The Science of a Happy Life
Uncover the science behind happiness with Arthur C. Brooks, PhD. Learn some practical tips and take actionable steps today for a more fulfilling life.
https://www.webmd.com/balance/video/arthur-brooks?src=soc_yt
— TRANSCRIPT —
[MUSIC PLAYING] JOHN WHYTE: Welcome, everyone. I’m Dr. John Whyte. I’m the Chief Medical Officer at WebMD. Are you happy? Do you want to be happier?
Can science help you on the path to happiness? My guest today says it can. He’s co-authored a book with no other than Oprah Winfrey that’s entitled Build the Life You Want– the Art and Science of Getting Happier. Dr. Brooks, thanks for joining me today.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS: Thank you, John. It’s wonderful to be with you.
JOHN WHYTE: I have to say, I really enjoyed your book. And what I was fascinated by up front you say people say to you, you must naturally be very happy. But you say, that’s hardly the fact. What’s going on here?
ARTHUR C. BROOKS: There is a small handful of social scientists and neuroscientists in the United States who study happiness. I think I know them all. And I think it’s fair to say that they’re not an above average happiness group. And that might sound strange to begin with, but it really shouldn’t surprise anybody.
We study happiness for a reason. We want it. Everybody wants it. And if you have the tool kit to find more of it, you’re going to dedicate yourself to the discovery of that. And the good news is that you’re not going to find happiness per se because happiness is not a destination. It’s a direction.
But you can get a lot happier, and I’m living proof that that’s the case. Since I’ve dedicated myself to the science of happiness, my happiness has risen every year. And I’m looking forward to it rising for the rest of my life as long as I stay on the path.
JOHN WHYTE: You say the science of happiness, and I want to push back for a minute on that. Help us understand how are you creating a science because that’s what the book is about, using neuroscience to give us tips and tools to make us happier.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS: Well, there’s two ways that science really helps us to understand happiness. One is psychology, and the other is biology, believe it or not. So on the psychological side, that’s social science. That’s how I’m trained.
I’m trained as a behavioral economist. And what we’re trained to do is to look at large data sets and then use statistical techniques to simulate these drug experimental conditions. In other words, we can net out the things that are probably not causal IN helping us to understand a phenomenon under consideration.
If you find a group of people and some of them are happier than others, you want to look at all the things in their background and all the things that they’re doing, and then they want to see statistically how each one of those things individually affects or is associated with their happiness. If you want to get even better at it, you do experiments. And that’s what the field is really doing in social psychology where we simulate real life in experiments where half of the people are exposed to a certain condition and randomly, another half are not exposed to it. So it really does look like a drug treatment and control experiment. And that’s where we’re finding our most cutting-edge data.
JOHN WHYTE: How do we do that? Do we do that by a survey or you talk in your book about neuroimaging? We can actually look at PET scans.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS: Well, this is where the biology comes in. This is where neuroscience starts to play a very exciting role. So some of the times you just ask people about the differences in their life, and that’s how you figure out whether or not something is having an impact.
But sometimes you want a little bit more biological verification of what’s going on. And we’re getting better and better at understanding how the brain is processing different kinds of cognitions, different sorts of mental states. We understand more and more about the so-called limbic system.
Your limbic system creates emotions nothing more positive and negative to give you information about whether something is something you should avoid or something you should approach. And all those emotions, all those feelings are created in different parts of the brain. And we can actually see how the brain is processing those different emotions with brain imaging.
JOHN WHYTE: What’s the role of genetics? There’s not a gene, as there is for some other conditions, where we can test for genetic predisposition, correct?
ARTHUR C. BROOKS: That’s correct. We don’t have that kind of specificity. We can’t get that granular with what we’re doing, and that’s too bad. I wish we did. But we’ll do the best we can nonetheless and get things that are directionally right so that we can give people good advice.
Transcript in its entirety can be found by clicking here:
https://www.webmd.com/balance/video/arthur-brooks?src=soc_yt