This Is Our Story

This is Our Story

Humanity United in Action,
Driven By Love and Compassion,
Informed by Science and Reason.

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Happiness

Marc Chagall, Happiness (1980)

Hedonic happiness is an emotion, experienced as pleasure and enjoyment, which may be fleeting. Functional MRI studies have mapped the neural correlates hedonic and eudaimonic happiness. Generosity (giving), reward (receiving, including retirement), social reward and emotional closeness in adolescents, positive relationships, certain kinds of music, recall of autobiographical happy events, antidepressant medications, have been found to be positively related to happiness on fMRI imaging. A default mode network has been identified as a useful guide for measuring and confirming happiness. However, brain mapping of emotions appears to be extremely complex, and a detailed map of brain activity in relation to particular emotions remains elusive. This has led some researchers to favor a “conceptual act theory” of emotion.

Still, arterial spin labeling is another MRI technique that has been developed, and used to study moods in adolescents,  Responses to facial expressions and vocal expressions have been extensively studied; curiously, physical exercise appears to interfere with emotional face processing. Early life stress and trauma, schizophrenia and depression are highly influential. Combat PTSD can be treated with specific focus on the amygdala.

Several regions of the brain appear to be involved in processing happiness. Individual studies have identified the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, anterior cingulate gyrus, precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex and cerebellum, mediodorsal and anterior thalamus, ventral posterior cingulate and amygdala, amygdala and cerebellum, as significant processing areas for happiness and unhappiness in the brain. A particular neural network appears to control emotional response to affective touch. Neural relationships for happiness processing have been found between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala.

Regardless of what scientific inquiry may reveal, happiness is an experience. People were happy or unhappy, long before fMRI imaging was available. No explanation is required for why happiness is a basic preference, or desire. However, our growing body of scientific knowledge and theory (for example, the Pemberton Happiness Index) should facilitate the development of parenting, educational and therapeutic approaches to happiness.

Real

True Narratives

Imaginary

Visual Arts

Film and Stage

On the shadow side:

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Conjunto:

Polka:

Zelenka, Capriccios:

Other works:

Albums:

Fictional Narratives

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them! When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.  There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley."  Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.  But if they had been twice as many--ah, four times--old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig "cut"--cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.  [Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave II: The First of the Three Spirits.]

 

Novels and stories, from the dark side:

Poetry

If I when my wife is sleeping / and the baby and Kathleen / are sleeping / and the sun is a flame-white disc / in silken mists / above shining trees,— / if I in my north room / dance naked, grotesquely / before my mirror / waving my shirt round my head / and singing softly to myself: / “I am lonely, lonely. / I was born to be lonely, / I am best so!” / If I admire my arms, my face, / my shoulders, flanks, buttocks / against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not / the happy genius of my household?

[William Carlos Williams, “Danse Russe”]

Music: songs and other short pieces