Since the Renaissance, happiness has been the main stated goal of life, rather than being on good behavior to reserve yourself a seat in the afterlife. When asked their primary desire, people across the world, from the U.S. to Slovenia, have put happiness at the very top of their lists.4 But despite our five-hundred-year eyes on the prize, as a whole we consistently miss the target. The self-help section of any bookstore (that is, any bookstore that is left: their disappearance is itself a marker of our collective loss of happiness) is chock-full of tomes that explore the achievement, value, or consequences of pleasure or happiness in isolation of each other. The publication of books on happiness has become a lucrative niche market, to be sure.
Pop Happiness
In the twentieth century, Martin Seligman and his colleagues on the beaches of Mexico birthed an entirely new field called “positive psychology,” which aims to get us to focus on what is right with our lives rather than what is wrong. Positive psychology studies positive emotions, positive traits, and positive institutions in an attempt to make your life more, well, positive. The idea is to capitalize on your strengths rather than to emphasize your weaknesses or detriments. (To lead a productive and fulfilling life, you can take an online authentic happiness test.)5 Seligman argues that your happiness is based on who you are intrinsically, voluntary actions, and your circumstances. Tal Ben-Shahar’s Positive Psychology class has been and continues to be the most subscribed undergraduate lecture course at Harvard University (maybe because it’s an easy A?). Clearly, intelligence and youth don’t guarantee happiness.
Sonja Lyubomirsky takes positive psychology even further by breaking the driving forces of happiness into a pie chart: she states that happiness is 50 percent genetics (set point), 40 percent up to your own behaviors, and 10 percent environment (national or cultural region, demographics, gender, ethnicity, experiences, and other life status variables such as marital status, education level, health, and income).6 More recently studies put the heritability of happiness (i.e., satisfaction with life and well-being) somewhere between 32 and 36 percent.7 One genome-wide analysis found two genetic variants associated with subjective well-being (i.e., contentment),8 while yet another report suggests there are at least twenty more,9 which implies that we won’t be genetically engineering happiness very soon. The argument that your state of happiness is only 10 percent based on your circumstances/environment becomes difficult to parse considering that we live in our environments 24/7 and are constantly barraged with commercials of what we need to be happy.
Numerous pop psychology books have popped up, arguably because people want to know how to get happier. Each of these books views happiness as one phenomenon, and most confuse pleasure with happiness. Until you can distinguish the difference between these two emotions, you can’t recognize either one as unique and you can’t understand, let alone fix, the problem for yourself or for your family.
One Origin of the Confusion
If you google “happiness,” here’s what you get: “pleasure, joy, exhilaration, bliss, contentedness, delight, enjoyment, satisfaction, contentment, felicity.” Note the conflation of the concept of pleasure with the concept of happiness in this definition. Where did this conundrum come from, anyway? Who conflated pleasure with happiness in the first place? And how is it that governments and businesses have been able to harness this confusion for their own purposes? (See Chapters 13 and 14.) Here’s one quick and dirty explanation of how words make all the difference. Aristotle argued “the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain is a first principle; for it is for the sake of this that we do all that we do.” Enter eighteenth-century political philosopher–economist Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was a curious fellow hell-bent on quantifying and scientifically explaining individual human experience by constructing a tally sheet of happiness. He might be called the godfather of utilitarianism, the term John Stuart Mill coined in the nineteenth century to describe the philosophy of increasing net world happiness as the primary goal of human existence. Bentham argued that each person should consider others’ welfare as seriously as his own. But in the process, Bentham bastardized Aristotle: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, and that just happens to be a fact . . . benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, all of which ultimately comes to the same thing.” Under Bentham’s rubric, anything that minimized pain and maximized pleasure by its very nature increased happiness. Carrying Bentham’s rubric forward into the neuroscientific age, anything that triggers dopamine or opioid release and action (see Chapter 3) would equally qualify as generating happiness.
Even academics have confused the concepts of pleasure and happiness. For instance, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that there are two separate “accounts” of happiness: (1) hedonism (maximization of pleasure), and (2) the life satisfaction theory,10 giving them both equal standing. What? Since when is hedonism even in the same room as happiness? Aristotle would be turning over in his grave.
Now that you understand the history of the words themselves, how they have been confused with each other, and how even pop psychologists and Google can’t tell the difference, let me now make clear how I am defining them, because the brain science says so. For the rest of this book, pleasure, derived from the French plaisir for “to please,” is defined as the concept of gratification or reward. The keys to this definition are: (1) it is immediate, (2) it provides some level of excitement or amusement, and (3) it is dependent on circumstance. Conversely, happiness is defined as the Aristotelian concept of eudemonia—that is, “contentment” or well-being or human flourishing, or, as in the introductory quote from Yeats, “growth”—physical and/or spiritual. The keys to this definition are: (1) it’s about life, not the afterlife, (2) it’s not prone to acute changes in one’s life, and (3) it is unrelated to circumstance, so anyone can be happy, not just the rich and the powerful.
Unraveling the Threads
These two similar yet conflicting aspects of our neurobiology interact with each other, and it is this interaction that serves as the fulcrum on which our lives, our self-worth, and our internal compasses are balanced (see Chapter 10). Our current collective wisdom does not distinguish between reward and contentment at the etymological level, and fails to acknowledge the personal and societal consequences of mistaking one for the other at the biochemical level. And there are consequences, to be sure. That’s what this book is all about. Because chronic excessive reward eventually leads to both addiction and depression; the two most unhappy states of the human condition.
This confusion also belies the basis for many of today’s most successful marketing strategies (see Chapter 13). Over the past forty years, the dark underbelly of American enterprise has waged war on the American psyche. City College of New York sociologist Nicholas Freudenberg coined the term “corporate consumption complex” for the six biggest industries that sell us various hedonic substances (tobacco, alcohol, food) and behavioral triggers (guns, cars, energy).11 Add to that the consumer electronics sector, which further takes advantage of our neurobiology, and wrap it all up in some slick Madison Avenue packaging, and you have an unbeatable recipe for corporate profit. In fact, their recipes are continuing to improve: as the science of reward is elaborated and becomes more precise, new techniques in neuromarketing are now becoming mainstream. And as corporations have profited big from increased consumption of virtually everything with a price tag promising happiness, we have lost big-time. America has devolved from the aspirational, achievement-oriented “city on a hill” we once were, into the addicted and depressed society that we’ve now become. Because we abdicated happiness for pleasure. Because pleasure got cheap.
2.
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
You’re probably thinking to yourself, What makes this guy think he knows what’s going on in my mind? I’m in charge of my own thoughts and emotions. Indeed, you are in charge of your own though
ts, which are yours and yours alone. But you share the process of emotion generation and its experience with every other human on the planet. Your feelings of reward and contentment are just downstream readouts of your neurochemistry.
Before treating obese children, I trained for over sixteen years as a neuroscientist—six years cutting up and studying the brains of rats at the Rockefeller University in New York, and ten more years growing neurons in petri dishes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Tennessee, Memphis. These years in the lab afforded me a unique view of the relationship between hormones and behavior. Take a neuron, throw a hormone on it (estradiol, testosterone, cortisol), and watch it go bonkers. Those effects I observed in the dish are the same things happening in your brain right now as you are reading this. You’re just a jumble of gap junctions, dendritic spines, axons branching, and synapses forming. Some of these connections happen due to current experience, but many of these brain connections are formed before we are ever born. These processes underlie aggression, passivity, maternal behavior, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Almost assuredly, this is why homosexual and transgender youth can’t “behave” their way out of it. They’re a result of their own neural connections, the result of what came before. But it derives from the same basic tenet: the biochemistry drives the behavior. Because the biochemistry always comes first.
As a scientist, I don’t see behavior or emotion. Rather, I see neural pathways and biochemistry, and it’s the point of this book to get you to see them too. You see declining school performance. I see inefficient brain mitochondria. You see the diabetes pandemic. I see liver and muscle fat accumulation causing insulin resistance. You see drugs of abuse. I see presynaptic transporters and postsynaptic receptors. You see teenagers glued to their iPhones. I see dysfunction of their prefrontal cortex, the area charged with maintaining attention. You see economic stagnation and societal unhappiness. I see the limbic system, the primitive part of the brain with neural inputs and outputs that drive everything from joy and elation to depression and helplessness.
You see the result. I see the cause. Treating the result never works; it’s too late, the horse is out of the barn. Plus, treating the result just papers over the real problem: the cause is still there. Treating the cause works. But you have to understand the cause before you can treat it. It’s like the wasps in your attic. Which is more effective: killing the wasps one by one, or destroying the wasps’ nest? You have to work upstream of the problem. Which means we’re going to need a very short (I promise) course in neuroscience.
My Brain? That’s My Second-Favorite Organ
There are hundreds of brain areas that have evolved to perform different functions. The parietal lobes are where touch is interpreted. The frontal lobes cause muscle movement. The occipital lobes are where we see. The temporal lobes are where we hear. But where do we laugh and cry? Where are joy and sadness and fear and disgust and anger felt? In this book we’re going to focus on the limbic, or emotional, brain. This system comprises a set of specialized structures deep within the brain, which are all interconnected. And those connections lead to stereotyped emotions in each and every one of us.
The brain is made up of billions of neurons (nerve cells) that are in constant communication with each other through an elaborate neural network. Each neuron has a cell body that makes proteins so the neuron can stay alive, and neurotransmitters that allow neurons to communicate with each other. They each have dendrites, which are special appendages that receive information, on which there a number of receptors. Neurotransmitters and receptors can be described as floating keys that fit into specific locks. Each neuron also has one long axon, a special fiber that transmits this information. When a neural impulse is generated in the first cell, it pulses down to the end of the axon, which contains little packets of neurotransmitters (the keys) waiting to be released. The firing axon then shoots the neurotransmitters across the synapse to bind to the receptors (the locks) on the dendrites of the next cell.
Throughout this book, we’re going to be talking about three specific limbic brain systems (see Figs. 2-1, 2-2, and 2-3).
FIGURE 2: The brain’s limbic, or emotion regulation, system. The limbic system consists of three major pathways that send and receive chemical information that is translated into positive and negative emotions. The interplay between these three distinct pathways dictates both the perception of emotion and the resultant behavioral responses.
Fig. 2-1: The reward pathway utilizes the neurotransmitter dopamine to communicate between the neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the dopamine receptors of the nucleus accumbens (NA) to generate the feelings of motivation that attend reward and learning.
(1) The first system, the “reward pathway” (Fig. 2-1), is made up of neurons (brain cells that send and receive information) that synthesize the neurotransmitter (chemical for communication) dopamine in a primitive (you don’t control it, it controls you) nucleus (collection of like-minded neurons) in the midbrain known as the ventral tegmental area (VTA). When neurons in the VTA fire, they send their dopamine to another brain area called the nucleus accumbens (NA) to generate the feelings of motivation that attend reward. The NA is also a “learning” pathway—learning what feels good (shopping, alcohol, masturbation). Those neurons then release a set of neurochemicals known as endogenous opioid peptides (EOPs), which have the same effects on the brain as morphine and heroin do, and which generate the feeling of pleasure or bliss.
Fig. 2-2: The contentment pathway utilizes the neurotransmitter serotonin to communicate between neurons of the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) and multiple sites throughout the cerebral cortex, where the brain interprets impulses as “good” or “bad.”
(2) The second system is the “contentment pathway” (Fig. 2-2). A different primitive area in the midbrain called the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) contains neurons that produce serotonin and fan out to distant sites all over the cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, where you process experiences and make judgments like “That’s good” or “That’s bad.” Serotonin acts in different ways on different neurons, depending on each neuron’s function and the type of receptor (a specialized protein that receives and binds with the molecule, to alter the firing of the next neuron) that sits on its surface.
Fig. 2-3: The stress-fear-memory pathway consists of four areas. The amygdala, or your stress center, is in communication with the hypothalamus (at the base of the brain), which controls the stress hormone cortisol. The hippocampus, or your memory center, interprets memories as both good and bad. The amygdala and the hippocampus are reciprocal to each other. The fourth area is the prefrontal cortex (PFC); this is the wise area of the brain that inhibits behaviors that put you at risk. These four areas together keep your outward behavior in check.
(3) The third brain system is the “stress-fear-memory pathway” (Fig. 2-3). There are four areas of the brain involved in this pathway. The amygdala is your stress or fear center. It is a walnut-shaped area, one on either side of the brain. When you’re in a dark alley, your amygdala is going gangbusters. The amygdala is in communication with three other areas. The hypothalamus, at the base of the brain, controls all the hormones of your body, including the stress hormone cortisol, which prepares your body for extreme duress. It also sends messages to your sympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight response) to get ready and your vagus nerve (the vegging, chillaxing nerve that slows everything down) to stop firing. The hippocampus is your memory center. It’s where you lay down memories, both good and bad. The amygdala and the hippocampus are reciprocal in that when your amygdala figures out that an experience is not a good one, that information ends up stored in the hippocampus (“I’ve seen this movie before”). The pain of that hot stove from your childhood resides here, as does the last horror movie you saw. And finally the fourth area is the prefrontal cortex (PFC); this is the wise area of the brain that keeps you from doing stupid
things again, like insulting your boss, or going to another horror movie. These four brain areas together keep your emotions from overwhelming your ability to think straight and your outward behavior in check.
These three pathways generate virtually all human emotion, and in particular those of reward and contentment. The motivation for reward is experienced when the dopamine signal reaches the NA. A host of different stimuli (power, gambling, shopping, internet, substances) generate signals of reward, but that internal feeling of reward is pretty much the same whatever the trigger. This is why virtually any stimulus that generates reward, when taken to the extreme, can also lead to addiction. You can get addicted to a drug, but you just as easily can get addicted to a behavior, such as gambling or internet use.
Conversely, while experiencing happiness is predicated upon sending the serotonin signal, the actual interpretation of that signal isn’t as simple. It also depends on the receptor that is receiving that signal, which changes how you experience it. This is why the positive emotions derived from listening to certain types of music have a different quality from the ones experienced when graduating from college, which are different from the ones triggered by building a home for Habitats for Humanity. And this is very likely why there are so many different definitions of happiness—many different on-ramps, many different roads, many different speed limits—but only one destination for contentment. Other positive emotional phenomena, such as joy, elation, rapture, and the mystical experience, likely take the same roads but end up taking different exits.
The Hacking of the American Mind Page 3