CHAPTER 3 Rush to Action: The Biology of Risk and HappinessRead more at location 663
What’s the Big Idea? Our brain chemistry likes a new challenge.Read more at location 665
Which part of the brain flashes when you win a poker hand? When the IRS audits you? When you see a photo of your mother?Read more at location 673
To imagine the human race without the limbic brain is to imagine a horror movie, devoid of caring and compassion.Read more at location 687
The writer Bill Bryson has pointed out that about “half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same as the chemical functions that take place in you.”Read more at location 704
THE TOMORROW MACHINE—OUR FRONTAL LOBERead more at location 713
Thinking about tomorrow is a vital evolutionary gift to humans and a critical part of mental health. Without the ability—or the desire—to think about tomorrow, we devolve into misery, into a lower form of life.Read more at location 714
The frontal lobe of our brain is our future machine.Read more at location 726
Walter Mischel of Stanford conducted heralded studies on four-year-olds with a simple tool: the marshmallow. He placed a marshmallow in front of them and then left the room.Read more at location 730
Our brains allow us to “see” the future. Not predict the future but envisage a future, whether it be a vision of tonight, next week, or after our death. However, seeing is not enough to bring happiness. Even achieving goals is insufficient. We also need hope. Our greatest moments of happiness come when we are engaged in an effort, trying to achieve, armed with a vision and with hope.Read more at location 766
slave feels demoralized because even if he can concoct a vision of freedom, he loses hope.Read more at location 768
knows the trouble I’ve seen,” but at the same time those spirituals try to find a reason for hope “nobody knows, but Jesus.”Read more at location 769
The frontal lobe helps us assess our behavior and how others will perceive our behavioral choices. In Freud’s world, the frontal lobe is home to the superego.Read more at location 785
Listen to this strange story. A man fell off a stagecoach, smashed his frontal lobe, and then revolutionized motion pictures. Along the way he turned into a madman and murdered his wife’s lover in cold blood. Meet Eadweard Muybridge.Read more at location 791
For neuroscientists, though, the case was breathtaking. Muybridge exhibited all the signs of frontal lobe trauma. In addition to being unable to control his emotions, and lurching back and forth between coldness and hot anger, he disregarded risks. His business associate testified that Muybridge photographed himself on a dangerous rock in Yosemite, “where a biscuit, if slightly tilted, would have fallen down 2,000 feet.”Read more at location 815
A dozen years before Muybridge, a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage was blasting train routes in Vermont with powerful explosives. He was known as a kind, even-tempered supervisor.Read more at location 824
He lived another dozen years, a fitful wreck of a personality—irreverent, profane, and annoying.Read more at location 829
Cases like Muybridge’s and Gage’s show up again and again, whether through tumors, industrial accidents, or torn arteries. When that modest web of tissue just behind the eyes, more specifically the orbitofrontal cortex, rips, it is like offering another drink to Dr. Jekyll or letting Lon Chaney watch the rise of a full moon. To be fair, the results are seldom murderous or sociopathic. Instead the warmth of human personality tends to chill.Read more at location 831
In fact, patients with frontal lobe damage can perform wonderfully on IQ tests, and they might beat you at Trivial Pursuit.Read more at location 834
But if you give them a test that requires any planning, or if you ask them to plan a picnic in the park, they will either not show up or appear at midnight dressed in scuba gear. They cannot begin “thinking about tomorrow”Read more at location 835
Here is the argument: Evolution gives us the frontal lobe—our windshield looking out to the future—which then allows and inspires us to think about tomorrow and the day after.Read more at location 838
The frontal lobe, then, is the part of the brain that tells us we will be happy only if we have some forward momentum in our lives. A life of stasis, a life of murmuring mantras, a life of staring endlessly at the surf armed with a piña colada will confound and frustrate the frontal lobe. It is literally in the front of our brains, but metaphorically our frontal lobe is aiming human beings to go forward.Read more at location 839
A competitive economic system acknowledges and applauds such drive and ambition. Attempts to staunch competition simply induce guilt, and worse, gear us up for an emotional and economic car wreck.Read more at location 846
Inside, the left and right sides of the brain are vastly different, yet are so interconnected that we cannot make rational decisions with only the rational part of our brains. Nor can we show emotion if we use only the emotional part. Here are a couple of startling examples.Read more at location 851
While we think of ourselves as a single “I,” the left and right sides can play tricks on our “I.”Read more at location 873
three important concepts in any pursuit of happiness. First, happier people tend to have more left-side brain activity. Second, happiness is not the exact opposite of sadness. This is not simple algebra, where one unit of sadness on the right side of the brain can be wiped out by a unit of happiness on the left. Third, while the left side of the brain is often touted as the “analytical side,” it needs to consult with the right side in order to make reasonable decisions.Read more at location 882
How do we know this? It was harder in Dizzy Dean’s day. Now we look at an fMRI of a crying baby’s brain and see the right hemispheres lighting up, while a cooing baby’s lights up on the left.Read more at location 887
In Descartes’ Error, the neurologist Antonio Damasio points to numerous examples where patients with access to pure reason divorced from emotion become socially paralyzed. They would even have trouble ordering a baloney sandwich at a deli because they could not call upon their memories and tastes for salty meat. Our emotions, feelings, and memories penetrate decision making.Read more at location 913
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink argues that our instantaneous impressions are often right because they actually take into account nearly all of our prior experience—even if not laid out in an analytical spreadsheet.Read more at location 927
recent research shows us that our instant impressions do seem to call upon our lifetime of experiences and whatever helpful tools are encoded in our DNA, allowing us to distinguish friend, foe, predator, and prey.Read more at location 935
We can see the link between reason and emotions among investors.Read more at location 938
Edenists will disdain busy working people. They will portray them as heartless robots of a soulless capitalist system. They don’t understand that most of those purported robots are driven both by their rational and emotional brains. They do not represent pure reason or pure greed. Most of those who succeed in moving toward their personal and business goals have integrated their drives for forward motion and hope.Read more at location 957
in the James worldview, we need external stimulus in order to generate internal energy. A life of meditation and inner searching leads to a dead end of boredom and stasis.Read more at location 968
A busy life actively engaged in the world allows our bodies to take in external stimuli and convert them into internal energy.Read more at location 970
The father of pragmatism and the brother of the novelist Henry, William James presented his ideas in simple but cogent fashion: In his parable of the bear, James argued that we do not see a bear, fear it, and then decide to run. No, we see the bear, begin to run, and our bodies become aroused as we get ready to run. Our palms sweat, pupils dilate, veins pop, all of which are pathways to transmit fear to our brains. Nanoseconds later we recognize we are scared to death. Emotions are bodily functions, not signals to the body.Read more at location 972
James’s ideas were mocked and discarded during the reign of behavioralists like B. F. Skinner, who thought emotions were bad for our well-being and did not see much difference between laboratory rats and graduate students.Read more at location 978
Ekman was going to study faces. Ekman had read Darwin and a French neurologist named Duchenne de Boulogne, who had mapped faces and the emotions they signaled. Ekman’s task: to prove that there was a universality among facial expressions.Read more at location 982
If he could do this on Margaret Mead’s terrain, he would also kick sand on her contention that the people in New Guinea were emotionally distinct from Westerners.Read more at location 983
Ekman was pilloried in the profession and faced protests led by Mead, who declared him a “disgrace,” and the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who stood up at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association, called Ekman’s ideas fascist, and said he should not be allowed to speak.Read more at location 986
Sure enough, Ekman’s findings seemed to back up Darwin, de Boulogne, and James. The external stimulation can inspire the internal reaction. Moreover, common terms like “cold feet” and “hotheaded” are not just metaphors but actual descriptions of our bodily sensations during emotional changes.Read more at location 994
How do these signals get transmitted from the body to the brain and back to the body?Read more at location 1001
Dopamine urges us to take action, to engage, to try new things, and it gives us a feeling of pleasure when we do so. Dopamine may also help people see patterns of behavior so they can assess and refine their predictions about cause and effect.Read more at location 1030
For healthy people, though, dopamine is an elixir, a chemical that delivers a rush, a natural high. It makes us feel alert, interested, and, well, alive.Read more at location 1037
Because our bodies are engineered for pleasure and learning feedback, I argue that any economic or social system must do the same, if it is going to allow human beings to flourish and search for happiness. Let’s go shoppingRead more at location 1046
At the same time that dopamine helps us predict and learn, dopamine is the molecule of urge. When we reach for a chocolate éclair, or the hand of a lover, dopamine is at work.Read more at location 1058
We feel the flow before we get the result we seek. And this is key. Dopamine is not the reward for winning, for conquering, for finishing the race, the task, or the job. Dopamine is the reward for trying . As dopamine flows, the goal seems within our reach, and we thrust our hands outward to grasp it. This is the key to human life, the key to successful social and economic systems, and the great flaw in the thinking of happiness gurus and egalitarian political regimes.Read more at location 1059
BEYOND DOPAMINE: OTHER IMPORTANT NEUROTRANSMITTERS OF HAPPINESSRead more at location 1067
While dopamine charges us up for a new task, beta-endorphins flow when we feel the thrill of victory, or the agony of defeat.Read more at location 1069
Serotonin, which is found in fruits, mollusks, and humans, is one of the earth’s oldest transmitters. It stabilizes moods and feelings of dominance and submission.Read more at location 1073
Oxytocin triggers caring and maternal feelings through the nervous system.Read more at location 1085
in order to feel happiness, we had best be (1) moving forward, and (2) anticipating new surprises and experiences.Read more at location 1095
Psychologists and neuroeconomists who blame competition for unhappiness are simply bad psychologists and neuroeconomists, who want to remake man in their own idealistic image or refuse to accept man as he is.Read more at location 1101
Movie buffs admire the famed Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1980 film The Station, in which the tired, drained, inanimate faces at the Warsaw train station seem to search for something, perhaps a long-lost spark of human energy. Is this where we want to end up?Read more at location 1105
If we want to pursue happiness, as individuals and as a society, we would be foolish to ignore our DNA, to ignore our cerebral structure and the neurotransmitters that inspire us to take another bite, whether of an apple or that proverbial slice of life.Read more at location 1115
