Aside from basic survival, the pursuit of happiness is arguably one of the most fundamental concerns of every human being on the planet (not to mention a driving force behind the $10 billion-a-year self-help industry[1] ). But according to Cornell cognitive psychologist Shimon Edelman, we’ve been going about it backwards.


Edelman, author of The Happiness Of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About The Good Life,[2] tells The Huffington Post that the way we tend to chase happiness is much like the way we drive our cars.


Citing a metaphor from Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, Edelman explains that, much as we don't pay attention to the nitty gritty mechanics of how a car engine works -- preferring instead to focus on the more nebulous idea of keeping our cars "running well" -- we also don't think about the specifics of our brain function. We want to be happy, but we don't even really know how happiness functionally works.


Advice on how to be happy is everywhere -- but rarely do these words of wisdom help us to actually become happier. According to Deepak Chopra, the wealth of research and literature on happiness that's come with the explosion of positive psychology hasn't gotten us very far in understanding our own emotional lives.


“We know very little about what it takes to be happy, and a lot of what we know is wrong,” Chopra wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle blog post.[3] “This seems to be the conclusion of some voices in the movement known as positive psychology."


According to Edelman, understanding the workings of our own minds can help us to comprehend not only the nature of happiness but, perhaps eventually, how to optimize the brain for well-being. Recent developments in cognitive science have shed light on how positive emotional states (including pleasure, happiness, and euphoria) occur in the brain -- and why we're hardwired for happiness.


“In the past 10 years, neuroscience has witnessed a revolution. We used to treat the brain as a black box into which very limited glimpses were available, but we are starting to comprehend the basic principles within which the whole thing operates," says Edelman, explaining that these simple principles are accessible to anyone who's interested in getting to know his or her own mind.


Such an understanding could yield great benefits: By Minsky's analogy, we can understand how to better drive our cars by better understanding their engines. And by comparison "getting to know the way the brain works in an intuitive, statistical manner," as Edelman puts, can help us to optimize our brains for happiness.


In short, the brain's computation is all about foresight and prediction -- using our memories and recollections to plan for the future. We know that the world is predictable to a certain extent based on past experiences and patterns, and so we create statistical representations of everything we experience.


"Knowledge of past experience can help an organism deal with the future," says Edelman. "That's the basic imperative... Emotions are basically computational shortcuts that funnel the outcome of the monitoring that organisms do over themselves."


This process is the brain's biological imperative: It not only keeps us alive, but according to Edelman, it's also what makes us happy. Pursuing happiness is the motivation that drives our actions and habits, and it is in that pursuit -- rather than any end goal that we think will increase our well-being -- that we find joy and satisfaction.


"Happiness ... is kind of the goal that makes us go," says Edelman. "Without motivation, nothing in the world would happen. All the animals in the world would just lie down and expire. So the short answer is that this is what happiness is: The goal that makes us go."


But that goal is constantly eluding us. Part of the reason we're always seeking happiness is that it's so fleeting in nature. As Edelman explains, "[Happiness] seemed difficult to grasp and hold onto... One has this compelling need to go on."


This "need to go on" -- to continue the pursuit -- is one of the brain's evolutionary advantages. "A species that rests on its laurels wouldn't be doing that for very long," he says.


But not all happiness is gone at a moment's notice: eudaimonic happiness, which has to do with the way we evaluate our own lives and the feeling that we have lived well, is inherently longer-lasting than any state of pleasure, joy or euphoria ("hedonic happiness"). The distinction of these two domains of happiness goes back to Aristotle, who said that eudaimonic happiness happiness (also translated as "human flourishing," or "living well,") could be had by living in a way that follows a larger purpose beyond oneself. Happiness, for Aristotle, wasn't the result of a life-long pursuit -- it was the activity of pursuing.


"Eudaimonic happiness happiness is something you build up over a lifetime," Edelman says. "In a sense, it's a great consolation for older people -- it's nice to know that on that component, people can get more and more happy as they age if they led good lives."


This eudaimonic happiness pursuit of the good life can also keep us in good physical health, according to recent research. A University of California study [4] found that the two different types of happiness were associated with different gene expression. People with high levels of eudaimonic happiness happiness had low inflammatory gene expression and high antiviral gene expression, while those with high levels of pleasure-seeking happiness exhibited higher inflammatory gene expression.


"What happiness does in the short term, it also does in the long term," says Edelman. "This [eudaimonic happiness] is what can be built and cherished and enhanced and preserved."



Also on HuffPost:




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  • You can change the brain's structure and functioning.


    Neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson's groundbreaking research on Tibetan Buddhist monks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that years of meditative practice can dramatically increase neuroplasticity -- the brain's ability to use new experiences or environments to create structural changes. For example, it can help reorganizing itself by creating new neural connections. "The findings from studies in this unusual sample... suggest that, over the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the long-term practitioners had actually altered the structure and function of their brains," <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/" target="_blank">Davidson wrote in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in 2008.</a>




  • You can alter visual perception and attention.


    In 2005, <a href="https://eprints.usq.edu.au/2552/1/Carter_Presti_Callistemon_Ungerer_Liu_Pettigrew_CB_v15n11_PV.pdf" target="_blank">researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and University of California at Berkeley</a> traveled to India to study 76 Tibetan Buddhist monks, in order to gain insight into how mental states can affect conscious visual experiences -- and how we might be able to gain more control over the regular fluctuations in our conscious state. Their data indicated that years of meditation training can profoundly affect a phenomenon known as "perceptual rivalry," which takes place when two different images are presented to each eye -- the brain fluctuates, in a matter of seconds, in the dominant image that is perceived. It is thought to be related to brain mechanisms that underly attention and awareness. When the monks practiced meditating on a single object or thought, significant increases in the duration of perceptual dominance occurred. <strong>One monk was able to maintain constant visual perception for 723 seconds -- compared to the average of 2.6 seconds in non-meditative control subjects.</strong> The researchers <a href="https://eprints.usq.edu.au/2552/1/Carter_Presti_Callistemon_Ungerer_Liu_Pettigrew_CB_v15n11_PV.pdf" target="_blank">concluded</a> that the study highlights "the synergistic potential for further exchange between practitioners of meditation and neuroscience in the common goal of understanding consciousness."




  • You can expand your capacity for happiness.


    Brain scans revealed that because of meditation, 66-year-old French monk Matthieu Ricard, an aide to the Dalai Lama, has the largest capacity for happiness ever recorded. University of Wisconsin researchers, led by Davidson, hooked up 256 sensors to his head, and found that Ricard had an unusually large propensity for happiness and reduced tendency toward negativity, due to neuroplasticity. “It’s a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are,” <a href="http://india.nydailynews.com/newsarticle/7b470adb0a9b6c32e19e16a08df13f3d/buddhist-monk-is-the-worlds-happiest-man" target="_blank">Ricard told the New York Daily News.</a> Davidson also found that when Ricard was meditating on compassion, his brain produced gamma waves <a href="http://india.nydailynews.com/newsarticle/7b470adb0a9b6c32e19e16a08df13f3d/buddhist-monk-is-the-worlds-happiest-man" target="_blank">"never reported before in the neuroscience literature."</a>




  • You can increase your empathy.


    Research at Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education made some incredible findings last year. Neuroeconomist Brian Knutson hooked up several monks' brains to MRI scanners to examine their risk and reward systems. Ordinarily, the brain's nucleus accumbens experiences a dopamine rush when you experience something pleasant -- like having sex, eating a slice of chocolate cake, or finding a $20 bill in your pocket. But Knutson's research, still in the early stages, is showing that in Tibetan Buddhist monks, this area of the brain may be able to light up for altruistic reasons. "There are many neuroscientists out there looking at mindfulness, but not a lot who are studying compassion," <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Stanford-studies-monks-meditation-compassion-3689748.php#page-1" target="_blank">Knutson told the San Francisco Chronicle.</a> "The Buddhist view of the world can provide some potentially interesting information about the subcortical reward circuits involved in motivation." Davidson's research on Ricard and other monks also found that meditation on compassion can produce powerful changes in the brain. When the monks were asked to meditate on "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion," their brains generated powerful gamma waves that may have indicated a compassionate state of mind, <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/dalai.html" target="_blank">Wired reported in 2006.</a> This suggests, then, that empathy may be able to be cultivated by "exercising" the brain through loving-kindness meditation.




  • You can achieve a state of oneness -- literally.


    Buddhist monks can achieve a harmony between themselves and the world around them by breaking the psychological wall of self/other, expressed as by particular changes in the neural networks of experienced meditation practitioners,<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12661646" target="_blank"> the BBC reported.</a> While a normal brain switches between the extrinsic network (which is used when people are focused on tasks outside themselves) and the intrinsic network, which involves self-reflection and emotion -- the networks rarely act together. But Josipovic found something startling in the brains of some monks and experienced meditators: They're able to keep both networks active at the same time during meditation, allowing them to feel a sense of "nonduality," or oneness.