Thinking About Happiness

I really do not remember when I was particulary happy or unhappy! I think I have got over this emotion for past several years, i take moments of pleasure and displeasure in the flow of life equally. But, i find people often talking about happiness, in fact several months, some psychology students approached me while i was sitting in Vice-regal lodge lawns of the University of Delhi, preparing myself for my regular evening yoga excercises and meditation. They interviwed me about my happiness. Anyway, aware of the popular craze for happiness amongst the youth, i started a thread on Vimarsh, the e-forum for the science community of DU, in December 2008. Several people posted their comment about happiness there. I quote a few of them here. I started the thread by saying:

All human being crave to be happy, in fact that is the primary driving force to work We go to that extra mile just hoping to derive happiness, whether through earning that extra hundred Rupees, or going to a restaurant to eat good food. But, no one really knows what makes us happy. A recent scientific study may help. This new research suggests, that the happiness of people around you has a profound impact on your own personal satisfaction. Like an influenza outbreak, happiness - and misery too - spread through social networks, affecting people through three degrees of separation. For instance, a happy friend of a friend of a friend increases the chances of personal happiness by about 6% . Compare that to research showing that Rs. 5000 increase in monthy income bump ups the odds by just 2%, says James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the new study. "Even people we don't know and have never met have bigger effect on our mood than substantial increases in income," he says. He and colleague Nicholas Christakis, of Boston's Harvard Medical School, made the connection by mining 53,228 social connections between 5124 people who took part in a decades-long clinical study. As part of the Framingham Heart Study, participants updated researchers on their social contacts and health status, including happiness, as measured by a standard psychological questionnaire. Many participants listed several other study participants, allowing the researchers to connect social dots. Fowler and Christakis took a similar approach to document how obesity and cigarette smoking permeated through the same social network. Even more than smoking and obesity, happiness spreads best at close distances, they found. A

happy next-door neighbour ups the odds of person happiness by 34%, a sibling who lives within 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) by 14%, and a friend within half a mile by a whopping 42%. The effect falls off through the network, with friends' happiness boosting the chances of personal happiness by an average of 15% and friends of friends by 10%. As with obesity and smoking, Fowler and Christakis detected no effect beyond three degrees of separation. While there might be six degrees of separation between any two people, "there are three degrees of influence," Christakis says. Fowler theorises that beyond three connections, a kind of social dissonance saps the transmission of behaviour, almost like a wave. "If you drop one pebble in a pond, it will create ripples out from the pebble," he says. "That's not what's happening here. You have a whole handful of pebbles and you're throwing them in the pond at once." Sentiments of a happy person contain its infective spread of happiness. Fowler and Christakis found that each happy contact increases a person's odds of happiness by an average of 9%, while an unhappy contact decreases those odds by 7%. "I think that happiness is more likely to spread because here's an emotion that's about social cohesion," says Fowler. Visible and contagious happiness might have helped our ancestors maintain social cohesion. It's pleasurable to be near other happy individuals and not near other unhappy individuals." The editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies, and curator of the World Database of Happiness says: "Happy people are typically more involved, are nicer to their kids and their dog, and live longer" . So, the moral of the story, is be happy and spread happiness around, if you really want to remain happy. Avoid feeling unhappy because your neighbor has acheived phenomenal success that you always wanted in your life. If your motto in life is to be happy, you can be even when you fail to get success. I used some parts of an article published in the New Scientist magazine for my comment. Here are some of the responses from various members: Shekhar Jain (ShekhU ) wrote: I DONT KNOW WHAT what make people happy, but i can tell you a incidence when i feel happy even condition were not favering anyone. one day we face a complete power cut in night so all of us was feeling disturbed but suddenly i saw moon in the sky. that moonsight make me soo happy at that time i thank to god for that power cut. i forget about next day i forget about my sleep i forget every thing. i was happy just because of that moonsight. what i think is, when a person is doing something from and for his/her heart then s/he feels happy. distinguish between brain and heart, regarding feeling, is undigetable but it is true according to my philosophy.

As usual i replied: What really is happiness?" and as usual i searched the Net and look what a gem i discovered: A person named Kuldip Gupta has published an article on scribd titled happiness in this article he said: A caveman was happy if he got his stomach full. He did not look beyond. That can not be defined as happiness. Its stupor. Desires per se are essential for growth and activity. Annihilation of desires is like killing of Cancer cells by radio therapy , it would kill lot of good cells too. Self centered desires like cancer cells do cause more harm than good though. Yet desires are an essential prerequisite for Human evolution. As defined by Aristotle, Happiness is an activity not a emotion. A contended person sans of any activity would seldom be really happy. The safety catch is that one should not relate the fulfillment of desires with ones inner self or happiness. Happiness must relate to being socially contributor, to being an active participant in general well being. An alcoholic maybe on the seventh cloud yet that emotion though devoid of any desires can not be termed as happiness. Happiness has to be independent of desires. An old axiom getting what u like is success and liking what u get is happiness is again an incomplete definition. Happiness most of the time is an illusion. We perceive well-being, health, wealth, as happiness. All these are conditioned responses. A hand out of our accumulated subconsciousness. As Dr. Radhakrishnan said in his book An idealists view of religion that the biggest challenge facing the mankind is that they have stopped thinking and have become robot automata. A person looks for external stimuli, recognition to know or evaluate his self . He looks at the mirror to know if he is fairest of all. He does not have enough confidence on his own self. Thats the principal reason why happiness has become elusive. Without thinking, we are in the danger of becoming the clones as described by Aldous Huxleys in Bravo new world and likely to seek induced happiness. The induction or stimuli could be som as in this book or any other tangible or intangible substance. These are extremely superficial and transitory. Few occasions when I HAVE FELT HAPPY are related to the moments when I did though small deeds but made the environment or surroundings slightly better. I have committed several wrongs too for my benefits. They have given on occasions big profits yet seldom happiness. Those are moments of a trade off for immediate pleasure for sustained happiness . This is a subject on which one can go on and on and yet reach nowhere. Happiness is in the journey and not in the destination. My dear friend Tarun Deep Saini added: The neurological centre for happiness/sadness is in the limbic system. There are several useful articles on the net about it, here is just one of them: We do philosophize about what makes us happy and even more often, what should make us happy. Perhaps, the correct word to use there is contentment, since you cannot seek happiness, you can seek only objects and activities that might bring it to you: in other words you can only act on your desires. There is a belief that the motivational centre (the limbic system) came into existence with the mammalian brain. Thus, it is one of the oldest components of our brain. Primal fears, such as fear of reptiles, darkness and height are encoded in this part of the brain and are fairly immune to rationalization. Sexual urges are also based in this part (and you would agree that it does make us happy ).

Why does looking at the Moon or a beautiful view make us happy? It seems to have no survival value. Why does music, or art in general, make us happy? I don't know if we know the answer. But clearly, these things too can generate a strong emotional response. Perhaps it is because limbic system has a lot to do with memories, and perhaps such serenity reminds us of childhood contentment when we were taken care of by all powerful parents and life was good. Biologists, especially neuroscientists might be able to answer these questions for us. Seeing a happy child surely makes the mother feel herself content. In fact, limbic system is probably the link to our consciousness of the external world, and our connection with it. It has been shown that damage to this system can make a person emotionally dead. I know of a famous case where the person who had suffered such damage would tell his parents that they were not his real parents but fakes. However, when he talked to them over the phone he was convinced that he was speaking to his own parents. The popular theory that explains his behaviour is that when he saw his parents his brain did not produce the required emotional response in him, while, from memory he would have expected it to be there. Thus, his brain made sense of it by believing that they were not his real parents but some look alike. Your emotional response being chemical does not mean that the stimulus cannot be external. Being in the company of happy people can surely pull you up, and the connection would be the limbic system that makes the body feel that all is well in this best of possible worlds. There are several questions that used to be in the domain of ethics, aesthetics and philosophy. Knowing that not all people are alike (after all there are psychotic people in this world too), the surest way to understand our behaviour and mental states is through neuroscience. You cannot understand the software of your brain unless you understand the hardware first. And to be sure, happiness and sadness are states of brain that are useful indicator of the mental and physical well being of a person, and are thus states existing on the hardware of your brain and not in some metaphysical world. If I damage your limbic system then no amount of philosophizing will make you happy. The state would seize to exist for you and you will be pushed into an emotionless state. I replied back by writing: each biological organism, is like a wireless transmitter/receiver tuned to a different frequency. We react positively when we are in the proximity of another person with whom our body/mind resonates and are quite indifferent to people on a different frequency. But that indeed begs the question what frequency. Do I mean to say that human beings emit/absorb electromagnetic just like a radio/television/mobile phone. if so what is the range of these frequencies are they radio waves or waves of a different frequency band? Indeed we all know the symptoms of happiness; a smiling face and a sprighty walk, and also the fact that smiles can often be relaxing tensions and alleviate moods. That's perhaps what is induced by my first post, whereby i quote a research report which indicates that happiness can be infective. But, there are many other common experiences which do not, apparently, support that point of view. People are often said to be happy while participating in festivities, or attending social gathering like marriages and similar parties. Can we say that everyone attending the party is happy. That must be so, if we were to believe that happiness can be spread through body language. We all know that our moods are dependent on many other factors too, for example boredom or frustration which no kind of body language of people around us can surmount, except perhaps a chuckle of a child closely related to oneself. Why is it so, that the body language of certain kind of persons is much more effective in making people feel happy? That is the question! I think no science has ever attempted to answer that question and any attempts to explain it with conventional sciences whether biology or psychology can be very successful. Further, Are there any genetic reasons why some people are happy even under most tultomous

times while others are unhappy in the slightest adversity. A recent article published in the New Scientist magazine seems to suggest that. In this article, Andy Coghlan wrote: Positive people may owe their optimism to a gene variant that helps them dwell on the good and ignore the bad. That's the conclusion from a study examining people's subliminal preferences for happy, neutral, and threatening images. Volunteers who had inherited two copies of the "long" variant of 5-HTTLPR a gene that controls transport of the mood-affecting neurotransmitter serotonin showed clear avoidance of negative images, such as fierce animals, and a clear preference for positive ones, such as puppies. People with this variant combination are dubbed "LL" carriers. The effect wasn't seen in volunteers with at least one version of the "short" variant of the same gene these people showed no strong preference whatever the content of the images. Time lapse In repeated tests, the 97 volunteers had less than a second to identify dots hidden in one or other of a pair of adjacent images. Each pair contained a neutral image alongside one that was either positive or negative. The researchers found that LL volunteers took 18.3 milliseconds longer on average to spot the dots in a negative rather than neutral image, suggesting a subliminal aversion to bad images. Conversely, they noticed the dots 23.5 milliseconds sooner in the positive images, such as cuddly puppies, than in the neutral ones, suggesting they were subliminally drawn to them. "It sounds very small, but in terms of attentional time, it's consistent," says team leader Elaine Fox of the University of Essex in Colchester, UK. Optimistic streak Fox and her colleagues conclude that the LL volunteers may be primed to seek out positive events and ignore negative events. Earlier studies had revealed a tendency for negativity and anxiety among individuals with at least one short variant of the gene, but the study is the first to reveal an optimistic streak in LL individuals. "A number of mechanisms may contribute to this difference, and the authors have provided good evidence that attentional bias in the processing of emotional stimuli may be one of those mechanisms," says Turhan Canli, who has studied the same phenomenon at Stony Brook University in New York Later, I posted the thought of Deepak Chopra who is much in news (at least in TOI and some news channels like NDTV) The source is the article that has been published in TOI , as a Guest Editorial. In the article he said: .........Look beneath the surface and you see that much else has failed, the most glaring examples of which include freewheeling militarism, global pollution, pandemic disease and a large-scale refugee-movement. Each of these enormous problems was either caused by modern technology or has proved intractable despite it. The world isnt going to emerge from the current crisis until we face head-on the fact that everything we fear about our current way of life will only grow worse unless we change. The human dilemma will not be solved with more oil, a new missile defense system from the US, or the Pope telling Africa to abandon birth control and just say no to unprotected sex.

The human dilemma is a portentous phrase, but what it comes down to is how the individual and a society made up of individuals tries to be happy. If the path to happiness is external, disaster will eventually ensue. This is what Indian spirituality discovered thousands of years ago. Its not as though the message became outdated. If Im on a plane to India and there is a young person from Mumbai or Delhi sitting next to me, his goal in life the same goal he sets for his children centres not just on money and success but even more narrowly on becoming a doctor or engineer. .......... I contiued by quoting from an article published by Bill Allin on scribd. In this article he opined as follows: Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude. - Denis Waitley, American inspirational speaker and author (b. 1924) What the hell does that mean? If that was your reaction to the quote, you might be a bit light on the happiness scale, and may not know it. Think about things that can be owned, earned, worn or consumed. They all require spending money. Thanks to the rich and powerful West and its persistent propaganda telling us that we can't be happy unless we spend money, an unbelievably large number of people in the world equate happiness and spending. That requires people to have money to be happy, going along that way of thinking. Everyone who is poor must be unhappy, as a corollary. Or at least lack the ability to be truly happy. People with lots of money spend, spend, spend. And they are happy. Or they believe they are. They must be, they conclude, because they are living the lifestyle that says they must be happy. They believe they are happy because they have been taught to believe that. Yet look at the divorce rate among these people. Look at the percentage of their kids who take drugs and alcohol and simply can't manage in school. Look at the number who grow up with a video game as a surrogate mother instead of a real one. By the time they are in their teens, they don't want their natural mother anyway, many of them, because their mothers don't know what to do with them. And they have no idea what to do with their mothers. So they all spend as much as they can to be happier. But they don't get happier. What they do get is embroiled in addictions and obsessions, causes to which they devote much of their lives--such as their religion of choice or a political party--in a vain effort to teach the rest of the world how to be happy. Some cults in other parts of the world understand. They have no source of the money needed to spend the way the addicts do in the West. So, jealous of the West and their own inability to get money to spend on the luxuries they believe they need to be happy, they become suicide bombers or terrorists of other stripes. Some kill their own people out of spite. That was more then a year ago! In an article published on scribd very recently, he has written: What is happiness? Most people have an idea, until you try to pin them down to words to describe it. The first dictionary I checked had this as its first meaning: "state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy." The dictionary uses a description that isn't definite. Characterized by a range of emotions. A range? Even the dictionary won't pin itself down to a meaning we can all latch onto. That in my opinion is more then enough fodder for thinking. So with that I close my this article!!! Rakesh Mohan Hallen