If happy little bluebirds fly...

So Diane Rehm had this guy from Harvard on today--author of a book on happiness. He said some interesting things, as did another researcher on another show--5 hrs in the car today--and they all mix together beautifully, like it was planned that way.

1) We are driven (= coerced) by our genes and culture toward certain activities in the pursuit of happiness. (This from the Harvard guy.) We are driven by culture to acquire, and we are driven by genes to procreate. And so, if you ask most parents, they will tell you that being a parent tops the list of things that make them happy. Children make us happy, in the deepest sense.

The thing is, research suggests the opposite: that while we may love the idea of children--and really love our children very deeply--in fact when we are actually dealing with them, "happy" isn't on the list of words parents use to describe their feelings. Kids are exhausting. They quarrel, they make a mess, they sass and tease and nag and whine, worse at certain stages than others. Good stuff, too--sure. But they wipe you out. It's not the face of happy.

How is it--this Harvard guy asks--that what we say about how our children make us feel is at such odds with how they make us feel in reality? The answer, he suggests, is that our genetic wiring pulls a fast one on us, the better to keep the species alive. Fancy that.

2) The human brain--same guy, same show--is extremely complex and sophisticated in many respects, but it has not developed a sophisticated capacity for imagining the future. We simply aren't very good at anticipating how we'll feel in different circumstances, which is why the question "What would make you happy?" is so hard to answer. It's also why, in part, we tend to resist change.

But it's also true that humans are extremely adaptable--and that they adapt quickly, even after great tragedies. When bad things happen, we are genetically wired to get through the change and find good in our new reality. And so, a person who swears at age 40 that she'd want her friends to put a bag over her head if she's ever severely incapacitated may likely, at 80 and in a wheelchair, find happiness in her existence. She just couldn't imagine it at 40. (Which makes you wonder about advance directives.)

3) The human brain can be photographed at the precise moment of decision making, and so we can see which parts of the brain are firing, and it tells us something about how we think. (This from a guy at Princeton, interviewed on RadioLab.)

If you saw a train coming on a track, bearing down on 5 track workers who didn't see it and couldn't be alerted to it in time, would you throw a switch to divert the train onto another track--a track that had only 1 worker who would be killed--or would you take no action and watch the 5 workers be killed?

Most people say, fairly quickly, that they would throw the switch.

What if you were standing above the track with a sole worker, and the only way to save the 5 workers below would be to push the sole worker down in front of the train to stop it before it hit the 5 workers? Would you push the sole worker to save the 5 workers?

Most people say that they would not push a man in front of a train. But they struggle.

Turns out that there are two distinct parts of the brain firing off in each of those decisions. There is the part that we get from our primate past: don't kill the guy beside you. We are genetically programmed to not kill the guy beside us. But there's another part of our brain that fires off when we try to calculate a matter of greater good, like killing one to save five. That's new: that's pure human. And researchers who can photograph what's going on when we contemplate pushing the guy in front of the train--they tell us that the brain looks like a battlefield in that moment--firing off all over the place, primitive instinct warring against reason. Sophie's Choice.

Nothing more to say about it. I love this stuff.