Like a bullet to the hippocampus

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When people first find out that I left a tropical island in the Caribbean to move to the UK, their initial reaction tends to be one of complete disbelief that anyone would leave “paradise” to live in London’s weather, notorious for grey and rainy skies. I never quite understood why, in this city, so many people’s moods are so negatively affected by the climate, and I was frequently told, “The weather here is rubbish! Everyone’s miserable.” So when I was commissioned to write an article about happiness, I saw a golden opportunity to propagate some cheer this winter, particularly with the Holiday Season around the corner. The only problem is, that on the foggiest day I’ve ever witnessed, and with overcast skies and wetness galore, I, like so many other Londoners, found myself to be miserable as well.
In an attempt to find happier grounds, I visited the popular website, YouTube, and searched for videos that would make me laugh. With over 3,170,000 views, I remembered a particular video titled Calming the Baby Beast, in which a baby sitting in the back of a car euphorically dances and smiles to the song Dog Days Are Over, by UK indie-rock band Florence + the Machine. At first glance, this video comes across as merely being jovial and light-hearted, but when it is more closely examined it presents an interesting scope by which happiness can be studied. Firstly, the baby becomes ecstatic, particularly when the song’s chorus – a burst of rhythmic clapping, festively cheerful instruments, and a powerful voice proclaims that “happiness hit her like a bullet in the back”.
Even though the lyrics in the chorus speak of happiness, the baby surely is unable to understand the meaning of the song, and the interesting part is that the words are not the sources of his happiness, but rather pleasure is inherently triggered by the combination of musical melodies and instruments. Secondly, while he dances and giggles to the music, laughter can be heard from the family who is watching and recording the baby, showing that the “baby beast” is not alone and is aware that he has an audience. Lastly, as soon as the song ends, the baby begins to cry, and the tears contrast drastically to his previously exhilarated state.
One can then begin to wonder, how ephemeral is happiness? How is it correlated to outside influences? Is it magnified when it is experienced with others? Is true happiness tied to a grand event, or is it found in the simple things? How does our environment and the prevailing culture of where we live affect our mood? Why are some cultures constantly striving to attain happiness through material wealth while others seem to have found a much simpler answer? To further explore the meaning of happiness, and wanting to expose it from various perspectives, Glass set out to speak to six important figures from varied fields to get to the root of what happiness is and where it can be found.
Leading neurologist and researcher, Dr Robert Zatorre (McGill University), explains how music can stimulate the brain, leaving the person feeling happy.
What is it about music that has the power to target different emotions?
Part of the reason why it can produce many different emotions is that it has many components to it that are capable of producing emotions. There’s also the idea that musical sounds can mimic the movements that people make when they’re in different mood states. If you imagine being quite happy and excited about something, and you were to look at the way people move in that state, they’re probably jumping around or moving rapidly, whereas if you imagine someone who’s depressed, their movements would be very slow – low amplitude movements. If you think about the music that conveys those particular emotions there is something in common there.
How is happiness produced by music?
There was a famous music theorist in the 1950s called Leonard Meyer who codified the idea of “tension and resolution”, and he wrote a book called Emotion and Meaning in Music. Basically, what he said is that music captures a lot of emotions by virtue of creating different levels of tension and then resolving that tension. In our research, we have different kinds of brain scanners that allow us to measure brain activity. We know that there are certain parts of the brain that are responsive if you give someone food, and these are the reward areas.
In our first set of experiments we played people music that they really liked. In fact, they liked it so much that they had the sensation of chills or shiver down the spine, which people reported as being a very pleasurable sensation, and we’ve used this as our index of musical pleasure. So what we did is we had people listen to music they were already familiar with, and we asked them to press a button whenever they experienced pleasure, so we would know what was going on. What happened was, the areas that were active at those moments were the same areas that had previously been identified as relevant for other kinds of pleasure – food, sex, drugs.
The same system is engaged in different pleasure responses, including music. The surprise here is that music is not a chemical substance like drugs, it’s not a physical substance like food, and it’s not biologically necessary; if you don’t have music you won’t die of starvation, if you don’t have music it won’t prevent you from reproducing. Here’s this weird thing which is completely abstract: music is just a series of tones played one after the other, so why should it engage the same system? We went back to this theory of Meyer’s and others, and we thought about what these other rewards have in common; they are reinforcers and they are stimuli which an organism seeks out. So music according to this model of Meyer has some of these same properties because you have this whole play-out of expectation, tension, and resolution.
How do you correlate social interaction, music and happiness? Are they interdependent on each other?
Historically, social interactions have always been extremely important in the making of music. If you look at an evolutionary framework again, the vast majority of music produced by most cultures has almost always been group music, whether it’s music, clapping, or dancing. Another important social interaction is mother and infant interaction. Most cultures that have been studied have some kind of particular type of music which is sung by mothers to their children. That makes sense, because we think of music as a mood enhancer or regulator. If you have a baby, and it’s awake you might want to stimulate it and make it happy, so you might sing happy music to it. If it’s crying you might want to calm it down by singing soothing music, and if it’s tired and won’t sleep, what do mothers all over the world do? They sing a lullaby. There’s a very strong component of social interaction in music.
Dr George MacKerron (London School of Economics) is an economist currently researching the correlation between happiness and one’s environment via an iPhone app called “mappiness”.
As an economist, how would you define happiness?
It’s not just one thing: rather, there are three or four things we can mean by it. There’s an affective, hedonic side: your immediate moods and feelings. There’s an evaluative, cognitive side – the things people think about when they’re asked about their “satisfaction with life as a whole” – which as economists we sometimes try to equate with our concept of “utility”. There’s an element that’s about meaning and purpose in life. And maybe (if you’re Aristotle, anyway) there’s an aspect concerning some kind of “virtue” or “right action”. These things are all correlated with each other, but not perfectly so. mappiness asks people about the second aspect when they sign up, and then concentrates on the first. But the third and fourth might be interesting to address in the future too.
According to your findings with your mappiness, what is the correlation between climate and happiness?
We find small effects of sunshine (positive), and of wind and rain (negative, especially when people are outdoors!). The big impact is of hot days, though: when temperatures go beyond 25°C or so, our models predict a happiness boost of around 5 per cent. I imagine that’s because people are at the beach, having barbecues, and so on (rare treats in the UK). The effect size is about the same as for physical exercise or cultural activities – so those might be good responses to a grey day.
You’ve previously revealed that people in cities are generally less happy than people who are more exposed to green spaces. How do you think urban design can address this?
Note a subtlety of our results on this point: it’s about where people are at the moment they respond, not where they live or work. Most of our respondents live in cities, and it’s mainly the effect of green spaces on those people that we’re picking up. Looking at the relationship between where you live and work and where you are right now, in terms of happiness effects, is another thing I hope to look into in the future.
Another thing I’d like to do with the mappiness data is look for evidence that green spaces within the built environment – trees, lawns, and so on – can have a positive effect on happiness. Our users have contributed hundreds of thousands of photos, which we might be able to use to examine this question.
Dr Victor Buchli (University College London) is an archaeologist and anthropologist at one of the top five universities in the world, and he sheds light on the material culture aspect of happiness.
How would you define happiness through a material culture/anthropological point of view? 
Material culture studies artefacts and how people use artefacts to create social relations. When we think about joy and happiness we normally think about it in terms of capacity, of your ability to forge links, to realise social goals, to reproduce yourself, and to essentially create society and community.
We look at these in terms of how certain things and even certain technologies expand those capacities in order to, in a sense, feel more connected and feel a greater sense of community. In anthropology, one doesn’t think about personal happiness per se, in a more existential sense, but one thinks about it more in terms of how it enables you to live more effectively in the world, both socially and materially.
How is the concept of happiness changing in the 21st century? What does it mean to be happy now?
I think since the twentieth century the concept of happiness has changed, partly because change is so rapid and communities are broken down, people move and migrate, and they don’t necessarily live in one place any more. What we consider to be the home is not just one place that’s discrete in time and place, but it actually exists in multiple places and through multiple platforms. So as technology changes, as migration occurs, as traditional communities – in a sense – break down, new kinds of communities and societies begin to emerge, and there are new capacities that begin to emerge in terms of feeling connected, feeling contentment, and of your ability to enhance those capacities for connection and happiness.
Do you think people will create new forms of happiness in the future?
Yes, definitely. It is something that we know looking at changes in the beginning of the 20th century, and even in the nineteenth century. I’m thinking of an example in early twentieth century Cameroon, in particular a kingdom where if you were a young man without high rank it was very difficult to find a wife, because the paramount king has privileged access with a large number of wives. So if you’re a young man without prospects, the possibility of even conjugal happiness – of reproducing, of having a family – is foreclosed. However, that changes with early globalisation, with the opening up of the coasts under the conditions of colonialism. It is a double-edged sword. As brutal as it was, it also offered new sorts of possibilities.
The incursion of Christianity as well, which suggested a different way of relating to the world from the way you would have related to it before, all of a sudden unexpectedly provided all these opportunities for new forms of social life and happiness, which would have otherwise been foreclosed. And so, a young man can go from the interior to the coast to find a wife, become Christian, and then find an entirely different way of being in the world and realising new capacities, while enhancing his sense of happiness, in an entirely novel and different form. That is something that we’ve seen very much within anthropology in the twentieth century and even more so right now.
Deborah Levy, acclaimed fiction novelist and playwright as well as Man Booker Prize nominee, talks about the balance between sorrow and joy, to contextualise people’s affinity for the pursuit of happiness and a desire for happy endings.
As a writer, how do you approach the theme of “happiness”?
I think I’m with Freud on happiness. He said that he saw his task as transforming our everyday misery into ordinary, everyday unhappiness. I think unhappiness is better than misery, and that’s where I would start. As a writer, in my novels, it’s not like I’m looking to write a really cheery character or a really miserable character. Neither of those are true; there’s a kind of balance to these things. It’s possible that, in fact, I could write a character that’s insatiably cheerful, always wise cracking, who underneath it all really harbours quite a lot of melancholy.
Or I could have a melancholic character, nevertheless, like my character in Swimming Home. He’s called Joe – he’s a famous British, male poet, and he really seems to have a great deal of gusto for everyday life. He speaks in quite an exuberant way, but in fact we learn that he really has some confronting, unsettling, and bleak inner thoughts. There’s no happiness without unhappiness. There’s a fair mix of the two, I think.
You have previously expressed that, when you were a child, your mother would tell you bedtime stories with happy endings, which you wouldn’t necessarily agree was the best way to end the stories. Why do you think so many stories have happy endings?
I’m not against stories with happy endings. I’ve written a few myself with really happy endings. Roland Barthes had a very interesting take on happy endings and narratives. He said that narrative is a kind of tranquilliser, an opiate to free us from terror. And so happy endings become a sort of tradition in stories, like most fairy tales; moral order is restored, the baddies have been dealt with, good will prevail and we can rise above our difficult, unjust situations. There’s nothing wrong with a happy ending, it’s whether it’s a truthful ending. That’s why there are happy endings, so we can be tranquillised against terror and also for hope. It’s a sort of sedation, isn’t it? You want to make the world a manageable place to live in, where things will turn out right.
Your last book, Swimming Home, has been described as being a “page-turner about sorrow”. Why did you find it important to write a book dealing with this topic?
I’m really interested in the ways that all of us attempt to switch off the things that are upsetting. But where do they go, those things? They’ve got to go somewhere. We try to forget things that are unsettling, but they have to go somewhere, and we know that they return. There’s no getting away from it, those things come back to chase us. Depression is really about not wanting to know something we know; it’s about trying to “un-know” something, and that’s a very good subject for a novel.
So I wondered if I could make that story, which is the most interesting story for me there is, not so bleak that you just can’t go on, because I didn’t want that in the book. I wanted to make it a really exciting page-turner. And the other thing is that sorrow – and anyone who hasn’t felt it probably needs to feel it, because life is a mix of sorrow and joy – always begins somewhere, it’s not like it’s mysterious, so in terms of mapping out a plot, where does it start? It doesn’t have to start in the present, it can go way, way back through generations. There’s an interesting play in time for a subject like sorrow.
 
Dr Stefan Koelsch (Freie Universität Berlin) is a leading neurologist researching the correlation between music and pleasure.
Do you believe it to be a physical, tangible property that can be accurately measured?
Not accurately measured, but I think that happiness has neurocorrelates that are somewhat different from those of fun, pleasure and reward. Happiness is also fun, and we usually perceive happiness as also being rewarding. That is why when we are happy, the reward circuit is usually active as well. It’s not the other way around; it’s not that every time the reward circuit is active, we are actually happy. Also, I think there’s an important difference between the two. One is that they have different properties in regards to satiation. Another one is that you can buy pleasure and reward with money, which you can’t with regard to attachment related emotions. Love, for example, is not anything you can buy; not from others and not within yourself. You can’t elicit love in yourself from any kind of monetary stimulus.
How is happiness evoked by music?
My take is that when we engage with music we engage in a number of social functions that serve in the formation of social attachment to others. Social isolation is bad for our health. Other social functions are: feeling together with other individuals, being empathetic with members of a group, communicating with each other, coordinating our movements, and cooperating with each other. This leads to an increased social cohesion between the members of a group; it decreases conflicts, it makes it more likely that next time when we are together with each other, we will cooperate again and not be hostile, and it increases the chance that we can rely on and take care of each other in the future as well. I think that is an important thing between music and feelings of joy and happiness.
How can we use what you’ve discovered in your studies to help make us happier? 
I think that is an easy question because the answer is to do music, to cooperate with each other. It’s important that you experience being and cooperating with others: communicating, coordinating movements, figuring out what the others want and think, and experiencing emotional states with others. Just make music with other individuals in a way that’s not aggressive but rather playful, and the rest will be done by your brain itself.
Dr Jonathan Haidt, (New York University) author of The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind, praised as being one of the most creative contemporary psychologists, offers insight into where happiness comes from.
People’s lives are a constant pursuit for happiness, but it seems to me that we’re also in a constant pursuit of love. What is it about love and happiness that makes them such a compelling duo?
Firstly, I would disagree that we’re in a constant pursuit of happiness. I would say we are in constant pursuit of relatedness and respect and that those are two of the most basic motives. We often do things that don’t make us happy, because deep down we crave respect more than we crave happiness, so we often do things like take jobs that don’t make us happy because they seem like they can give us greater respect from others. But to the extent that many young people in particular are thinking a lot about what would make them happy and where they can find love, I think they do go together. Falling in love gives us the emotional state of passionate love which is the most intense happiness a person can have without using drugs.
Do you think we fall in love easier when we’re happy, or are we happier when and because we’re in love?
We certainly get extremely happy when we fall in love. It’s also known that happy people are more attractive, they’re more likely to get married, and once they’re married they’re more likely to stay married. So happiness and love are associated in many ways.
Happiness and love are a compelling duo; loving feelings, like happiness, are often ephemeral, where one of the two people usually falls out of love with the other. Is there a correlation between falling out of love and the transient nature of happiness?
The key thing, from a psychological perspective, is to distinguish between two very different kinds of love: passionate love and companionate love. Passionate love is a drug – it is like taking speed, ecstasy, or LSD. It destroys your sense of reality and makes it hard for you to sleep. It cannot last more than a few months in that way. Passionate love is, by its very nature, temporary. It always wears off, and when it wears off people often think, “Oh my! I’m not in love any more, maybe it was a mistake, maybe it wasn’t true love.” Companionate love grows much more slowly; it’s the love that comes from sharing your life with someone, and gradually getting more and more intertwined, and you come to rely on and complete each other. This is the kind of love that’s necessary for marriage. Passionate love is nice, but not essential. Companionate love is essential.
In your book, you talk about how people associate winning the lottery with being one of the best things that could ever happen to them, and then you talk about how this pleasure would eventually fade. Do you think that people don’t know themselves well enough to know what would truly make them happy?
Yes, there is a large line of research called “affective forecasting”. The leading researchers there are Tim Wilson at the University of Virginia and Dan Gilbert at Harvard. Dan Gilbert’s work shows that people are pretty good at guessing which way something will make them go – that they’ll be happy, rather than sad if they win the lottery. People understand that, but they are dismal at understanding the duration of these effects. The things that we expect to last for a long time, turn out to be very short-lived. The conclusion I came to when writing The Happiness Hypothesis is that happiness comes from between; it comes from getting the right relationship between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get those three relationships right, you will be as happy as your brain allows you to be.
Material possessions make us happy for a certain amount of time, and then we aspire to something else. Often we may feel that we’re being greedy, but it’s not necessarily greed, is it? Where do we find the balance between greed and happiness?
Research on money and happiness, by people such as Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, shows that when we spend money on experiences, especially experiences with a friend or a loved one, those do make us happy, and then we get to stay with them and look back on them. When we spend money on material goods, especially status goods to show off, those don’t make us happy; they actually divide us from people. Anything that strengthens your relationships will probably make you happy; anything you do that damages your relationships will probably make you unhappy.
And this is why winning the lottery is so ambiguous. When people win the lottery they get a lot of money but it tends to damage most of their relationships. On average lottery winners are not unhappy; they’re slightly happier than they were before, but that hides a lot of areas. Some of them are happier, some of them commit suicide. The kind of success that really makes people happy is earned success. So if you win a million dollars in the lottery, nobody has respect for you, but if you start a business and it’s successful and you earn a million dollars, then people generally respect you. Relationships and the respect of others, those are the two things that most matter.
You talked about a relationship between “yourself and something larger than yourself”, meaning something related to the divine. How would you counterpose Eastern and Western ideals for happiness in terms of religion?
Confucianism is not very deistic, Confucianism is all about getting the right relationships within the family and to one’s leaders. Hinduism is very much about living a good life to improve your soul’s chances for reincarnation. Christianity is about living a good life that will get you into a divine after-life. So I think Eastern and Western religions both see the importance of living a good life and getting relationships right here. You can call it lasting happiness, nirvana, or escape from suffering, but religions do function to create moral order and constraints in this life.
By binding people together into communities that are morally ordered, it does seem to make people happier. The research on religion in America shows very clearly that religious people are happier than average, and atheists are less happy than average. You’re not just working to make money, your work goes to saving souls, creating the kingdom of God on earth, or just to make spiritual progress in your relationship with God. All of those sorts of things tend to make people happier.

by Regner Ramos
 
From the Glass Archive, Issue 12 – Joy
 
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