Despite there being strong evidence that subjective wellbeing measures produce statistically significant and often highly informative results, due to their subjective nature there will always be some scepticism surrounding them. In order to help prove the doubters wrong, and to understand wellbeing better, neuroscientists and psychologists have started to investigate the relationship between our functional neuroanatomy and our sense of wellbeing.
In this article we aim to give an up to date view of our current understanding on this topic. We start by mapping out the key sections of the brain, then discuss some key concepts and finally we finish off outlining some of the most interesting findings in the literature. To put into perspective how cool the brain is – it’s a bundle of cells, like all the other organs in the body, but it’s a bundle of cells that has sent man to the moon, performed awake operations on other brains, re-engineered genes and created Jay-Z’s Black Album (Elliot’s favourite). Let’s go on a tour of these cells. Although there are well accepted areas of the brain that control certain things, it is important to note that these are not hard and fast. . Each brain is unique, like our hands and faces, meaning that our mappings of abilities within and on the surface of the brain are not identical to one another.
The brain is made of two hemispheres, the left and the right. Generally speaking, the left cerebral hemisphere controls the right of the body and the right controls the left. We split these two hemispheres into four ‘lobes’ according to their unique functions: frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital. The frontal is sometimes referred as the ‘human’ part of the brain, as it helps us to read emotions, solve problems, plan, memorise, make judgements, inhibit sexual behaviours and order our language. The temporal lobe is one of Jess’s favourites. Here we process sounds, which are turned into electrical signals, read by the brain through the cochlear.
The parietal lobe holds the ‘sensory strip’, neighbouring the motor strip but instead giving the brain feedback about sensation. It also processes and conceptualises visual information, language and importantly mathematics. Finally, the occipital lobe. Here visual information is processed and understood correctly. Damage here may cause people to neglect half of their vision, such as reading one half of a word, or not knowing where a sentence finishes on a page.
There are also a few parts of the brain that we are most interested in for happiness research. Firstly, the connection between the Amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), which is the brain circuit that is relevant for emotion regulation. Raw emotions are triggered from the Amygdala and are often done so sub-consciously. Our conscious experience is more linked to our frontal lobes than the deeper parts of our brains. Typical neuroscience studies involve putting electrodes all over the scalp and reading the electrical activity. These measurements are then related to the feelings people report. Positive emotions lead to more activity in the left front side of the brain and negative emotions lead to more activity in the right front side of the brain.
Before we move onto the literature, here are a couple of key concepts that come up a lot in these papers. The first is ‘neuroplasticity’, also known as brain plasticity and it is defined as the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to learning or following injury. The second is “epigenetics” – the literal meaning for this is ‘above genetics’ – as it does not refer to a change in a person’s DNA but rather how much or whether some genes are expressed in different cells in your body. Over the course of a person’s life recent research has shown that epigenetics change based on a person’s experiences or life choices, for example by eating a bad diet or choosing to smoke. These concepts are important for wellbeing research because they show that through our own actions we can produce objective results on our mind and body.
We have split the research findings into four topic areas below:
Resilience: by resilience we mean the ability to improve mood and emotion regulation. A paper by Kral et al (2018) found that the more experience an individual has in meditating, the stronger was the connection between the Amygdala and the MPFC. As such, the reactions from these individuals to extreme positive and negative stimuli were much smaller than the control group, who had little or no meditating experience.
Attentiveness: An interesting paper was written in 2010, titled “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. They developed an app to create an extremely large database of real-time reports of thoughts, feelings and actions of a broad range of people as they went about their daily lives. There were three main findings. First, people’s minds wander frequently, regardless of what they are doing. Mind wandering occurred in 46.9% of the samples and in at least 30% of the time during every activity except making love (individuals had 22 activities to choose from on the app). Second, people are less happy when their minds are wandering than when they are not. And third, what people were thinking about was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing at the time. This evidence is supported by neuroscience research, for example, Lutz et al (2009) shows that mental training can significantly affect attention and brain control.
Connection: the ability to understand emotional experiences of others, empathy, is an important skill for effective social interactions and helps to develop deeper personal relationships. An extremely interesting and unique study was completed last year to test how training empathy in adolescents impacts their brain circuits. The authors of the paper created their own video game (not joking), called Crystals of Kaydor and investigated whether playing the game increased empathic accuracy and related brain activation in adolescents. The authors found that connectivity in empathy-related brain circuits was stronger after gameplay and that the training produced behaviourally-relevant, functional neural changes in the brain.
Purpose: Boyle et al. (2009) used data for 1238 older persons and found that a greater purpose in life is associated with a reduced risk of mortality, holding all else constant. They used life evaluation surveys over a 5-year period and controlled for a large number of variables that will have also impacted the result. Shaefer et al. (2013), found that purpose in life can predict a better recovery from negative stimuli. Greater purpose, assessed over two years prior, predicted better recovery from negative stimuli indexed by a smaller eyeblink after negative pictures offset.
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