Experiments at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin used MRI to map the brain of monk Matthieu Ricard while he was engaged in what Buddhists call compassion meditation. The pictures showed activity mainly in the left prefrontal cortex (just inside the forehead) of Ricard’s brain.

Generally people with happy temperaments exhibit a high ratio of activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area associated with happiness, joy and enthusiasm. Those who are prone to anxiety, fear and depression exhibit a higher ratio of activity in the right prefrontal cortex.

But the degree to which the left side of Ricard’s brain lit up far surpassed 150 other subjects studied in this trial. He had 30 years of experience at meditation but, unfortunately, we don’t have the control knowledge of whether Ricard might have exhibited the same results before he became a monk. His off-the-chart results may the result of his meditation skills or because he is an exceptional individual.

Buddhists have long maintained that meditation offers great benefits to their minds and bodies, but science demands measurements.

Well, it’s starting to get consistent. Measurements on adults, children, infants, even Rhesus monkeys have come out with the same result: people blessed with effervescent left prefrontal cortices are much more likely to be happy, perky, smiling individuals.

It’s all part of a trend in science, to study happiness and determine what is it, exactly, that makes us happy?

They are marshaling all the most sophisticated scientific techniques: searching for a genetic basis for happiness, brain imaging to pinpoint the spot on the brain where happiness resides, and in-the-field surveys to try to understand which activities or stimuli make people more or less happy.

And they are interested in a range of possible applications. How does happiness affect physiological symptoms like stress and heart disease? We already know that happy people tend to live longer.

Can drugs be used effectively to make unhappy people happy? Are our brains coded from birth for a certain level of happiness, or can they be altered by experiences when we are young, or even as adults?

This is revolutionary stuff, not only for biologists but also for psychologists, who have concentrated much of this century on pathology, obsession, melancholy and angst.

”Look in a psychology textbook,” said Daniel Kahneman, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and another happiness sleuth. ”There are a lot of pages devoted to anxiety and depression. Happiness might not even be there.”

Happiness, it goes without saying, is highly subjective and some researchers are trying to better define and measure this squishy subject.

People who describe themselves as optimistic, engaged, ‘the kind of people who jump out of bed in the morning and are ready to tackle the world, have consistently higher levels of left prefrontal lobe activity. Physiologically, they also have ‘higher levels of natural antibody activity — antigens against everything from colds and flu to cancers.

By contrast, people who are depressed have greater activity in their right prefrontal lobe. And children with more active right prefrontal lobes show ”excessive wariness in response to unfamiliar situations.”

Edward F. Diener, a University of Illinois psychologist who conducts happiness research, recently said in an interview: ”We’re trying not to just ask people how happy they are in general, but to document it at specific points. Happiness is how frequently you’re happy, not how intensely you’re happy. Having some peaks in there is nice — it’s certainly not bad — but if you have a peak, it could be because you’re unhappy and then you had something happen to make you superhappy. Then you have to go back to the normal thing.”

Michael Argyle, a psychologist at Oxford University, has found some common threads. Money, he says, makes little difference to happiness, except for people who are very poor. People on the job are happiest when they have good relationships with co-workers and when part of their day is spent ”wasting time, fooling around, and sharing gossip and jokes,” he said. And for some reason, watching soap operas on television makes people happy (”I think they’ve got imaginary friends there,” he said.)

Increasingly, though, most happiness researchers are convincing themselves that a significant part of happiness is physiological and genetic.

Tests on twins have found that ”identical twins separated from birth are more similar in how happy they are than fraternal twins who grew up together,” Dr. Diener said.

Yet drawing the line between the physical and the psychological is not easy. What is cause and what is effect? Are people with more prefrontal cortex activity happier or do happier people have more prefrontal cortex activity?

Extra:

Dr. Mark George, a psychiatrist and neurologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., and the lead author of a report in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

When his 11 subjects felt happy, the characteristic pattern was a decrease of activity in the regions of the cerebral cortex that are committed to forethought and planning. These regions are in the temporal-parietal area of the cortex, located just over and a bit behind the ears, and the right prefrontal lobe, just behind the forehead.

“Those neocortical regions are used in complex planning — it’s interesting these shut down in happiness,” on the other hand L frontal lobes wake up!

[Maybe that’s a clue? That when we stop thinking about the future and things we need or want, we become happy! – Dr. Keith]

Dr. George went to test the value of repeated daily transcranial L-pre-frontal lobe stimulation and found it way better than the placebo controls (Am J Psychiatry 1997; 154:1752–1756). Seems far preferable to a pre-frontal lobotomy to me, which means the patient can then NEVER be happy.