Frequent smileage

I was not in the country when Mount Pinatubo erupted but I could not forget cable news footage I saw of a man who was struggling to hold on to his carabao while they were both being carried by lahar flow. I was holding my breath watching him tug at his carabao but I grew wide-eyed in disbelief when upon seeing the camera, he smiled and waved, causing him to lose hold of his carabao forever. The carabao was probably all he had left and some of us might think he was short in the cost-benefit-analysis department but from where within did he scoop that smile that flooded his face with such salutations, oblivious of the larger deluge in his midst? In the other extreme, I have known people who, upon the slightest irritation, caused by a lack of parking space or an honest mistake of a waiter, would curse the day, the entire transport history of this nation or of their waiter, accusing the universe of conspiring to deprive them of a parking space or pasta it owed them. It makes you wonder then if there are people born happy, whatever their circumstance.

Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying the "science of happiness" for many years and the studies he conducted told two things that at first seemed contradictory to me. First, it would seem that based on experiments, there is a range of "happiness" people are born with, i.e., an inherited, genetic disposition. This supports what other experiments revealed that generally, people revert back to their level of happiness in about a year, regardless of changing circumstances, even drastic ones. This was apparently the case observed with paraplegics and lottery winners. If the now paraplegics were already innately happy people before the incidents that turned them into paraplegics, they seemed to revert to that level of happiness in about a year despite the unfortunate event. If happiness were not existent in the lottery winners before they laid eyes on their winning numbers, they would revert to that void after a year, despite the initial attempts to fill it with the euphoria of dancing with Lady Luck. Now that makes us feel doomed, doesn’t it? But wait, Seligman’s second insight says that even if there is a range of happiness one is born with, it can still be learned. I think he is saying that even if some people are born more predisposed to feelings of happiness, no one is really born sad. For this, he used the analogy of a two-story house, which I found enlightening. He said with your life as a house, you could choose to live in the damp, dark and musty basement or the upstairs room where "there is a great view of the ocean."

We are also measuring happiness of entire nations. Diane Ackerman’s An Alchemy of Mind. The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain (NY: Scribner, 2004) mentioned a 1994 study of happiness by 64 countries and concluded that entire nations are happier than others based on criteria that included national peace, minimal class consciousness, modernity, economic development, government stability and gender equality. The Scandinavians came up on top of the list although I distinctly remember watching a National Geographic documentary of the said region once and noted the absence of smiles so ubiquitous in every Philippine island. So does that mean that frequent "smileage," measured in "smiles" – the only thing we have more of per capita does not really translate to "happiness"? I am aware of opposing sociological, cultural views/studies on this propensity of Filipinos to laugh at their misfortunes and would like to add to the confusion by citing what neuroscience, so far, has found out about what happens to our brains when we are "happy."

It seems the "funny bone" is in the left prefrontal cortex. Harvard studies by Dr. Jerome Kagan, who has been studying children for many years, found that "happy kids and adults tend to have a more animated left prefrontal cortex." Other studies are consistent, showing that "resilient, positive people show more mindglow in the left prefrontal cortex and an inhibited amygdala. In the negative, more vulnerable people, the amygdala springs to life and the right prefrontal cortex becomes lively." The left-brain is the more logical, analytic, reasoning hemisphere. I think this is interesting because this seems to fly in the face of reactions, especially from columnists, that those who are optimistic about life, regardless of how ugly things look, are not clear-minded. In terms of brain activity, it seems that being reasonable and logical predisposes you more to happiness than being intuitive and emotional (right-brain activities) does. So apparently it is also a smart and reasonable decision to choose to be happy.

But it is ludicrous to confine the membership of the Frequent Smiler Program to left-brained people because the neural map of happiness is not complete yet. In another experiment, during the sitcom Seinfeld, MRI images showed a surge of activity in left-hemisphere regions of subjects associated with making sense of ambiguity. However, seconds later, both hemispheres showed activity in other regions associated with emotions and memory. This means that for the neural map to tell its complete episode of happiness requires a pulling together of regions from both sides of the brain, even if starts on the left side.

In terms of survival as an organism, certain levels of fear and anger could help alert us to dangers in the environment but feelings associated with happiness such as "joy," "contentment," "gratitude" and "awe," account for "greater functional harmony" which just means being happy makes us work and live better as individuals (Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. NY: Harcourt Inc., 2004). We all know that through experience. But do forget about maps of joy falsely drawn by drugs like "ecstasy" because it is known in science that repeated use can induce more and more severe depressions after highs that become less and less so. That makes ecstasy users the real-life losers relative to the farmer who lost his carabao to wave at the camera.

But because our skin and bones are not transparent such that we cannot see how happiness is displayed in a light show in our brains, neural definitions of happiness arouse only the neuroscientists and the occasional science writer. The playwright Tom Stoppard provides I think a more eloquent working definition of happiness, even if it sounds Newtonian: "happiness is equilibrium; shift your weight... you compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to the world. When the world shifts, you shift." Makes me think of a kaleidoscope with shapes and colors forever shifting and we are awed as we reconcile with each shift. No one way to be happy. No one way to arrange your life to be beautiful. Each surprise is also part of the journey and the view.

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