The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized

2 The Color of Happiness

2 The Color of Happiness “The Colour of Happiness” was the title of the article I published in the British magazine New Scientist in May 2003 that caused the media stir about happy Buddhists with happy brains. At the beginning of the previous chapter I listed several widely discussed claims to the effect that there is a connection between Buddhism and happiness, specifically that Buddhists are especially happy and that it is Buddhism (rather than say the weather where Buddhists live) that produces the happiness. Now that we are clearer about what eudaimoniaBuddha and what happinessBuddha are and how they are perceived as connected by Buddhists, we are in a better position to understand the empirical claims being made. Consider again several distinct claims that are often conflated, but should be kept apart. • There is a connection between being a Buddhist (What counts as being a Buddhist—monk, nun, layperson? What are the membership properties?) and being happy (which kind and how defined?). • There is a connection between meditating (which way among the thousands of different types?) in a Buddhist way and feeling good (does feeling good = being happy, and if so, which kind of happiness?). • There is a connection between being in a Buddhist frame of mind and being good. (What is the nature of this connection? Is it causal or correlational ? How are being in a Buddhist frame of mind and being good conceived , and what, if any, connections are each, being a Buddhist and being good, alleged to have to happiness as opposed to each other?) • There is a connection between being a Buddhist and physical heath and well-being. (What is the connection between health and happiness; how are health and happiness conceived?) • There is a connection between being a Buddhist and possessing certain kinds of unusual autonomic nervous system control such as being able to 38 Chapter 2 control the startle reflex. (What is the connection between happiness and this sort of autonomic control?) • Experienced Buddhist practitioners are very good face readers. (What is the connection between face reading and happiness?) • Experienced Buddhist meditators have lots of synchronized global brain activity. (What is the connection between such synchronized global activity and happiness, well-being, good mood, physical or mental heath, and so on?) Happiness and the Brain At the time I wrote “The Colour of Happiness” (Flanagan 2003a), the only completed brain study that existed on the connection between Buddhism and happiness had an n = 1—that is, one experimental subject had his brain imaged by an fMRI. This is not ordinarily considered a good sample size. However, this first exemplary individual, Mathieu Ricard, was an experienced Buddhist monk (born and bred in France by very cerebral and classy parents) and his left prefrontal cortex, the area just behind the forehead, an area well established to be reliably correlated with positive emotion, lit up brightly (thus the editor’s choice of “colour” in the title).1 Indeed, his left side lit up brightly and more leftward than any individual tested in previous studies (approximately 175 subjects). However, none of these prior studies involved people meditating while the scanning was underway (in the meditating monk’s case most meditation was on compassion and lovingkindness). These scientific problems did not prevent various media sources from announcing that scientists had established that Buddhist meditation produces (a high degree of) happiness. I do not know whether the “Joy Detectives” who, unlike me, were actually doing the preliminary studies cautioned the neurojournalists or not Fortunately for science, prior to the study of the meditating monk that the 14th Dalai Lama—using his given name, Tenzin Gyatso—first alluded to in an op-ed piece for the New York Times on April 26, 2003 (Gyatso 2003b), that I reported on in the New Scientist, and that Dan Goleman (2003b) wrote about in the New York Times on February 4, 2003, there had been a number of excellent studies on positive affect and the brain (Davidson and Irwin 1999; Davidson 2000; Davidson, Kabat-Zinn et al. 2003 Davidson and Hugdahl 2003. These experiments revealed that when subjects are shown pleasant pictures like those of sunsets, scans (PET or fMRI) or skull measurements of activity (EEG) reveal increased left-side activity in the prefrontal cortex, whereas when subjects see unpleasant pictures (say, a human The Color of Happiness 39 cadaver), activity moves rightward. Furthermore, people who report themselves generally to be...