“Happiness
is a state of mind. More correctly put, it is the state beyond the mind.”-
Anonymous
As I
was told to write something about Happiness, what it is perceived to be by
world and by me, I started looking around on internet about Happiness. Most of my
efforts were fruitless, as you can imagine that everyone has a different
opinion about Happiness and hence everyone has one’s own definition of
happiness. Well I come across the quote above, but soon after, I knew that it
is wrong! Why?
Well I
stumbled across a marvelous video on TED talks, in which a renowned scientist
Dan Gilbert was talking about science behind happiness. I cannot describe the
whole video as such, but I can surely try.
There
were many changes happened during the evolution of mankind from the monkeys,
one of the very important changes that happened overtime was that the size of
the human brain increased by 1/3rd. One of the main developments
happened to brain is front lobe or the pre-frontal cortex and thanks to this
part, humans could now simulate the future in the mind. No other living being
on earth can do that; we can think about a situation, feed the current data to
the brain and can simulate that this would happen, if I would do that. This
amazing ability led us to the concept of “Synthetic Happiness”. Dan came up
with this breakthrough finding that happiness cannot be created from the
external world, because happiness is synthetic, i.e. we make it, in our brains,
deliberately!
There
are numerous examples which can be mentioned here. A paraplegic person and a
lottery winner were questioned, and they both said that they are equally happy.
Even a drummer, who was dumped by Beatles in their initial days for the famous
Ringo Starr, even said that he is very happy that he didn’t remain with The
Beatles. Even a person who was convicted for murder and exonerated after 15
years, due to DNA evidence against the case, when asked said that he is really
happy now. Why is it so?
The answer lies in the word- “Synthetic”.
Studies conducted over Human Brain, have showed that the aforementioned Simulator
(Pre-frontal cortex) tend to overestimate the impact of any event on us, this
is called impact bias. Now due to this impact bias, our brain tells us that the
event is going to be very horrible, but as it turns out to be less horrible-
VOILA! We are happy that it was not as horrible as we played it out in our minds.
That is why generally any major life trauma can never match the amount of
sorrow we expect in our brains and that’s why even just after 3-4 months it has
no longer any impact on our happiness.
So
what it really tells is that we think that happiness is to be found, while it
has been scientifically proven that happiness comes from within. It is totally
a play of chemicals in our brains. The key to happiness is being content and
for being content we should do what we love to do, not what we are good at, not
what would earn us big bucks.
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