from 1865. A young man opening a telegram containing the news that he had inherited a fortune became initially pale, then exhilarated and restless. He staggered around the streets whilst ‘uproariously laughing’, talking irritably and singing loudly. Everyone thought he was drunk although he hadn’t drunk anything (apparently confirmed after he vomited and the contents were examined). He was simply full of joy.
the joyful brain
In his ecstatic state the man who received the telegram would not have been the ideal person to carry out a task involving careful analysis and precision because our mood can change the way we think. When we feel any emotion strongly enough, whether it’s fear or ecstasy, we tend to make decisions without processing information as deeply. Instead we rely on heuristics or stereotypes in our judgements.
A standard psychological test involves giving people a paragraph describing another person. After a delay they are asked questions about the person. If they are experiencing a strong emotion at the time they will rely on stereotypes triggered by certain words in the passage rather than on the actual information. This does have advantages in terms of efficiency which might be essential in a time of crisis. It might be unfair to assume that a man wearing torn clothes walking behind you down a dark alleyway is dangerous, but if that brief moment of anxiety causes you to quicken your pace so that you reach the main road faster, then even if he turns out to be harmless you haven’t lost anything by speeding up. Were you to slow down while you considered whether there was in fact anything suspicious about the man’s behaviour or whether you were unfairly generalising on the basis of his clothing, you might put yourself in danger. Nevertheless it is not the case that strong emotions always lead to a decrease in accurate reasoning. Emotions tend to be seen as irrational urges which interfere with effective decision-making. Research has shown, however, that in certain circumstances, feeling good can change your thinking in such a way that you make better decisions, particularly if those decisions necessitate creativity.
You are given a standard white candle, a box of drawing pins and a book of matches. Your task is to attach the candle to the wall and light it in such a way that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. When people were given this task in a laboratory after their mood had been manipulated the results were striking. One group had been given a comedy to watch before the task while the others saw a more serious film. Three quarters of the group who had seen the happy film found a workable solution, compared with a measly 13% of those who had seen the serious film. The solution to the task, incidentally, is to use some drawing pins to fix the drawing pin box to the wall as a ledge for the candle. Then you light the candle with the matches and the box successfully catches the drips.
Dr Alice Isen, a psychologist at Cornell University, has conducted years of experiments in this area, finding that mild happiness can improve performance in everyone from children to doctors. She finds cunning ways of making one group of people feel slightly happy – giving them money, telling them they’ve done unusually well on a task or simply providing fruit juice and biscuits. Compared with another group who hadn’t had any reward, the happy group were significantly better at thinking up unusual word associations. In another experiment doctors were given a bag of sweets to cheer them up before they made a diagnosis and extraordinarily this resulted in a better diagnosis where they took more information into account. This had nothing to do with them putting in extra effort because they were happy; instead there appeared to be something qualitatively different in their thinking. When people feel happy they seem to consider problems from more angles.
Joy allows people to think optimistically and to remember other times when they were successful, as well as allowing them to focus on the task at hand. Your negotiation skills even improve when you feel happy, so the time to ask for a pay-rise is not when you’re feeling fed up with a job, but when you’re feeling good.
If we turn to the chemistry of what’s happening in the brain there might be an explanation for these processes. Dopamine is just one of hundreds of neurotransmitters or chemical messengers in the brain, but we know more about it than any of the others. The cells that produce dopamine are only found in a few areas of the brain, mainly in the brain stem, but it has effects in many other areas. Food, sex and drugs all release dopamine, producing feelings of pleasure, but only for a limited time. Like all neurotransmitters dopamine is a chemical that allows one neuron or nerve cell in the brain to communicate with the next and in this way messages are passed between the millions of neurons in the brain. Dopamine is released when we feel joyful and it is these dopamine levels that might affect the way our thoughts are processed. Alice Isen suggests that the release of dopamine into a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate region might help us to switch perspective. Seeing things from another viewpoint is a key component of creativity and we might actually find this easier if dopamine is helping us along while we explore ideas. The same could apply to negotiation; to bargain successfully it’s necessary to see another person’s perspective along with your own. Then you can encourage them to agree to a solution that is beneficial to you.
In the 1950s two scientists, James Olds and Peter Milner, were experimenting with rats to see whether they could teach them to do simple tasks like pressing a lever. They discovered that if you put an implant into a certain part of a rat’s brain – the hypothalamus – and then apply a weak electric current, the rats actually like it, or rather they love it; if they were provided with a lever by which they could control the electric current themselves, the rats would press the lever about 2,000 times an hour, for hours at a time. If the rats were given the choice between feeding or pressing the lever, they would starve themselves rather than miss out on the current. This only worked if the current was applied to the part of the brain associated with dopamine release; if the rats were given a drug which blocked the action of dopamine they lost all interest in the lever. The reward system in a rat’s brain had been discovered. It is assumed that humans have a similar system. Could brain stimulation explain the joyful feelings that the Russian novelist Dostoevsky said he felt preceding his attacks of epilepsy? He described it as ‘a feeling of happiness such as it is quite impossible to imagine in a normal state and which other people have no idea of.
In a more unpleasant experiment an electrified grid was used which gave a shock so painful to a rat’s feet that if food were placed on the other side of the grid a rat would die of starvation rather than go through the agony of crossing. However, the rats would cross the grid to get to the dopamine pedal. It seems they were prepared to do anything to get that rush.
Drugs such as cocaine, nicotine, cannabis and amphetamine all raise the concentrations of dopamine in the brain, either by increasing the amount released or by blocking the mechanism that reabsorbs the dopamine, limiting its effects. Either way the person ends up with more dopamine. It’s the same process as the one that happens when the rats stimulate their hypothalamus. The more addictive drugs – cocaine and heroin – release more dopamine.
It has now been discovered that even the anticipation of taking a drug can release dopamine. The problem is that in addiction this anticipation is experienced as a craving, which, despite the release of dopamine, isn’t pleasurable. The power of dopamine could explain why addicts will sometimes risk losing their jobs and homes, even their families, in order to get another fix. As the brain adjusts to the new dopamine levels, the drug is needed purely to continue functioning. This is known as the dopamine theory of addiction, but what it can’t explain is why so few people become addicted. Only 10% of people who use cocaine become hooked. Likewise only 10% of the American soldiers who regularly took heroin in Vietnam took it again once they were back home. This implies that a person’s situation plays a big part in addiction.
A Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander has lent weight to this idea with his creation of a luxury rat park. He trains rats to become addicted to a dopamine pedal, but then instead of placing the pedal in a bare cage, he installed it in the luxury rat park where there are jogger wheels, plants, warm nests, nice food, plenty of space to run around and even mountain scenery and streams painted on the walls. Once rats were in here and were occupied and presumably more contented they barely touched the dopamine pedal, in contrast to the caged rats so desperate to get to the pedal that they would starve themselves in order to reach it. This could provide part of the explanation for the fact that so many people who try drugs don’t