What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite: Updated and Revised

likely to tackle a great white shark, just as an orca from a whale-hunting culture would have no reason to start hunting stingrays.

when we feel right about a decision or a belief-whether big or small-our brains are happy. Since our brains like being happy, we like feeling right. In

amygdalae feature prominently in this threat response.5 What this tells us is that the brain doesn’t merely prefer certainty over ambiguity-it craves it. Our need to be right is actually a need to “feel” right. Neurologist Robert Burton coined the term certainty bias to describe this feeling and how it skews our thinking.6

In effect, that pioneering orca induced “tonic immobility” in its adversary—a temporary state of paralysis many species of sharks fall into when turned on their backs. The human discovery of tonic immobility in sharks is relatively recent, making the orca’s behavior all the more remarkable.

Or we could more accurately say that mind is not something produced by the brain, but that which the brain does. Said still another way, the brain’s activity—and, indeed, the activity of our nervous system in total—is our mind. To quote neuroscientist Simon LeVay, “The mind is just the

The reason that Spartan men could devote themselves to becoming full-time professional warriors is that they had plenty of slaves for tending mundane,

Neuroscience research is revealing that the state of not being certain is an extremely uncomfortable place for our brains to live: The greater the uncertainty, the worse the discomfort.

When we want to revisit the memory, we pull the book from the shelf and turn to the right page. We now know that memory doesn’t work that way, and, in fact, your memory of the hairpin curve and corkscrew loop doesn’t really reside in any single place in your brain, nor is it in any way complete.

The analysis revealed that the same parts of the brain that respond to physical threats are also the parts that respond to belief-based threats-and, as in the earlier study, the