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

defining a meme simply as “that which is imitated.”3 The biological corollary to a meme is, of course, a gene, a unit of heredity transmitted from an organism to its offspring.

Most of us can grasp the substance of a problem and even be provided with a means for overcoming it, yet we often still fail. It is this gap between awareness and action that set me on a path to write this book. I wanted to know why humans so often do things not in our best interest.

only a brain advanced enough to engage in complex thought and self-reflection is susceptible to the fuzzy mystification that obscures from view how our minds really work.

The problem is that our penchant for connection-like many features of our brains-can get out of hand. When that happens, our brains quite literally make something out of nothing, and we can’t seem to stop ourselves from doing it

The flip side of this reality is that our big brains, advanced as they are, come with an array of complex shortcomings and are also expert at transmitting these shortcomings.

nonwarrior labor. The Spartans were not concerned with the principle of"freedom”—they were concerned with their own freedom.

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.

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 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