As a neuroscientist, comedian and Guardian science blogger, Dean Burnett knows that science communication is both important and hard to get right. Early in this book he expresses his frustration with the way that the media often sensationalise research to sell a story. In one newspaper, the following headlines all purported to reveal the latest scientific truth about how to be happy: “Forget cash – how sex and sleep are the key to happiness”; “Key to happiness? Start with £50k a year salary”; “Why the secret to happiness is having 37 things to wear”… Readers would be forgiven for thinking that it’s all nonsense. So how does a responsible scientist condense all of the relevant research and make it accessible?
The Burnett method is to combine a chatty style with hundreds of academic endnotes, interviews with “experts” (including Charlotte Church on fame and Rhod Gilbert on comedy) and personal anecdotes, and on the whole it is very effective. He begins by describing the parts of the brain – and why none of them is solely “responsible” for processing any emotion. He runs through some chemical neurotransmitters and what we know about their roles, such as dopamine (reward and pleasure), endorphins (a response to pain and stress) and oxytocin (the “cuddle” hormone). He rattles through studies, building a picture of what exactly tickles the human brain and why. Including tickling. Laughter, it turns out, may originate among the temporal, occipital and parietal lobes, whose role is to “detect and resolve incongruity”. This really is explaining the joke on a minute scale, but who better qualified to do so?
The first chapter, about “home”, deftly explains why our brains need stability, privacy and access to nature. Others cover the importance of love, sex, work and friendships. But Burnett repeatedly thwarts any attempts at neat hypotheses. “Personality and individual differences,” he writes, “risk undermining much of my argument so far.”
He knows that the human brain loves a narrative, and he stitches together his findings with stories from his own past and his current quest. Scanning the brain is very expensive, he tells us, so studies that use it tend to be small and rarely repeated, making their results not very scientifically sound. Nevertheless, he asks a friendly professor if he can strap himself into a local fMRI machine. “After about five minutes, he finally stopped laughing.” There are also some comedy footnotes: “Just to be clear, at no point should you literally attempt to physically break a brain down into its components.”
Writing about neuroscience is a burgeoning field, and often controversial – see Cordelia Fine’s books about the “science” of gender, or Susan Greenfield’s on the damaging effects of new technologies. But (apart from one small quip about Brexit) Burnett stops short of getting political about what’s in our heads. Money “triggers the reward pathway in the brain somewhat like a drug”. A lack of control over our work lives “can be psychologically harmful, sometimes even clinically so”. The workings of the insula and somatosensory cortex could explain why some people think rape victims or poor people deserve their lot. And our social status is so critical to humans that mocking or criticising others can give us pleasure. The brain can be ugly.
Sometimes, Burnett seems to go too far, such as when he claims that oxytocin causes racism. The study he cites, “Oxytocin Promotes Human Ethnocentrism”, by KW De Dreu et al, makes fascinating reading – but it only claims very slight evidence that oxytocin motivates “out-group derogation” – hardly enough to justify “oxytocin makes you racist”.
But it would not be scientific of this review to draw any disparaging conclusions from this sample size of one exaggerated comment among several hundred painstakingly referenced observations. Burnett is himself reluctant to suggest easy answers. “What makes an adult brain happy? That can’t be answered in any succinct way, sorry”, he writes. Yet he also points out that in a world that causes such stress to our brains, “experiencing happiness may well be more of a necessity, rather than an indulgence”. So, at the risk of over-simplifying: to be happy you should have a home that is safe, big enough and near green spaces; work at a rewarding job that offers autonomy and novelty; earn enough money and find love – but don’t focus on pursuing money or love; do things you enjoy; laugh a lot, but don’t be a comedian … Oh, and benefit from consistent and loving parenting.
First, though, you should read this funny, stimulating and rewarding book. You’ll be happy you did.
• The Happy Brain: The Science of Where Happiness Comes From, and Why is published by Guardian Faber. To order a copy for £9.99 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com. or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
