I hate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think it can safely be said that happiness is the most important—or the most sought-after—experience or state for us humans. In some ways, that’s a bit strange, because it’s difficult to say what happiness really is, and since ancient times, philosophers have argued over its definition. Can we equate happiness with momentary, fleeting pleasure, or should happiness be measured over the longer term? Whatever the case may be, though, it’s safe to say that we do experience happiness, and some of us can be said to be genuinely happy.
At least on the subjective level, we often experience a sense of happiness. And if we agree with the widely accepted notion that emotions have their seat in the brain, then we’d have to agree that happiness can also be found there. Unfortunately, to date, we don’t know much about where exactly it’s to be found. We know, in general, that parts of the brain—like the limbic system—process emotions, but with respect to happiness, the jury is still out.
In psychology, we think of happiness as divided into two general components: emotional and cognitive. The emotional component is the experience of more pleasure or displeasure, while the cognitive component relates to how you evaluate your life (i.e., whether you think it’s good). A person can be called happy if s/he experiences pleasure more than displeasure, and has a favorable attitude toward his or her life.
Wataru Sato and his team at Kyoto University studied subjective happiness with the goal of trying to find where it’s located in the brain. The procedure they used was quite simple: put people (in their case, 51 subjects) in an MRI machine and then ask them some questions about their level of subjective happiness. If you see brain differences between happy and unhappy people, then you can draw your conclusion about which part of the brain is responsible for producing happiness.
Sato and his colleagues did find such differences. Firstly, they were able to distinguish the subjectively happy people from the subjectively unhappy by having them fill out questionnaires that measure the emotional and cognitive components of happiness. Then they looked at their brain differences, and they found something interesting: the precuneus, a structure of the brain involved in a lot of different things, was larger in happy compared to unhappy people.
The larger volume of the precuneus in happy people is an indication that happiness is processed (at least to a significant extent) in this area of the brain. The mechanics of it is likely complicated, and poorly understood, but it can at least be assumed that this region is heavily involved in our sense of happiness. As Sato argues in the paper, it may not be so surprising that the precuneus processes happiness, as we have evidence that meditation increases the volume of the precuneus over time.
This last fact should come as good news, because it means that it’s possible to actively manipulate your level of subjective happiness. Since meditation increases the size of the precuneus, maybe that can make you happier. We probably should not expect an exponential increase, but a little bit can go a long way.
As always, though, one should be slightly hesitant to draw conclusions from a single study. There’s a number of reasons for this, but in our case, suffice it to say that other studies may well find other regions (especially parts of the limbic system) that are involved in happiness. And let’s not forget that self-reports may not always accurately reflect the nature of subjective experiences.
mind.one 