like they have territories. They don't really go beyond their home territory when they're searched for more food and things like that. So it's clearly an underlying instinct to that because most of the things we revolved through is keep us alive and a home keeps us alive. It keeps us safe. It minimizes dangers because it provides a familiar environment.

And even like the most logical level, if something's familiar, well that does tell you is that you've encountered it before and it didn't kill you. And therefore, it is probably safer than something new, which might kill you. And, no, we have this instinct to form this safe, safe place, which will provide all the things. Think of a human home. We think of all the things it provides, too. In fact, usually it's where we eat. It's where we sleep. It's where we expel bodily waste.

It's where our family reside. So a typical home contains so many things which are linked to our fundamental sense of safety, our biological drives, and these are all things which make us happy. So even at the most basic level, if you just think of a home as a place where your stuff is, And that sort of tends to make us happier because it provides us the sense of safety and comfort, warmth and security. And these are all things which quiet the more anxious parts of the brain, the threat detection mechanisms and the thing just cause stress and cortisol release. But then also we are complex creatures. We're not just, no, we don't just live in a home for a sense of safety. It's a big part of our lives, spend most of our time there.

Or we make it our own. We put our own stamp on it. We put our personality on it, if we can, if it's our hands. house, you know, some people in rental accommodation are far more strict rules. And they tend to have a lot less happiness in their house because of that because they don't have the autonomy to say this is my home. This is more a place where I live. And it's the sort of thing that happens where places like London where people have to move often because rent are so extortionate and people are constantly buying and selling and, you know, try to move into or out to the city to make, you know, to make ends

meet. And people tend to move from place to place, specific location. But As a result, same thing happened in New York. I talked to a New York journalist about this, but as well, the city itself becomes like a home rather than any specific building in it. So you get this much larger sense of place identity. We feel like you are a Londoner rather than someone who lives in London. And these are sort of things that can happen when, because humans have the brain capacity to encompass larger areas and things like that.

So yeah, there's so many different things that a home does for us. And even back to the social interaction thing that we may crave social interaction. Like most people need at least some level of social interaction to be happy, or at least no, they can't have it. But even if you are the most egregious, extroverted, outgoing person, you still need some downtime. You still need a sense of privacy and security. Like even like the most outgoing, like, interactive person, they still have their own bedroom

where they can go and be away from other people because interacting is hard work sometimes. You need, you bring this tax by constantly being engaged with by other people. And you need privacy. You need both people and privacy. That's something. There's too, like, they sound incompatible, but it's just different times, different times a day and different times of your life. You need one than the other.

So, no, that's, the home provides these things. It provides both communal spaces for you or your family or your friends who you live with. And it provides a sense of privacy too, which is, you know, we need both of these things. And yeah, so there's loads of different boxes that are home ticks in the brain when it comes to making us happy or at least happier. Sure. And another thing that you touch on, well, mentioned in the book is having aspirations and goals. And something I thought fascinating about that was there seems to be a sweet spot in the degree to which you achieve these goals. So there's a couple of examples in the book where becoming too successful or too famous has actually had a detrimental effect on the person's happiness.

Yeah, it's a strange one because we want people to like us. We want to be successful. We want to be secure. We want to be liked. We want to be admired. We want to be high status. These are all underlying fundamental goals. And much of human motivation, according to a lot of the neuroscience research, is goal directed.

So a lot of things we do, we do with a specific goal in mind. I mean, sometimes that goal might be, I need the toilet, so I'm going to go to the toilet. It's my goal to get there and use the toilet. And you do that quite regularly, so, you know, it's not really a big deal. But, you know, we also have much longer term goals that we can, you know, we are creatures. We have the cognitive capacity to plan ahead and envisage our lives in the future, which a lot of creatures can't do. Like they very much live in the moment. So we have this idea of what we want to do and what you want to be.

And that probably is very motivational factors. That's like there's a chapter about work and money and things which corresponds a lot with that. If you end up having a job which feeds into your goals are, whether it be, you know, if you want to be a leading surgeon and you have a job in a hospital, then that makes perfect sense. Whereas if you want to be like a famous rock star or something, we have a job which pays a bill so you can pursue that and with a flexible schedule, that also makes you sort of kind of happy because you are working towards the goal that you have in your head. And jobs which distract from that, they tend to make you less happy. So if you want to be a rock star, but you've got a redemanding job and we don't want to let you go home to rehearse. It keeps calling you into work because it's all shifts. You never awake at time.

That can be really stressful because both the work is hard and you're not fulfilling what ambitions you have. So yeah, so like the ambitions can make you happier if you're able to work towards them. But I think as I said, they're talking to Kevin Green, the entrepreneur, like people who achieve their ambitions and then they can be happier. You've got loads of money. If you've got all the success you want, it's perfectly possible to be perfectly happy then. But then I think it's one thing I keep coming back to in the book is that we're not finite creatures.

We don't just stop once we've achieved a goal. Like we wake up the next morning and life carries on. And the brain doesn't like that. If you work towards a goal for ages, we've had a goal in mind for years. And instead of we achieve it, that's great. But then that doesn't last forever. The brain isn't static.

It's constantly changing. It constantly craves new things. new experiences and in a sense that we are achieving still. So then we need a new goal or we need something else to work on. Or like if there's no ceiling on it, if you want to be a rich person, then, I mean, how rich is rich enough for most rich people. That's a lot of the time. It doesn't seem to be any upper limit on how rich they want to be.

Even like the richest man in the world, be it Bill Gates is still earning money. I mean, he could feel free to stop now and never have to do anything ever again. And even like you'd sell enough wealth to last in 50 lifetimes, but he's not. working towards earning more money and keeping his businesses afloat and stuff. So there's clearly more going on there than just achieving a certain end point. And that's where it sort of becomes a bit more murky because if you've got all the basic needs met, you end up graduating the more psychological needs that need to be liked, to be admired, to be looked up to, to be respected, even to be feared, to have power. These are all potential motivations too. So it's a very,

tricky balancing outcome sometimes if you are the sort of person who ends up achieving your goals. I think the best way to be is to be like myself to have absolutely no goals and see what happens which is why I've ended up like this. Not too bad a place to be. Well, no, exactly. So I can't really complain about the strategy not working, but I'm sure there are plenty of disaster stories who use the same strategy.

Maybe I'm the one exception out of the thousands of casualties, which I'm just lying in the gutter right now. So when we're talking about happiness, I think it's maybe a bit difficult to talk about happiness without talking about laughter. You know, it's physical expression, if you like. So what is the sort of neurological neuroscience take on the link between happiness and laughter? Well, there is actually a surprising amount of neuroscientific and other scientific research on laughter and jokes, which, you know, given the stereotype, you might be surprised to hear.

Because apparently we're not compatible scientists and comedians and someone who does comedy and who is a neuroscientist. I find that rather offensive at times. But I get where it comes from. And I think actually looking into it more, I kind of sort of see more where this might have arisen this or cliche, however accurate or inaccurate it might be. And a lot of it, according to the available evidence, it sort of boils down to a sense of incongruity. When something happens or when we experience something which does not conform to how we think the world works or how things should go.

And it can be a visual thing, it can be a verbal thing, can be a linguistic thing, behavioral thing. Like we all have this mental model of how the world works in our heads and all the components of it. When things violate that, they cause a sense of incongruity. Like, this is incongruous. This shouldn't be happening. What is this? And normally, that causes a sense of sort of stress or psychological stress or danger because the brain doesn't like uncertainty. Uncertainty means I don't know what's going to happen, which means it could be a risk, which could be dangerous and I have no way to prepare for it.

So the brain has this underlying dislike of uncertainty. The uncertainty makes this unhappy a lot of the time. But when this incongruity occurs, and when it can be shown to be harmless, then it becomes pleasurable. It's like, oh, I see there was something uncertain, and I fixed it, so I realized what it was. It was totally harmless. That's a good thing. So you experience this sort of release of tension. That's one theory, or it could be just a case of experience in a sense of reward because an uncertain thing occurred, but it was resolved with no danger.

and therefore, good, well done, have a reward for that. That's good. That's like the reward part of the brain saying to you, good, good work there for figuring that out. And that's sort of what jokes do. They provide, they set up a sense of incongruousness and then resolve it in a harmless way. Or the sense of slapstick would do that. Someone falls over and breaks their neck. That's horrific.

That's terrible. Someone falls over and lands in some mud and they're fine, but they look ridiculous. That's good. That's nice. Also, they've lowered their status. You can feel a bit more superior as a result there. so the social element comes into it again. And it's sort of, you know, it's constantly happening.

Like, according to the data I've seen, it's not that much of it because obviously it's very hard to make people laugh in an fMRI scanner. It's not the most amused environment. But what data that it suggests that this, the brain, like there's a hub in the middle of several lobes, which sort of maintains, oversees all the different sensory inputs, because obviously you can laugh

in any sort of sensory modality. You can laugh at a funny sound, a funny sight. Even tickling is obviously the most sort of primitive form of laughter and the primary source of laughter. That's why you can make rats and chimps laugh by tickling them. It's actually, you know, these are animals which do laugh as well. Laughter actually predates humanity, which is quite a weird thing to think about when you look at it that way.

But there's also such a massive social element of laughter. It comes back to the whole social, there's an importance of social interactions to just the human being and the human brain. And when you think about the fact that any other emotional reaction we have, be it anger or sadness or, you know, sort of disgust, it's kind of brief and fleeting. You maybe start crying when you laugh and you're too sad or something. But, you know, it's like, ooh, it's like a brief thing, whereas laughter, it's such a loud and obvious reaction. It's so not subtle. Like, you know, if you imagine, you know, it's like people often.

find themselves compelled to laugh during a funeral because obviously it's just the tension in the atmosphere makes you want to puncture it with something and it's really you can suppress it, you do suppress it, but it's very hard to do. And a lot of that seems to come down the fact that humour is such a, is now a very much a social aspect. Again, comes back to the, it's a way of interaction. People can be identified by their laughs often better than their speech sometimes. And we are 30 times more likely to laugh in a group than when we're alone. And it's, it seems of a big role in human mating. It's sort of like a show of,

it's not like with stags, like showing their massive antlers and rutting and peacocks with their big tales. Humans now use humour to seduce and, well, not seduce, but show, look how quick my brain is. Look how fast and able I am to induce emotions in you. Look how superior I am as a specimen. And this is a cliche that you all see comedians with women who are far, or male comedians with women who are far too good for them.

and never happened to me, I'll be honest, but maybe it needs to put more effort into it, but my wife would probably disapprove now. But it's sort of like a cultural cliche that funny men are more attractive, but then that comes into the whole cultural versus instinctive or like nature versus nurture thing.

Like, is this because men do comedy? Are we, just because we expect it? Or is there some sort of underlying aversion to women being funny? Because that's supposed to be a male role. So, yeah, it's very much, that's a nice interest in, facet which looked into a bit. But yeah, like, laugh through is so important. But it's also like,

it's almost like the last resort of happiness sometimes. Like, even the cliches of you say, no, people say at times like this, all you can do is laugh or like at least we look back on this and laugh. It's like even if all else fails, you still have the ability to laugh, even if that particular point in time you don't want to. There's still the potential to laugh at things. And it's not like the most powerful part of happiness. It doesn't, you know, it's kind of fleeting. But, But it's always there. It's always like a backup. If it all goes wrong, you can still laugh at something.

And that's sort of like a useful aspect of happiness. So another sort of key feature of the book is that there is a lot of different types of people that you've interviewed. Researchers and scientists, obviously, but also pop stars, comedians, businessmen, etc. So how did you go about choosing the people to interview? And did you have any particular favorite interviewees? I mean, I would love to say, like, you know, I have spreadsheets and databases and thinking like who is the most suitable person for this, and who is the leading expert in this field, and a few times it was, you know, Chris Chambers is like a leading neuroscientist in terms

of neuroimaging and transcranal magnetic stimulation. And Sophie Scott is like pretty much the go-to, the professor Sophie Scott of UCL. She is like the go-to person for studies on how the brain and humor and laughter works. And so that's so. There is that day. And Dr. Matt Wall of Imperial, he's UCL, the study was Imperial, I think, but he just released his paper on his peptin, the sort of neurological hormone or the neurohormone, which sort of sits atop both the lust and love mechanisms of the brain.

So these are people with very relevant and very up-to-date experience and knowledge of the field that I was looking into. So there was the element of that. And obviously, Dr. Petro Boynton, who is the telegram, you know, the telegraph. agony aunt and just but a leading social psychologist in the field of relationship. So a lot of people were very relevant. But a lot of the time, it was just me scrolling through my phone book saying who might possibly talk to me who is relevant here.

So, but some, I spoke to Charlotte Church, for example, but she was, I thought, a very, very, very, very, um, poignant person to speak to on the subject of fame. Because obviously she became internationally famous at age 12. And that's a very rare experience. So she was performing for presidents and on movie sets and, and, from other major pop styles and huge concerts and stuff and she's like a small town Welsh girl like me so I think we'd have something relevant there

and I wanted to see how that affected her or did that make her happy if not why not if it did what was it and but I wanted to speak to her but then as I was getting ready for bed one night I just got a text out of the blue from Rod Gilbert I ended up speaking to as well and she's saying do you

a friend of mine is doing a one woman musical show about the neuroscience of love and would like to speak to a neuroscientist who knows how comedy works. So I said, you might be relevant. Oh, yeah, well, I think there aren't that many of us out there in the Cardiff area. So I said, yeah, of course I'll do it. And I was speaking to Karis Evans, who it turns out, she's also mentioned briefly in the book as well.

And she sent me her CV, which just because she just, like, wanted to make sure, like, show me she was legitimate, which I didn't ever doubt it. But there we go. And she said she's one of the choir on Charlotte Perth, Charlotte, George's Pop Dungeon. I said, oh, I actually was looking to speak to Charlotte. Do you, are you good enough friends that are passing a message? And said, well, I'm in the car with there now. We're going bike riding because they are best friends. So basically, it was just a case of, oh, yeah, so I do know these people.

And I feel I owe a lot of people an apology because when you become a Welsh person with any sort of level of media notoriety or you become a sort of a known person who is Welsh, a lot of people will end up asking you, oh, you're Welsh, do you know Rob Brydon? Do you know Anthony Hopkins? Do you know Tom Jones stuff? And I've always been quite short with people saying, look, I know it's a small country, but there are millions of us. So we don't all know each other. Please stop being so dense.

But it turns out we do all know each other because it just proved. And I feel really bad about judging people for assuming that we all are, all our friends. So yes, so it was a lot of time. It was just who do I know, who has got key experiences on this. But it comes to favorite interviews. I really like talking to Charlotte Church because it was like the revelation, which I won't go into too much years,

I don't want people to not buy the book in the end, but of what was more important to her than the international fame was really quite eye-opening. And I think I really like talking to a girl on the net, the sex blogger, because we become good friends over Twitter over the years. I like to think she does for sex

what I'll try to do for neuroscience, trying to sort of demystify it, make it relatable, make it entertaining, as best we can and like we have a sort of similar ethos there and it was interesting talking to her and sort of all her experiences like what you know how much does no an active and very varied sex life make you happy does it is that something you're into and it was the fact that her uh sort of assessment of what she's learned by let's call it experience was very consistent with what the experts were saying like dr bulton the relationship of expert and the things she concluded and the advice she would give

from a very informed, very academic, very well-read and studied perspective, was the same sort of basic conclusion that someone who's lived it would come up with. So it does show that maybe there is a lot of useful advice in that part of the book, at least. So yeah, I was quite happy to find that, too. Not planned at all, but none of this was. This is kind of like a big question, but can anyone be happy? I've actually been asked just a couple of times already, but I think everyone who asks me this has a different sort of interpretation of what it means,

but based on what I've found out, I think everyone has the underlying mechanisms inherent in their brain to experience happiness. I think that is, barring, of course, major traumas or massive surgeries, but that's always the caveat which you've got to put into these things. So I think everyone has the ability to be happy. but then again everyone has the ability to the physical ability and what's required to fly a plane but it doesn't actually mean you can do it.

It takes a lot of time and effort and practice. So some people will be less inclined towards being happy. Some people are very predisposed to find the negative and everything and it really depends on the good one. Obviously

genetics are going to play a part in this but it depends on your background your upbringing. I know a few people who are twins and they are very different people, each of them, because at one point, they grew up in a very similar environment, exactly the same parents, same schools and everything, but as they matured and then went their separate paths, they lived different lives and that leads to different outcomes and different outlooks on life. And, you know, people are happy and people can be happy, but it really depends all the time on circumstance.

Like if you are someone who is living hand to mouth on the bread line and you've got, like, your support and your partner just left and your house is falling down or your rents going up and if you have no control over these devastating factors then you're not going to be a happier person or you're not going to be able to say I am happy now because your circumstances don't allow that but doesn't this the people like in those situations are going to be higher risk factors for the lack of happiness in their lives but it doesn't necessarily have to be you know someone who's living in such dire straits. People who are like big celebrities

tend to be unhappy as well. Like they have their own issues and problems to deal with than just having something which other people would say should make you happy doesn't necessarily make it the case. And so yeah,

so I think everyone has the underlying ability to be happy, but whether it's going to be lasting, whether it's going to be persistent or whether it's going to be easy, that very much varies from person to person. Can happiness ever have a downside? I'll say yes to that, actually, based on everything I've read in that it's good. Subjectively,

if you're happy, you're happy. That's good. It's very hard to be happy and not see the good side of that. But in terms of longer-term consequences, then yes. I mean, there's a very interesting study I found in the discussion in the third chapter, which shows that for all this discussion or all this obsession in the sort of business world of having employees be happy because a lot of the data says that happy employees are more productive. I think the start I found is that they are like 37% more productive. So if you have 100 happy employees, they're like doing the work of 137 for no extra cost. And however you think of your employees, if you're a business manager or if you're a CEO, if you think your employees are all worthless scum, if you make them happy, you get more out of them.

And that's going to be a very important thing for any business which wants to earn profit. So despite this happiness, it's this theory that happy employees are better and more useful. Lots of evidence suggest that they're not necessarily, that's not necessarily the case. Because people who are happy tend to be more selfish by all accounts and that they are more concerned with their own happiness than they are than that of others. And you could argue that's a chicken and egg situation. Are they happy because they're selfish? Because they look after themselves more than anyone else. Do they put themselves first?

Therefore, they've achieved their own happiness as a result. So that's a circular reasoning thing, but it doesn't even be a link there. And people who are persistently happy can often be more devastated or more hit harder by it when something does go badly wrong, which does happen. Because life is essentially random. You live long enough. Something bad will happen to you, be it low-level trauma or some just minor irritation, which build up over time. But some of my evidence suggests that people who are, they have a predisposition to be happy, will be made a lot more unhappy by setbacks because they're not used to it.

They don't have any sort of ability to cope with it. And that's another thing which seems to come up in that people who only ever have good things happen to them, they kind of, let's say, stunted in a sort of developmental sense. There's the concept of emotional competence. Like the more varied and different emotions you experience over time, the more capable you are of processing them and dealing with them. And you become a more rounded person for it. Like people say you don't really have the ability to, you're less likely to form a

successful relationship if you've not had a bad one before. You've not had one go wrong because it gives you. this awareness, this knowledge, this understanding of how things work. And it sort of explains a lot why people who are in the most privileged positions, who have never had to deal with any hardships, tend to be, let's say, less pleasant people overall if the current political climate is anything to go by. So, you know, I don't like to get into the politics thing, but I will say that much. So, yeah, it does suggest that happiness itself is good, but pure happiness all the time.

That's not an ideal way to be. So just as one sort of final question to round things off, do you think science will ever reach a point where it can make definitive statements about the origin and effects of happiness in the brain? Or will it always remain somewhat ineffable? And how do you feel about that if that is the case? It's actually quite a actually comes up surprisingly often in that it's really hard to see where things are going to go in terms of how we can study the brain, even like in the next, like, in the next, like, 50 years or so because technology develops so fast now and so readily and things like fMRI scanners weren't even thought of 50 years ago but now we can monitor the activity of a living brain and we do so all the time and it's you know it's it's weird to think that that happens so fast so to be able to say yes or no regarding will we ever understand these things in the human brain is

isn't something I'm even able to do with any authority not that I have much authority the best of times but specifically in this instance. And it is, but it's interesting to see, like, one of the problems I find with talking about stuff like this or studying things like this, it's very, it's surprisingly easy to almost like wander into the field of philosophy sometimes when you don't actually think, well, what am I talking about you? Like this, I can say these neurological processes occur,

but then when it comes to the conscious experience of these things, then you're sort of into, you're talking about cartiore. idealism here or we wandered into quantum mechanics and stuff. So it becomes a far more sort of subjective or sort of a meta thing to look at. And that becomes, like, my PhD was in behavioral neuroscience. I'm technically a behavioral neuroscientist by training. And one of the things that behavioral neuroscience does, it essentially ignores the mind, as we would understand it, not because it doesn't think it exists or anything. It just said, what can you do with it in a scientific sense, like how big is a mind?

What, where does it end? What color is it? You can't actually measure a mind in any objective, replicatable way. And that sort of makes it scientifically redundant in many ways. So then when we talk about happiness is in like the dedicated

conscious experience of it, then we're sort of wandering into that territory of, okay, so I can show you in the brain, maybe I can show you the brain like these parts of the brain are all integral for what people report as happiness. But then we're sort of wandering into the cognitive, the consciousness aspects, and then can we even look at such a thing

with the technology we have to have? I don't know. But I don't think necessarily it would be a good thing to say that if we were able to say, look, here's how happiness works in the brain, take these pills, you'll be happy forever. That doesn't sound like a useful thing to achieve. that's like, you know, it's like sort of like reading the end of the book first, not my book, any book, just like, okay, that's what that is. And, you know, that's not the point of it.

Like happiness is something which is meant to be like a motivator. It's from what I can, as is my understanding now. It's something we know, it's a sense of reward we feel when we've done something right, when we've done something we enjoy, when we've succeeded at something. And for these things have any value, then, you know, not getting them shouldn't make you happy. And that's why things like hard narcotics, like they constantly trigger the reward pathway of the brain, give us this blest out state without any of the intervening stages of, look, when you do something or achieve something or accomplish something or just do something which the brain would recognize as being a good thing. That's what happiness and pleasure is supposed to be responses to. So

to just hijack the whole system and just trigger it automatically, that doesn't really seem like something that would have any really useful outcomes insofar as we as a species exist. That was neuroscientist, comedian and science writer Dean Burnett, talking about his latest book, The Happy Brain, The Science of Where Happiness Comes from, and Why. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In our May issue, which is on sale on the 2nd of May, we take a look at human body farms. These facilities could help forensics learn more about how our bodies rot,

which could help them in solving crimes. In this issue, we also take a look at how emotions trick your brain, investigate whether psychological profiling can turn Facebook likes into votes, find out the sneaky ways that social networks are built to make you binge, and discover whether pollution could be leading us to a fertility crisis. Did you enjoy this podcast? If you liked what you heard, then why not subscribe and leave us a review? You can find us on iTunes, Acast, Stitcher and many of your favourite podcast apps.

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