HAPPINESS is…
Aristotle declared that happiness is composed of two aspects: hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (a life well lived). Is that it? Is that all?
Now in this post-enlightenment, post-modern, science-based time, we think that the brain is somehow wired for producing or somehow creating the complex state of happiness. We want answers, evidence-based answers about what is going on with us humans. What is happiness, surely one of the most important emotional, social, philosophical states of our existence. So, what is happiness, the emotion and the real science of it?
Beginning with pleasure. There are fundamental pleasures (such as food and sexual pleasures) and higher-order pleasures (monetary, artistic, musical, altruistic, and transcendent). Does the brain recognize these as separate neural mechanisms? Are there specific neural pathways for each kind of pleasure? And is happiness only a rare accompaniment to the competing influences of anxiety and depression.
Scientists like to use the term hedonia, a neutered word for pleasure, and place it into the state of happiness, now described as an absence of pain and displeasure while experiencing strong feelings of pleasure. Are we getting close?
So there are two components to happiness: one is the objective, neural-based identifiable affective state and the other is conscious affective feelings, the subjective experience of emotion. Included in these two components are overlapping neural pathways for the fundamental pleasures and the higher-order pleasures. It is all a complex schema.
It turns out that the happiness in brain circuitry involves widely distributed circuits in the frontal cortex coordinating with hedonic hotspots in deep parts of the brain. Forming a scientific understanding of happiness requires manipulation of the brains of lab animals (the very serviceable rat) both to stimulate suspects areas and to ablate them to block pleasure reactions.
We end up where we began, only marveling that happiness is somehow wired into our brains and has a hugely important function in maintaining life, especially knowing it will end.
Is this good news? Insofar as happiness may be a requisite means for surviving the slings and arrows of life, it offers satisfaction, gratification, and hope. We all strive for happiness in all pleasures, fundamental and higher-order, even sometimes risking consequences of addiction and poor social choices.
Evolution has created all the tricks that are packed into happiness and our brains are well decked out to lure us through our long but finite life in pursuit of that wonderful, still quite nebulous, state of happiness.
In other words, we are at core biologically doomed to be happy, to want to be happy, to seek every means possible to each of us, to find and enjoy happiness.
That search is always on.
