The surprising science of happiness

     This talk is given by a sociologist who is speaking about the development of the human brain over the last 2 million years. How our human brains have developed from homohabilis to homo sapiens. He points out that our human brain has developed in size, but this doesn't mean it only got better; it means that it also developed new structures. What he means by the new structure is the frontier lobe or the prefrontal cortex. He describes the idea of what makes having the prefrontal cortex a significant development in the human brain. He explains that its strategic function is an adaptation, or rather acting as an experience simulator. This is what helps us in many situations when we have to make a decision about something. We can run the experience in our brains without actually doing it in the real world. Then we come up with a decision based on the simulation and not the real experience. Then he moves on to discuss happiness providing different examples of what happiness is. Moreover, he differentiates between two kinds of happiness, natural and synthetic. Natural happiness is the feeling of happiness we get after getting what we want. Synthetic happiness on the other hand is also the happiness we get but when we don't get what we want. He then discusses the idea that we believe natural happiness to be superior to synthetic happiness. However, Synthetic happiness is much more real and enduring. He supports this idea with data taken from different experiments at Harvard University. We believe that getting what we want would eventually make us happy. However, scientific studies prove that when we don't get what we want we can achieve a level of happiness that is far more enduring.