The Psychology and Neuroscience of Happiness

[Music] thank you so much Vince it's a great pleasure to be here I've just flown in from Copenhagen as it happened talking about happiness and but I thought the best place to start really is to think about joy so think about pleasure and maybe something like this [Music] [Music] just goes on and on why are they so happy why does it make you feel so good imagine what it's like when they're crying so this of course is great for Monday mornings or days when it rains as much as it does today for laughing babies on

YouTube we'll get you that fix at the same time is also very clear I think that we are living in a time of great change and it's also very clear that there is something tragic about this consciousness that some of us are endowed with and maybe not the President of the US but most of us because of course as this quote I put up for you is from a very interesting book which is a collaboration between the Nobel prize-winning writer John Steinbeck and a field biologist called ed Ricketts and it's called Locke from the Sea

of Cortez and he says in there man might be described fairly adequately if simply as a two-legged paradox he has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness perhaps has been suggested his species has not set has not jailed but is still in the state of becoming bound by physical memories to a past of struggle and survival and limited it in futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness and that of course is the paradox isn't it we have very good at predicting things we're very good at remembering things but we are finding it

very difficult to be in the now and yet of course we need to find out what is going on in our brains as we do this here's a man being trepanned as in the famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch the neurosurgeons that I'll show you later that I work with are not quite the same although they've kept the hypocrite gear we tend to put people in scanners most of you will have been in one of those this is an MRI scanner when you do that you can see what is inside the physicality of the human brain

is very clear and yet of course these 15 brains I guess nobody will be able to tell me which of those are men and which are women and which of them is a famous BBC TV presenter who was not particularly happy being in my scanner and of course you can then start to look at how the brain develops and you can even put more people in the scanner which is of course very exciting but what is it then that we see here's an artwork by my friend Annie Katra who's taking a photo of a nice

of herself and off her mother and of course the iris is the only part of the brain that we can see with the naked eye and what we see then becomes a real kind of interesting question most of you will just see black blobs of their black and white and yet if I show you this you cannot help see my two daughters playing in the in the Sun so what is it about the templates that we make what is it about having to make meaning of things that we have to have these templates are we

in fact prediction machines so look at this little baby who's got a cochlear implant which means that this baby is now able to hear but what the baby hears is very different it's like this did anybody understand any of that and yet if I give you a template which is what most of us will hear not just the eight channels that I played you the wife helped her husband it's very difficult not to suddenly hear it to make sense of the noise and of course that's what we do we tend to experience the world here's

a revolving brain and most people in Oxford when they see this as AI yes mortar you're Danish at last poor Yorick I knew him so well and of course I am Danish I can't run away from that and what I'm showing is a form of phlebology so as you can see up here really what you see is if I was sort of facing you this way this is the back of my brain this is the front of the brain this is if I was lying down which I hope you won't be doing tonight and this

is if I'm looking at the front of you and in red you get the visual cortex so in other words things come in through the retina and then it basically comes to the back of the brain and then in dark blue you've got the sense of of of hearing and in light blue the sense of being touched and then in orange and you know what it's like to smell and taste things but of course the key things about any kind of map is really where they are the white spots on the old maps they wrote

here be dragons and of course that's where we really want to go but before we went there and he had the great idea of actually meeting a set of sculptures of this so if you go across to the Welcome Museum you can actually see one of the first neural portraits of what is like to really experience the world except of course the one thing we don't show you here is why does it have to mean anything we're just showing you the five senses I in the brain and you know we were fairly successful but of

course it was near phrenology the idea that we just have blobs this is a fairly good portrait of myself from the 17th century where I'm sort of showing you exactly where the different blobs are on the brain but of course that's not how the brain works the brain is a very complex network in fact borrowing a quote from Thomas Aquinas quit quit receiver and modem represent EES R occipital which basically means that the content is shaped by the container and so in my work I can basically work out what the wiring is in your brains

using these MRIs and I can look at how traffic is flowing on that wiring and then I can make a computer model that can basically give me the same kind of result and then of course once I have a computer model I can start to take it apart and I can find out what are the important the necessary and sufficient components that are necessary so it becomes from something more than neuro phonology when I do this with this wonderful man from Barcelona Gustavo deco everybody should have a friend in Barcelona it means you can go

there on a regular basis that really is a pleasure but of course when I talk about pleasure I'm not talking about hedonism it's not just the pursuit of pleasure it's something else because of course when it comes to pleasure there's a cycle unfortunately I as I flew in I had to contend myself some pretty not so good coffee and at the moment I'm in a wanting face I really really would quite like to try some very good coffee so I'm sort of in this kind of phase I'm foraging for good coffee and there may be

some here and once I have engaged with that I then start liking it and at some point there would be great moments of pleasure during this process and at some point I can start thinking about science again so pleasure really is what enables those face transitions so it's absolutely important now I've done a lot of new phrenology in my time I've put lots of people in scanners doing all kinds of things eating things having social interactions even taking me some feta means you were surprised it was before crystal meth it was before Breaking Bad and

they were surprisingly easy to get the ethics for that and what you find when you do this is that of course you get pleasure the first time you take it so this is in fact the whole pleasure Network being active we also were able to get ethnic stood again bling which of course is also one of the great vice and pleasure of many people but the one thing we couldn't do was six so I had to ally myself with a Dutch person yeah Nicole Georg artist was sort of is the master and Johnson's roll into

one person and he looked into this very important question namely what happens in the brains of women when they fake orgasms compared to when they have real orgasms now there's a real conundrum here because we know from Sex Lies and videotapes in other words question is that only about 30% of women will have sex on a regular basis I don't think many men will stand for the same thing but the key thing really is to think about what happens in the brain and as you can see up here when you fake an orgasm there's only

a little bit of motor activity but very little in the white spots in where then pleasure network is on the other hand when you have a real orgasm you actually get that whole circuit and you can say is a bit frivolous to talk about six on on a rainfall day in London but of course it is I am Scandinavian after all right so although not Dutch but really what the reason why I want you to show these things is because you can see how you have different network switching in and out and one of the

things that happen when you have affective disorders when you have anhedonia the lack of pleasure is that you can't make that transition you end up being addicted to things you spend all your time here and there's very little pleasure and you go over that cycle quickly over and over again or you can't really get to those things so the key thing here really is to think about how it is that there's almost like a choreography a dance of how different brain regions are talking to each other as we go through this cycle and that of

course that traffic that can be jammed there could be closures of the roads and trying to think about how we can unlock those unblocked those is really how we can give people more pleasure now you can do things to rats that you can't do to humans you can take things out and you can find out that there's a network of atonic hotspots that if you stimulate here in the ventral pallidum or in the nucleus accumbens the rat will licks its lips more to sugar water which is how you measure pleasure in in other in other

animals like rats and you have a very similar kind of network in humans and so really thinking about pleasure before we start thinking about well-being is thinking about how this dance of different regions go together and there are many ways that one can change those one of them is my good friend and only tip overseas was talking to somebody who was very impressed with his work because what he was able to do is was to stick an electrode into a girl with dystonia which is a terrible motor disease that basically means that she's completely normal

but she's just unable to put her hands out and hold him in front of her now if you drill a hole into her brain and rebalance the network in a part called the Globus pallidus internal segment on both sides and put a battery onto the chest like a pacemaker you can basically transform this girl's life she if you met her today she would be exactly like a normal girl because this is what happens now she also has to undergo a lot of physiotherapy in order to end up like this and you'll see in a moment

she's such a wonderful woman and you can see how her left arm here at this point hadn't quite recovered from the the toll of having this this problem so this is quite exciting we can do this that we now have such a good understanding that we can rebalance these networks we can even do it for things that you can't see if you were to be i amputated about 25 percent of those who get amputated get chronic phantom limb pains and that's really quite awful earlier people thought they could just amputate more but then you just

get a larger phantom if you give people morphine it works for about two months in a year lifts with the constipation um but if you on the other hand stimulate deep in the brain in the periorbital gray at 20 Hertz you can make that pain go away you can have pleasure and as it happens when you scan people while they're doing that you get activity in the pleasure circuit not surprisingly now if you stimulate a ninety hurts the pain becomes unbearable so in other words it's the same circuit thats observes pain and pleasure and when

any heard that Jesus culture so here's another sculpture instantiating what plane and pleasure really is in the brain now how am i doing on time so I can do something better I think let's talk about music so when I when I talk when I tell my students about this they look up and say what's that black guy there's not Obama I said Steven Pinker famously said music was like Auto Street cheesecake it could vanish and the species would be unchanged I think he's completely wrong and I think James we'll show you why you so why

is that so great right don't be German on me dog thought of that model look at the figure and vas behind me you can either see the VAR so you can see the two faces you can either hear the rhythm or you can hear the guitar going back attack it down thank that DAC at the CAC it down and it's all about prediction error it's all about having a template and matching that template so we took the classic FUP beats and here hopefully there will be a simple one where we just tried something like this

it's not particularly danceable right maybe it with a handbag it's too predictable right I mean it's not that it's not that funky but what if you add a little bit of spice a little bit of syncopation to get us going there's a not quite James Brown there's not the gap but you can tell how because it's a little bit more unpredictable it's more interesting and so we'd like it we like to move we light it what if we add a lot of complexity to it it's like Crouch celebrating a goal right I mean it's too

unpredictable so we were interested in this we asked people and it becomes you inverted u-shape the kind of things that are too predictable are the things that you basically don't particularly want and don't particularly like by the things that are just that the right kind of level of predictability is what you like and so we couldn't help ourselves make one of these models that I alluded to we make a model and try to see what are the components that are important it turns out that when you are in the groove you are meter stable which

is a term from dynamical systems and you can measure this very precisely and when you then look at what regions are responsible for that you get what I call the eudaimonia of groove namely you get the pleasure circuit which is the frontal pit of the brain but also parts in the back so a whole network thats observes the meaningfulness of music the reason why you want to make dance and of course we have to go back to Aristotle because that's exactly what he said he said let there be James Brown no that's not what he

said he said hey Dona and eudaimonia is basically what happiness is all about and the lack of pleasure of course anhedonia is one of the key components of most mental illnesses so I'm betting on that we could help learn about happiness by understanding pleasure but it's not gonna be enough we gotta understand about eudaimonia and music is a good thing and not only music because together with Robin Carhartt Harry's we've been very interested in psilocybin and various other drugs which are incredibly meaningful for reasons we don't understand but for instance it's one of the things

that can break this cycle about 60 to 70 percent of patients that try psilocybin together to quit their nicotine addiction will actually go through it but at the end of the day though it's not about psilocybin magic mushrooms it could be about music it's certainly not about deep brain the electrodes it's about being with other people here's my good friend Roman Carson Eric who talked was written a book on empathy and together we've made this museum called the empathy Museum if you haven't seen it you should go and then you should come next time we

do one of our pop-up things and then you might be able to go and walk in the blue shoes of a crazy professor and listen to the stories that we tell ourselves or in the high heels of a of somebody who works in a different kind of life so I think there's a lot to be done and I think the key thing though and I'm very happy when Vince told me that he is going to do something on poetry because of course poetry is perhaps one of those things that really gives us meaning that really

gives us a sense of of joy and derek walcott sadly is no longer with them but he said for every pervert it is always morning in the world history of forgotten insomniac night history and elemental or always our early beginning because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history thank you hello and thank you for having me it's and everybody so we all know that a happy mind makes a happy body so I would like to speak about how I think we can make ourselves happy and that

is through dance so I dance and I think everybody should dance it's a physical exercise it makes our body healthy it's relating to immune-boosting effects and to health in general and it gives us the right kind of pleasure as we just heard from Morton so it's just so good for us but then many of you are going to tell me as it has happened throughout my PhD people say I can't dance and I don't want to dance so what about watching that then I asked well we can you know good this year we can stay

on the sofa and watch dance even just on the YouTube channel so I spent a lot of my PhD and my postdoctoral work at the University of the Balearic Islands and City University London in asking the question what do I get out of watching dance so watching dance in the lab basically what I do is I invite a lot of people who don't dance and I have them watch little short video clips of dance in the lab while I record two things from them their answers what they think they see what they feel so subjective

reports ratings and their physiology and that's because we know that when we feel an emotion our body reacts as well and we have electrodes to measure this so we will attach little electrodes to people's fingers and we I can measure if people are actually feeling an emotion as well and then I have them watch ballet for example so I would like to share three pieces of evidence with you today about this work first the question we were asking ourselves is their emotion and a dance movement or is it just pretty or something so we found

something quite surprising for us there are some specific shapes that just make us happy for some reason so these were round japes so I'm going to show you here what we showed participants were just it's videos I was talking about and some of these videos were mostly rounded movements or rounds and other movements were more like edgy and the majority of people felt really happy when they saw the red movements while not really happy when they saw the edgy ones so that's important and if we look at the entire art history for example a lot

of depictions of dance movements were actually such that depicted round movement like back bends or round out of the arms and so on and that across cultures and across times another thing that sugar stroke I said that really doesn't make dance dancers happiest that extreme movements are happy making people happy so for example I'm showing you four pictures here of someone like stretching their leg fairy high up and we found that people were more happy when they saw a very extreme type of movements interesting as well so again we went to the archaeological History Museum

and just checked and again a lot of the representations were these extreme kinds of stretches okay let's try I would like to show you some of the videos and see if the same happens for you so I've worked two videos one is from a sad ballet and one is from a happy ballet and I'm gonna play them one after the other and then I'm gonna ask you which one you thought was happy and which one was that so let's have a look at this one first don't say anything don't give it away and then the

other one so who thinks that this last one was happy the majority like in our study so just to look again you can see the roundedness and the edginess so something so simple it's just about making people happy with the right moves second question let's move on Christian quickly so obviously when we watch a dance it's not just about what we see is also about what we hear I didn't bring music more than show the effect it had on all of so we know that now but we try to investigate that also in the lab

and we combined sad and happy music was sad and happy dance so we had people watch all these video clips while they were listening sometimes to music that was congruent with what they were seeing and sometimes it was an incongruent with what they were saying and we found that the music and the dance had a super additive effect so if the music and the dance matched not only that people find the emotions more stronger that they felt but also their bodies reacted much more strongly so there's something about the music and the dance that share

something that made us actually feel something very strongly and that makes a big point for the sofa version of the dance merging of course but then this happened which was basically dancing is good for the edge and where this came from was from a study showing where we were looking at dances and lay people because we really were interested and it doesn't make a difference if I have training and dance for my experience of a dance so we compare dancers and non dancers when they were watching these de ballet movements and we recorded again their

body responses as well as their subjective reports and what we found was it did make a difference not only did the dances rates of emotions more strongly but also their bodies were more sensitive to the different movements and different emotions expressed with the movements so maybe there's something beyond the sofa anyway and I would like to finish with a happy outlook which is just something out what we've found so far very simple that there are some movements that just make us more happy than others so if you want to be happy go out and find

the right moves washing dance just watching dance makes us sweat so we found that and in that endeavor dance and music have a super additive effect so try to find the right moves with the right sound so is watching dance as good as doing dance well I guess there's still some important research to do here but at least remember the expertise effects there seems to be something about it so just as a final reflection so we all have an intuition about music being a tool for us that we can use to enhance our mood but

maybe we should give dance a chance too so therefore I have a task for you tonight before bed go to your browser google for example dance class plenty to choose from or Google tickets for dance performance please do it you'll feel very happy thank you everybody [Applause] good evening everyone I'm gonna start with a deep and dark confession there is no dancing in this presentation okay I'm disappointed too I obviously wasn't briefed properly so I'm gonna make the conversation receiving a bit broader and I'm gonna talk about some lessons in happiness now moderns already primed

you to my intro we're about two and a half thousand years ago there was a awesome dude called Aristotle and besides kind of like you know inventing parts of Western philosophy he also came up with a great word there's very helpful to introduce this topic which is eudaimonia and essentially what this means is that life can be worth living and that we should be aiming towards living a life that's worth living and we still use this word today to differentiate two different types of happiness eudaimonic happiness which is basically our satisfaction with life you know

we could describe it as trying to measure human flourishing but really just asking people to reflect on their life and to tell us how satisfied how happy they feel and in contrast we have hedonic pleasure you know immediate feelings of satiation or happiness or pleasure so I think so far this evening we've talked a lot about joy and pleasure in the moment and we haven't talked much about satisfaction about our feelings of happiness with ourselves and our lives and that's what I'm going to be talking about this evening so the way that we try and

measure this in people is mostly in surveys so the kinds of questions that we might ask people is things like do you agree or disagree with in most ways my life is close to the ideal so far I've gotten the important things out of life if I could live my life over I would change almost nothing and because there's quite a lot of people interested in happiness from governments to NGOs to academics you're actually able to ask quite a lot of people these questions so there's something called the world value survey that actually measures hundreds

of thousands of people all over the world over time and asks and these kinds of questions as well as you know many many other surveys and measures we've got so everything I'm going to talk to you about this evening is based on these very large samples of people being asked these questions about about how satisfied they feel with their lives so well the questions that I'm gonna try to answer first is about who is happiest so who in these hundreds of thousands of people reports being most satisfied with their lives so maybe we can get

some lessons there about what kinds of people are happier now before I go into this I do think there's an important caveat to make so when anyone whenever anyone is trying to convince you with survey evidence I want you to think about this graph this graph is a correlation between per capita cheese consumption and the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bed sheets now the point I'm making is that some of the evidence I'm showing you it's just a correlation it's just saying like hey people who are like this report being

happiest it doesn't mean that because they are like that that caused them to be happy it just means that is the correlation okay so I'm gonna start off and we're gonna talk about age so when we tell teenagers that that this is the best time of their life that it's amazing to be young and to be a student and to have no responsibilities that's kind of true because it seems like they're certainly happier than people for most of their adult life but actually the really old people they're much happier so there is this very well-known

u-shaped curve in happiness and this has been shown in across samples across people you know these vast numbers of people that we ask this is the pattern we see in age and to be honest we're not exactly sure why this is probably one of the most prevalent explanations is that it's really about expectations so as we get older we have these expectations about what life should be like and then unfortunately we constantly feel like we don't actually our lives don't meet those expectations so as we get older the kind of gap between these expectations becomes

more realized and so then people report being less satisfied with their life and then as we get older we kind of adjust our expectations and that's why people when they get you know more more elderly that they get happier and this hasn't just shown through surveys this is the rate of antidepressant use across age so again we see the opposite direction because this is antidepressants and you can even see this evidence in monkeys so some researchers went and asked all the zookeepers are or many the zookeepers across the world and asked them how happy do

your monkeys sing um which is must be kind of odd questions to get now the V keepers had no idea what the study was about they weren't told why they were being asked this but then the researchers were able to look at the age of these primates and then the reported kind of happiness of these primates and again the same u-shaped curve arises um what's interesting is that it depends on the kind of questions you ask so you can kind of see that in general life satisfaction questions you see the same kind of shape is

my life worthwhile you seek in a very similar shape general a happier usage a general shape bless you see the anxiety levels are much higher in midlife so this is an alternative explanation for why this is the basically life becomes more stressful in midlife maybe we have more responsibilities placed on us maybe you know you've got parents look after children to look after and that anxiety could also be an explanation another kind of group that does seem happiest is people who report being satisfied with their relationships so that's both romantic relationships but also in terms

of people who have lots of friends who spend lots of time with their friends this is one of the biggest LED predictors of who is happy and who's not basically your personal relationships so you can see here that people who say that they're satisfied with their relationships report being much happier than people who report not being satisfied now another one is money and money gets people really interested about happiness because in many ways we don't really like to think that money leads to happiness you know we have this idea that ah you can't buy happiness

you know happiness comes from within I still don't really understand where that idea came from because to me like if you live across countries rich countries are happier than poor countries quite straightforward within countries if you're poor within a country then you're less happy than if you're rich within a country so at least cross-sectionally is it if you measure at one point of time money does need happiness especially at the low end so especially for those people who little amounts of money even very small increases couldn't dramatically improve people's well-being but it's not just about

having money there's also increasing evidence about how you use your money impacts your happiness so if people use their limited budget which we all have a limited amount to spend if we spend more of it on experiences and not stuff then people seem to be happier from those experiences if we spend more money on others rather than just buying stuff for ourselves we seem to be happier as well so even though we can't kind of wave of what wave a magic wand and become richer maybe we allocate our spending differently to try and improve a

happiness as well another one is fulfilling employment that a people feel in control of their lives if they feel that they're doing something they're good at that's another super strong predictor of who is happy and who's not now I think I know what you're all thinking now I think what you're thinking is this is just too easy like all you're telling me is I need to get really rich I need to have amazing relationships both romantically and otherwise I need to find a job I'm like kick arse at and that I find really feeling control

and fulfilling like I'm just gonna go home tonight and be much happier but the thing is that actually it's a bit more complicated than that and the reason it's more complicated is because of this thing called hedonic adaption now basically hedonic adaption it's not a good or a bad thing but it changes what it means to try and pursue happiness if we're trying to become happier then his onek adaption can be your enemy so let me explain basically everything that we do everything that changes in our lives we just adapt you that's what the human

condition is we're supposed to be good at adapting to changing environments and that's the same with happiness so even though things that we think might really impact our happiness we just adjust so within a few years nomadic kind of what happens to us we seem to go back to a set point so if you look at that marriage you'd think that maybe I showed you the relationships matter maybe if we get married we're gonna be much happier but no we're happier a bit beforehand we're really happy on the day that's awesome and then back to

back to normal no marriage no I'm not not really helping birth of a child again pretty awesome just before pretty crappy just afterwards but again we just adjust back to the set point even when really terrible things happen even when really all the things at the death of a spouse we do adjust back within a few years you can even see this I want to be happy at the end there but this depends on gender in Tibet a few other things but basically we just adapt to what happens to us now this has really important

implications for us pursuing happiness because if we try to pursue happiness but then we know that we adapt every time then we need to think about how big the changes are that happening in our lives if we win the lottery tomorrow but then we adapt to that and in a couple of years time we're back to normal levels of happiness then we can't really win the lottery twice you know so really it's about steady changes steady gains people will be much happier if they slowly increase their income over time than if they had some massive

windfall and similar with other areas of life slow goal fulfillment that feels like you're making progress it's going to make people happier than big changes and similarly if you think about things like it's almost to become disabled versus the chronic illness all the evidence shows that for many disabilities that are kind of one-off instances people to adjust but for chronic illnesses where we feel bad continuously over time we don't adjust to that so thinking about what kinds of things might change our levels of well-being and trying to avoid certain things more than others would also

be a way for people to try and improve their level of happiness so I want to kind of summarize and finish off this evening by just a piece of advice which is basically that we need to relax a bit more because really in many ways we can't fully like pursue happiness because we'll just adjust back to it and even as though like the worst things you're really worried about happening to you you'll adjust to those so they won't affect you as much as you think similarly the things that you think will really make you happy

you'll adjust to that too so that's not going to make you as happy as you think so basically live a nice life try makes improve some things by maybe changing how you spend money trying to make small goals rather than big changes but at the same time almost anything that happens to you we will adjust back to you so thanks very much [Applause]