![]() Amen, MD’s mission is end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. To order a copy for £9.99 (RRP £12.99) go to. The Happy Brain: The Science of Where Happiness Comes From, and Why is published by Guardian Faber. So, at the risk of over-simplifying: to be happy you should have a home that is safe, big enough and near green spaces work at a rewarding job that offers autonomy and novelty earn enough money and find love – but don’t focus on pursuing money or love do things you enjoy laugh a lot, but don’t be a comedian … Oh, and benefit from consistent and loving parenting.įirst, though, you should read this funny, stimulating and rewarding book. Yet he also points out that in a world that causes such stress to our brains, “experiencing happiness may well be more of a necessity, rather than an indulgence”. “What makes an adult brain happy? That can’t be answered in any succinct way, sorry”, he writes. Burnett is himself reluctant to suggest easy answers. The study he cites, “Oxytocin Promotes Human Ethnocentrism”, by KW De Dreu et al, makes fascinating reading – but it only claims very slight evidence that oxytocin motivates “out-group derogation” – hardly enough to justify “oxytocin makes you racist”.īut it would not be scientific of this review to draw any disparaging conclusions from this sample size of one exaggerated comment among several hundred painstakingly referenced observations. Sometimes, Burnett seems to go too far, such as when he claims that oxytocin causes racism. And our social status is so critical to humans that mocking or criticising others can give us pleasure. The workings of the insula and somatosensory cortex could explain why some people think rape victims or poor people deserve their lot. A lack of control over our work lives “can be psychologically harmful, sometimes even clinically so”. Money “triggers the reward pathway in the brain somewhat like a drug”. But (apart from one small quip about Brexit) Burnett stops short of getting political about what’s in our heads. Writing about neuroscience is a burgeoning field, and often controversial – see Cordelia Fine’s books about the “science” of gender, or Susan Greenfield’s on the damaging effects of new technologies. “After about five minutes, he finally stopped laughing.” There are also some comedy footnotes: “Just to be clear, at no point should you literally attempt to physically break a brain down into its components.” Nevertheless, he asks a friendly professor if he can strap himself into a local fMRI machine. Scanning the brain is very expensive, he tells us, so studies that use it tend to be small and rarely repeated, making their results not very scientifically sound. He knows that the human brain loves a narrative, and he stitches together his findings with stories from his own past and his current quest. This really is explaining the joke on a minute scale, but who better qualified to do so?īurnett mixes a chatty style with academic endnotes Laughter, it turns out, may originate among the temporal, occipital and parietal lobes, whose role is to “detect and resolve incongruity”. He rattles through studies, building a picture of what exactly tickles the human brain and why. He runs through some chemical neurotransmitters and what we know about their roles, such as dopamine (reward and pleasure), endorphins (a response to pain and stress) and oxytocin (the “cuddle” hormone). He begins by describing the parts of the brain – and why none of them is solely “responsible” for processing any emotion. The Burnett method is to combine a chatty style with hundreds of academic endnotes, interviews with “experts” (including Charlotte Church on fame and Rhod Gilbert on comedy) and personal anecdotes, and on the whole it is very effective. So how does a responsible scientist condense all of the relevant research and make it accessible? In one newspaper, the following headlines all purported to reveal the latest scientific truth about how to be happy: “Forget cash – how sex and sleep are the key to happiness” “Key to happiness? Start with £50k a year salary” “Why the secret to happiness is having 37 things to wear”… Readers would be forgiven for thinking that it’s all nonsense. Early in this book he expresses his frustration with the way that the media often sensationalise research to sell a story. A s a neuroscientist, comedian and Guardian science blogger, Dean Burnett knows that science communication is both important and hard to get right.
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