The Science of Happiness, with Laurie Santos

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

I’m your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is a Cosmic Queries edition on a subject I think about which we all care, or should care, or should care, and that’s the science of happiness.

And we got one of our happy co-hosts to join me, Negin Farsad.

Negin, welcome back to StarTalk.

Hi, Neil.

Look at her happy face.

That’s her happy face.

You are host of the podcast Fake the Nation, and I recently appeared on that podcast.

I enjoyed it.

Thank you for having me.

Neil, you killed it.

People still write me about that episode.

Oh my God, thank you, thank you, and you’re also the author of the funniest book title I’ve ever seen.

How to Make White People Laugh.

So this is, for all people of color, this should be at the top of their shelf, right?

Because you don’t want angry white people.

Is that what you’re saying?

It’s a useful guide.

It’s a useful quick reference guide.

And you get to say that because your heritage is not sort of European white.

So what is your heritage in this?

I’m an Iranian-American Muslim, like everyone.

Yeah, like everybody.

Yeah, yeah.

You left out maybe two boxes you could have checked there, but I’m ready.

All right, so neither of us have expertise on this.

So we bring in experts when we need them.

And today we’ve got our special guest psychologist, Laurie Santos.

Laurie, welcome to StarTalk.

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Excellent.

So you are a professor of psychology up at Yale and in New Haven, Connecticut.

And you’re head of Sillman College.

And now, just so people understand, in the Ivy League and in many other places, dormitories are basically called colleges, is that correct?

Yeah, it’s kind of like Hogwarts.

You know, they kind of steal from the Harry Potter, you know.

Yale is based on Hogwarts, okay?

So, head, this is a title that, if I remember correctly, it was once called The Master of Sillman College.

So, I guess that went out with the movement in the summer of 2020, right?

You can’t run around calling people Master.

Yeah, exactly.

Especially since, you know, many of the heads of college are white men and, you know, a lot of our students are students of color.

It gets a little awkward, you know.

And at one time, they maybe actually owned slaves.

So, not this round, but earlier generations, possibly.

So, what do you do?

So, you are the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale, and it’s in particular the Canine Cognition Center.

So, that’s just fancy talk for dogs, right?

That’s exactly right, yeah.

We’re really interested in what makes the human mind special.

That’s kind of my day job when I’m not studying happiness and well-being is this question of what makes the human mind unique.

And we study dogs in part because we built them to be a lot like us.

And so, if we’re expecting some critters out there to show human-like characteristics, it’s probably gonna be dogs.

I wanna hear you say that again.

We invented dogs.

Just say that.

We invented dogs.

Well, we didn’t really invent them, but we shaped them.

They’re a lot different than a wolf.

Most of us wouldn’t be kind of curling up in the bed with the wolf in our house, right?

Hey, speak for yourself.

No.

That’s why Negin only has three limbs.

The wolf got hungry overnight.

So, you also host the podcast Happiness Lab.

This is a great title.

Pushkin Industries, are they the sponsors of the lab?

Is that?

Sponsors of the podcast, yeah.

The podcast, sorry.

Well, excellent.

So, let me just ask some general questions just to start out here.

So, isn’t happiness, I don’t mean to sound all philosophical, but how do you know you’re happy unless at some time you felt sad?

Yeah, I mean, I think one thing to know about happiness is I wish we had a more scientific approach to it, right?

That’s why we have you.

This is why we’re trying, right?

But even though you have lots of researchers studying happiness, we don’t have great measurement tools for happiness, right?

I wish we had a little happiness thermometer that we could stick in people’s mouths and know combining all their emotions of joy and laughter and sometimes anxiety.

Here’s their happiness reading, right?

By the way, there’s a great quote.

I think it was Logan Clendenning.

If not him, it was someone of his ilk that said, no science achieves maturity without a system of measurement.

And so this is one of the things that happiness researchers have been working on for a while now.

We have actually like two decades worth of data looking at this.

And what they’ve converged on, which sounds not scientific, but actually is quite a good measurement, is simply asking people about their own happiness.

Now, when I first started this, right, I study animals for a living.

My work is in animal cognition, where we have these really strict measurements that come out of the history of ethology and things like that.

It felt like-

What is ethology?

What is ethology?

Ethology is sort of the study of animal behavior and things, right?

That’s a word!

That’s a new word for me!

That’s a word, yeah, it’s totally a word.

Did you know this word?

I have never heard of this word.

Ethology, the study of animal-

Kind of animal behavior and animal kind of communication.

Okay, so the people who study ethics, it’s not ethology, I guess.

Yeah, I guess that’s ethics, ethicsology?

I’m sorry, go on.

Yeah, yeah, so the point is that I was, when I first got to this work on the science of wellbeing and I saw that great studies were based on asking people about their own happiness, I was pretty worried.

But what I realized was two things.

First is that these measurements are actually pretty solid, right?

They tend to be measurements that are relatively valid, so we can kind of like measure them over and over again.

And they also be tend to-

They’re repeatable.

They’re repeatable, right?

Just like we really want in science, obviously we measure you twice, we get the same kind of reading, time one, time two.

But the other thing is that these measurements seem to correlate with all kinds of things that we think must be relevant for happiness.

So when we have good hormonal measures of people’s moods, people’s self-reports of how they’re feeling correlate with that.

People’s self-reports of how they’re feeling, whether they’re happy or not, also correlate with rich textual analysis of their journals.

So I grab your diary, and I do all this machine learning on the adjectives you use.

And that really hardcore analysis correlates with when I ask you, you know, all things considered, scale of one to 10, how satisfied are you with your life?

And so in a bunch of different-

So one of the things you listed there was, you say hormones, but we can just broaden that and say chemistry.

You’re saying, if you say you’re happy, that correlates with being chemically happy.

That’s right.

I mean, the problem is that we don’t know a lot about what chemical happiness looks like, because even there we run into-

Silicidin, it’s the new school, but no, but even those kinds of measurements are hard when we don’t know what happiness is.

Because if I measure your chemicals and I give you marijuana, say, and then I have to measure, did the marijuana make you happy?

But I’m still at square one.

I have to ask you, hey, are you happy now after you smoked up a bit?

And so, what the science suggests is these relatively valid measurements might be tapping into the real thing we want to measure, which is, I don’t want to know about your hormones, I don’t want to know about your chemistry.

I want to know how you feel right now, you know, Neil, on a scale of one to 10, how are you feeling?

So, in some sense, if you tell me on a valid measurement that you’re feeling pretty good, that’s kind of what I want to maximize with any intervention I’m going to do on how you’re feeling, right?

I want you to think that you’re feeling good.

As a psychologist, this is a very important goal.

Yeah, I mean, you know, especially, you know, you and I are talking right now in the midst of COVID-19, you know, right after 2020, this has been a really hard, a really hard year and a really hard time.

A lot of people are feeling, you know, much more depressed and anxious and uncertain and lonely than they felt in a really long time.

And so if we could find good interventions that work across people’s individual differences to boost up their well-being, we’d be doing something really good for the world.

But can you translate it into, like, cups or quarts or, like, milliliters for people who don’t like the king’s measurements, is there, can I get, like, some just easy, because I want to bake it, you know what I mean?

What I can tell you is that social scientists are interested in two aspects of happiness.

That’s what people tend to measure.

So one of those aspects is sort of how you feel in your life, right, which is the kind of emotions you have.

We don’t want to get rid of negative emotions because that’s, you know, part of a rich, fulfilling life.

But we want, on average, there to be more, like, laughter and joy and positive things than, you know, anger and sadness and, you know, anxiety and things like that.

By the way, Laurie, when I was growing up, I grew up in New York City, and so I had exposure to theater, right, just as a New York resident.

It’s just part of the life of growing up there.

And I remembered seeing these, this pair icon of a smiley face and a sad face.

And I thought, why is there a sad face there?

Oh, because theater takes you both places.

And I say, why ever take someone to a sad place?

I just did not understand why you would glorify making someone sad in what you wrote.

Why is this?

And I was a fool.

I might have been 40 before I came any sense and understanding of this.

So that’s kind of back to my early question.

What role and value does depression play?

I don’t mean clinical depression, but just I have a bad day, I feel sad.

Tomorrow, I feel great.

Because I’ve been to LA and the freaking sun is out every day and it’s 72 degrees and a little cloud comes up and says, oh, it’s a cloudy day.

It’s like, shut up.

You have no idea what anything other than a sunny day is like.

And so they’re sad because they started in a whole other place.

So how does that factor into all of this?

Well, there are kind of two reactions to that.

So one gets to the other kind of measure of happiness.

So I said the first one is how you’re feeling in your life, but then there’s a second thing I really want to maximize, which is how you’re feeling with your life.

You know, that’s the answer to the question, how satisfied are you with your life right now?

And those two things, like how you’re feeling right now, whether you’re happy, joyous, sad, whatever, and how satisfied you are with your life, those things can vary a little bit, right?

You know, I think, you know, sometimes when we’re doing our best work, when we’re getting the most meaning out of life, you know, I think back to grad school, when I was like feeling really fulfilled career-wise, those in the moment weren’t necessarily the best times.

You know, my dean who lives with me in the college right now, she and her wife have a new baby, and they’re kind of in the midst of this, too.

You know, they’re so satisfied with their life.

You know, they brought this life into the world.

It’s so meaningful.

But day to day, it kind of sucks, like not sleeping, dirty diapers, right?

That’s bad news, right?

And so I think you can have these dissociations, right?

So it’s important to measure both kind of in general, in a big picture way, how satisfied are you?

What meaning do you have?

You know, do you have a sense of purpose?

And also kind of in the trenches, are you mostly feeling good?

Again, we’re not trying to get rid of negative emotion, but the goal is that when you’re having it, you’re learning from it or it’s serving a purpose or it stands in contrast to some other kind of emotion that you had that felt better before.

You also study dog brains and all the people who have, what do they call the dog, they carry on airplanes with them.

Emotional support animals.

Negin, I saw a comedian, I forgot which one.

I think it was Sebastian Maris-

Maniscalco.

Maniscalco, thank you, where he said he saw the actor who plays Superman carrying an emotional support dog onto the plane.

He said, no, we have to stop somewhere.

Neil, you haven’t seen my emotional support wolf on the airplane.

It’s how to make everyone scared so you feel better about yourself.

So if you study dog brains, the soothing effect that a very comforting dog can have, I guess there’s some kind of symbiosis there, right?

Yeah, most of the work that we do in the dog lab is a bit separate from the happiness work, but there is a growing body of work about what’s called human-animal interaction, right?

Just this idea of kind of socially connecting with this other creature that seems not judgmental, maybe not even as judgmental as some of your friends or some of your family members.

Like it can be a powerful-

Negin, you look terrible this morning.

My dog did not like this outfit, you guys, and it was a tough one.

No, but what they’re tapping into is one of the necessary features for happiness, which is some form of social connection.

Ideally, we’re getting that with other Homo sapiens, right?

But if that’s not happening, then sort of having a non-judgmental connection with the animal can give us a lot of the same pleasures that we get out of connecting with other humans, too.

And before we go to the break, because we haven’t gotten to any questions yet, Negin, I assume you have questions lined up from our people.

Out there, right, right.

So what about, I don’t want to derail where we’re going here, but I can’t help but think about emotional support robots, either for people who can’t interact with other humans, which is a big part of what you’re describing, but a robot might provide that.

So what about robot happiness?

Yeah, there’s actually lots of work trying to use, you know, soft, fuzzy, cuddly, kind of almost animalistic robots as kind of emotional support critters.

I think in COVID-19, I’ve seen lots of tweets of like, the last person I talked to was my Roomba.

You know, like a lot of people are finding some support.

If you make furry Roombas, that’ll change the whole ecosystem.

By the way, my therapist told me, because not to brag, but I’ve experienced some anxiety in my life, and my therapist had me pet my dog meaningfully for like a few minutes every night to like help bring down my anxiety.

So why are you bragging?

Where’s the bragging in that?

Anxiety is a very elite experience.

Did it work, though?

Yeah, I mean, you know, in general, a lot of those things that a lot of the questions actually are going to touch on a lot of stuff that she had me do have helped with my anxiety.

So wait a minute, Negin, you just solved something.

Laurie, let me get your fast opinion before we go to break.

The James Bond villains who are always petting a cat on their back, they have high anxiety.

They’re on to something.

James Bond has met with them.

You need a monocle and you need a dog or a cat, and you need to have some nice petting motions.

Petting motions.

You can be as evil as you want, but also calm.

Excellent.

Let’s take a quick break.

When we come back, we’re going to blow right through our Cosmic Queries on the Science of Happiness with Laurie Santos.

Laurie Santos.

Hi, I’m Chris Cohen from Haworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re back, StarTalk Cosmic Queries, a topic which is on all of our minds, especially coming out of the Coronaverse.

It’s The Science of Happiness.

And Laurie Santos, this is one of your professional specialties, is thinking about this as a psychologist and professor up at Yale.

I say up at Yale because we are in New York City, and that’s north, and so up is north.

That’s what I mean by that for those who have no clue or don’t really care what that means.

So, Laurie, you have a podcast.

That means you probably also have a Twitter handle or an Instagram handle.

What are they?

I do.

I’m on Twitter.

Just my name, at Laurie Santos, and you can check out the podcast, The Happiness Lab, anywhere you download your podcasts.

Excellent.

Very good.

Okay.

So, Negin, you got questions for us, culled from our fan base.

Oh, my God.

Laurie, you got so many amazing questions, and the first one is from…

So, that’s code for saying, when you answer, keep it short.

So, this first question comes from Patreon from Augusta Suresh.

Sorry if I mispronounced that name.

In a recent episode of StarTalk, Dr.

Tyson mentioned that he chose to have comedians on the show because if people smile and enjoy the moment, they’re more likely to remember it.

Can you give us some scientific insight on how happiness can lead to stronger memories?

Also, as a comedian, I especially love it.

It also puts you on the spot, Negin.

If we don’t laugh, you’re gone.

You know, but please give me reason for being, Laurie, please.

Yeah.

Can we justify Negin’s existence, Laurie?

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, well, one thing is like, you know, people remember the things that they’re talking about because jokes are funny, right?

And funny things are the kinds of things we want to share, right?

You know, so if they hear a good joke on StarTalk, they’re going to want to tell their friends or get their friends to listen to the podcast so they can hear it too.

But we also know that memory requires…

That’s the spreading of love.

It’s the spreading of love, yes.

Sharing StarTalk with your friends, full spreading of love right there.

That increases happiness.

But also we know that memories really require some emotional experience, right?

That helps us tag kind of the things in life.

You know, if I asked you, what are some of your earliest memories from childhood?

My guess is that they’re tinged with like strong affect or strong emotion.

You know, that time you got lost at the grocery store and you were scared or that time you got the present you wanted and you were super happy, right?

Those are the things that tend to stick out.

And so, you know, if we want to make things memorable, you know, giving someone a pleasurable experience is a really good way to do it.

So, Negin, you didn’t grow up in New York City, but I did.

And I don’t know if it’s still a thing, but the most terrifying prospect is getting lost in Macy’s.

I haven’t heard much lately, but when I was growing up, that was the thing.

Because we’ve all been to…

Macy’s is the single largest store in the world at Herald Square.

It’s where the parade ends and they dance.

That frontage is an entire block.

It’s nine floors up and the floor is down.

Yes, it is the Macy’s universe.

And you’re in there holding your parents’ hand, and you worry that if they just let go…

And it’s always so crowded and so many people, and you’re little, so that was a fear factor.

I just want you to know.

It’s also like the Vatican.

It has its own, like it’s its own nation.

It has its own rules.

Its own zip code.

And for some reason, you always walk out with like three extra handbags, and you smell like 12 different types of perfume.

A lot happens at Macy’s.

But I like that you need an emotional connection.

And so what you’re saying, Laurie, is that laughter and joy is an emotional connection to the learning.

But you’re also saying that Negin could also make us angry and have the same effect.

That might have other consequences.

That might have other consequences for StarTalk.

We want this show to be memorable, but not anger-provoking.

But not angry.

Okay, so Negin, don’t piss us off.

Well, that’s when I bring out the wolf.

As long as he’s in the…

Should we go on to another question?

Keep coming.

This is also from Patreon.

It’s 12 and a half year old astrophysicist Violeta writing in from Birmingham.

Prof.

Santos, is there any scientific truth to the statement ignorance is bliss?

Does processing more general knowledge make us more or less content?

I love this question.

This is a badass question from a 12 year old astrophysicist.

No, it’d be badass from an adult.

So it’s double badass coming from somebody who’s still in their tweens.

Yeah, well, Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, right?

I think he was onto something in a certain way.

One thing that we know is that there’s a lot of happiness boost that comes with learning something new, especially learning something new in a challenging way.

One of the coolest concepts in positive psychology is this concept of flow, this time when you’re so entrenched in something that you’re losing track of time.

And it can happen in lots of sports activities and things, but it can also happen when you’re learning something really rich.

But that’s called being in the zone, right?

Exactly, being in the zone.

But that’s the kind of thing that can happen when we’re learning something challenging.

If you’re doing a hard math problem that’s taking all of your cognitive energy, but you can still do it, it’s not so devastating that you can’t get through it.

I’m doing a calculus theorem right on the side right here.

You guys can’t see it.

Or even a hard puzzle, like a good jigsaw puzzle that’s taking all your attention.

And I think that’s a sign that when we’re learning, especially when we’re learning right at the edge of our ability, that is something that our brains tag as joyful, as so immersive.

Where does the phrase ignorance and bliss come from?

I think the phrase ignorance and bliss comes from when you’re getting bad information that you might not want to know.

I mean, I think this is something, you know, if you find out some terrible factoid, or your friends were talking about you, or you learn some awful truth, like that can kind of stick with you, right?

And so I think that’s where the ignorance is bliss comes from.

But I would say, you know, maybe ignorance is bliss, but learning is definitely bliss too.

Can I push back as someone who knows nothing?

You can only just raise your hand.

You can’t say, I don’t know anything I’m going to push back.

No, those don’t go together in a sentence.

Okay.

One of the things that has reduced my kind of like general unhappiness, which has made me more happy, is turning off the notifications on my phone.

I used to get all the news notifications all the time.

And so not knowing things when they’re happening, I have found to be particularly blissful.

But built in, you know you will learn it later.

So it’s just a delay.

It’s not a total abject ignorance.

And that’s one of the reasons.

So another thing that really we require for happiness in some sense is the ability to attend, to notice stuff, to be in the present moment.

And one of the reasons that notifications suck away our happiness so much is they steal us out of that.

I might be in the middle of doing a really great puzzle and looking at the pieces or learning something new.

And then I hear like, bing, like, you know, some Facebook friend posted some dumb thing about politics.

And now my brain is sucked out of that moment that was giving it joy.

And I’m kind of like, wait, what happened?

And it takes me a while to get back.

One of the things we don’t realize is how much these attention grabbers are negatively affecting our happiness, even if the information we’re getting is good.

And so one quick happiness-inducing strategy you can do is to shut off lots of those non-urgent notifications on your phone as soon as possible.

It’ll keep you more in the moment, and that being in the moment will boost your well-being a bit.

Well, I’m old enough, older than both of y’all, to remember when it was policy for the medical doctor to not tell you that you were diagnosed with terminal cancer.

They saw you back and said, Oh, you’re fine.

You’re fine.

Don’t tell grandpa.

Don’t tell.

And there was this even fact, I think, is a cat on a hot tin roof.

A major running theme in that is that the big daddy, I think, has cancer.

And he said, I’m fit as a fiddle.

And everyone knows he’s about to die.

So who was giving that advice at the time?

Or did medical doctors need more psychologists to come in and run the show?

Yeah, it’s tricky.

That’s actually one where, you know, ignorance might be a little bit more blissful or a specific kind of ignorance, which is one of the problems that comes with knowing about your medical diagnoses is that in addition to doctors telling you more information, they also give you more choice.

You find out some bad information and the doctor says, okay, do you want this kind of treatment or this one?

And the research shows that another thing that can be a real hit on our well-being, something we don’t expect, is actually having too many choices.

Too many choices.

Which is shocking, right?

You know, if you give me a choice, hey, do you want Netflix where you have three movies or do you want Netflix where you have, like, Netflix number of movies?

I would choose the Netflix number of movies, right?

That number is infinity, just in case you wondered.

But haven’t you all had the same experience when you plop down and you say, all right, I’m going to watch a movie and it’s scroll, scroll, scroll, and then my husband comes and he’s like, you’ve been here for like a half hour, like scrolling through.

It’s an hour later, right.

And you finally get to the end of the scroll and they’ve made new movies to add to the list.

Never mind that.

I just found out there are 14 flavors of Triscuits on the market now.

And I found that to be very stressful.

I mean, you can’t have too many snack options.

It’s demoralizing.

Plus Jell-O invented that, okay?

Jell-O, a wall of Jell-O flavors.

Exactly.

So, Laurie, what you’re saying is the high school senior who says, oh, I got into 15 universities and I don’t know which one.

I’m sad.

It’s like you just want to punch them out.

But he might be on to some.

I mean, what the data suggests is more choices make you sad.

And even when you do choose, that you have more regret, right?

If you had 50 colleges to choose from and you pick one, you’re kind of like, maybe one of those other 49 might have been pretty good.

And so, I worry about this with so much, you know, we have so much choice in movies.

We have so much choice in dating partners.

Look at Tinder, right?

You know, but I met my husband before online dating was a huge thing.

And I think, you know, I love him a lot.

Wait, wait, Negin, that could have happened in that sentence.

You know, I met my husband before Tinder, you know.

People can’t see my video now, but they’re thinking, she must be old.

By the way, for people who can’t see her, she’s sepia-toned.

She looks very old-timey.

Back in the old days.

The edges are kind of frayed of the image.

Okay, so what you’re saying is you selected your husband from a smaller pool of choices.

Yeah, one that didn’t feel infinite, right?

And I think that people on the dating market, this can get depressed.

Again, this is one of the themes of the work in happiness, and I talk about a lot in my podcast, is that our minds lie to us about what makes us happy a lot.

We think we want more choices.

If we had to pick, we’d pick something with lots of choices.

But in fact, that makes us kind of unhappy.

Another is in our leisure.

We were just talking about flow and picking things that are challenging.

If you give people a choice, many people choose easier problems or something that’s not as challenging, especially when they’re kind of choosing leisure.

But in fact, we kind of enjoy it when puzzles are kind of tricky and hard.

I think this is why so many people gravitate towards astrophysics is because we don’t have answers.

Actually, people sort of like that stuff when we don’t really know.

I kind of like being steeped in ignorance.

But I just have to make it clear on this podcast that you have told your husband, darling, I’d love you even though I had fewer choices at the time we got together.

And I’ve justified that by my own research.

I’m happier that way.

You are great for the limited pool you were in.

Wait, but this really makes a lot of sense because I did do a lot of Tinder dating and I did do a lot of OkCupid dating.

But I had really strict rules.

So I didn’t get overwhelmed by the options.

I would only allow myself to browse for a certain number of minutes.

I only reached out to people who I reached out to.

I never responded to people who thought they were interested in me because they were always wrong.

Is your husband a product of Tinder?

And then the hilarious thing is even though I was very successful doing the online dating and I had multiple boyfriends from that, my husband was in the IRL.

We met it up, like we had the same acting coach.

So it was a real showbiz connex.

Just wondering there.

We’ll give you some more questions.

Also from Patreon, Woody asks, is there a difference between beers by a can’t fire happiness and holding your newborn child for the first time happiness?

Or is happiness just an out of 10 scoring system?

Wow, I like that.

Well, I think if you get back to the definition of happiness we talked about before where it has these two components, like happiness in your life and happiness with your life, you might get some differences there on the beer by the campfire versus newborn baby, right?

Newborn baby, hopefully they’re cute and they’re cuddly and you’re really excited and happy, but you’re probably exhausted.

Cute to the parents.

It’s your baby, right?

Holding your newborn baby, right?

Cute, but a lot of complicated emotions, uncertainty, maybe some fear and anxiety, definitely lots of exhaustion and so on, right?

But with how you’re feeling in your life, oh my gosh, so much meaning of holding the new baby.

Around the campfire, that kind of feels good and that’s great.

Feeling good and having some beers and it’s warm and fuzzy and social connection, that’s all great.

But that might not be contributing as much to the meaning side.

So when I think about maximizing my own happiness, I kind of want to bump up both.

I want joy and good feelings in my life, but I also want to make sure that they’re serving a bigger purpose and a lot more meaning in my life too.

So if I were to layer some math on this, I would say then that the axis of happiness that is the inner fulfillment is not the same axis as the one that’s happiness in the moment.

And so to combine those, you want to move along both axes to get some combination of both that might be perfect for yourself.

Is that a fair way to think about it?

I think that’s exactly right.

I mean, you can definitely point to people who have every comfort and happiness in their life kind of thing, right?

You know, like rich folks who are social media folks who have the best wine and the best food and you know, and they feel empty, you know, they feel empty, right?

And they, you know, report feeling lonely and so on.

So, yeah, so you want to kind of move up both, you want to move up the line at once, maximizing both.

So you’re basically, what you’re both saying is you should have more beers and more babies.

Just to translate all of this for the listeners.

The simple deep platitudes of life, exactly.

Thank you, Negin, for just making it basic.

Okay, we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll come back with more Cosmic Queries, The Science of Happiness.

Oh, you know what time it is.

It’s time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons, Victor Sanchez, Austin Douglas, and Sarah George.

Thank you all for supporting us.

Without you, we could not do this show.

And if you are listening, and you’d like your very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

We’re back, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, The Science of Happiness, Happiness.

And Negin, you’ve taken us through these questions, but we gotta go into lightning round for Laurie.

So Laurie, lightning round means we want one word answers to these questions.

Okay, can you do that?

I’m on it, I’m on it.

You’re totally on it, okay.

All right, let’s go, Negin.

Okay, here we go from Patreon.

Gordon asks, hello, what does science say about the relationship between happiness and lifespan and happiness and money?

I’m from Asia and my culture believes money brings happiness.

Wow, is that Gordon, does Gordon have a last name?

Sorry, Gordon Vu.

Gordon Vu, okay, excellent.

So yeah, I’d like that, do happy people live longer?

Happy people do live longer and happy people are wealthier.

In other words, there’s some studies that show that if I measure your cheerfulness at 18, that predicts how much money you’re going to be making in your 20s, your late 20s and your 30s.

What?

So they’re related, they’re correlated, but the causal link seems to go backwards.

We think when you get rich, you get happy, but the data seem to suggest if you’re happy, then you might have lots of other stuff that get you to be higher salaried and stuff.

Or people like having you around and then opportunities are greater.

Exactly, maybe you’re more creative so you’re better on the job.

And so we kind of have it backwards.

Wow, so when I was in high school, I had friends who’d nickname me Chuckles because I was always making jokes and having fun.

So I had a nickname of Chuck in high school.

So, but I didn’t become a comedian.

Negin, I lost, did I go the wrong way here?

I know, I don’t know what happened to you along the way because you do seem like you could have naturally gone in that direction.

It’s so disappointing.

Yeah, damn.

I mean, you know what?

I think you ended up okay.

All right, good answer.

So keep them coming, Negin.

From Instagram, Nick Dorflinger asks, what drug gets me there safest?

Edgy question, but I want you to answer.

Yeah, Laurie, why worry about stuff in your life if you could just do it chemically?

Yeah, well, the most legal drug, I think, is gratitude.

The best illegal drug probably psilocybin is what the data suggests.

You get a boost and a real kind of connection with other people and everything in the world.

And the data seems to suggest that even once the drug wears off, some of that connection still holds.

Lots of new, like this is like super ongoing research stuff right now, but the data suggests that work is going to be super interesting in five years.

So does psilocybin have a street name?

It’s basically like just like taking acid or a bunch of like psychedelics basically, of firing forms.

Mushrooms and stuff as well?

Exactly, yeah.

Because I can’t imagine someone saying, hey, you want some psilocybin?

You know, generally drug users don’t use the chemical name.

Yeah, well, lots of forms of psychedelics basically.

Write that down, Neil Dorflinger.

Okay, this next question is really close to my heart.

Melanie Munz on Instagram asks, why do we get depressed when we’re not able to socialize with our friends?

This happens to me.

What’s up with that?

Totally, I mean, there’s one of the most famous papers, published papers in the History of Social Psychology suggests that social connection, being around other people, physically being around other people is a necessary condition for high happiness.

That was like the big tagline of this paper.

And so you’re just like showing off human nature, that social connection is really required for high happiness.

Now, this is tough during COVID because we have to get very creative about how we get our social connection and often involve screens like the one you and I are talking over now.

But the great news is it suggests most of the connection we get in real life, we can get across the screen too.

So communication is what was really happening there, right?

Which is a fundamental part of what it is to be human, that we can communicate information.

Yeah, and we’re social primates, right?

You know, if we got one thing from our primate ancestry, it’s the fact that we like being around other critters and grooming them and sort of getting information from them.

So it’s not such a surprise that natural selection built in happens there.

Because Negin pulls lice off her husband’s hair.

Don’t you do that, the grooming, you groom him this way, don’t you?

No, of course, and it’s delicious.

From the aloalex10 on Instagram asks, does happiness fall under schedules of reinforcement or is it innate?

Ah, that’s a good one.

And that implies a certain dichotomy that those things are different.

I guess I would say there’s research suggesting that some aspects of our happiness are heritable.

In other words, there’s some maybe genetic or epigenetic components to our happiness.

But there’s also lots of research suggesting that you can build in your own happiness, that through your own habits, things like being more social, taking time for gratitude, taking time to be in the present moment, even if you’re kind of naturally a like five out of 10 on a happiness scale, you can probably move it up through your own behaviors to like eight out of 10.

But you have to want to do that.

You have to want to do that.

And you have to put in the work, right?

I mean, that’s one of the messages is like, you can just like all good things, like being fit, learning astrophysics, you can do it, but it’s going to take some time and some energy.

Well, one of my favorite lines in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is when Ferris Bueller is describing his best friend who’s always miserable.

And he says, I don’t understand him.

He’s only happy when he’s sad.

And when I first heard that, I said, what?

But I said, oh my gosh, these are people who go out of their way to put themselves in a sad place.

And that somehow seems to be their equilibrium point.

So there are those who are five on your scale who want to boost it.

But maybe there are those who are five who are just happy at five.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely get, most of the emails I get asking questions about happiness are, you know, my spouse, my child, you know, someone in my life is so unhappy.

What can I do to make them happier?

And the answer is, you know, there’s lots of stuff they can do to make, to become happier if they put in the work.

But they kind of have to want to do it.

Wow, so what you’re saying is we don’t have as much power as we believe we have over making someone else happy?

Well, we do.

I think, honestly, a strange thing, one thing we can do that’s quite powerful is to make ourselves happy.

One of the, another big powerful effect in this field of positive psychology is the power of emotional contagion.

You know, we are chameleons.

We suck up the emotions of other people.

And that’s why people listen to StarTalk, right?

And hear you and the comedians laughing, right?

And they’re probably getting a little joy out of that themselves, even if they weren’t feeling it before.

And you would have to use the word contagion to describe it, okay?

Is there another word you can use?

It seems like it works.

It’s a tough word in a pandemic, Neil.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough, fair enough.

How about catchy happiness?

All these pandemic words are jumping into our communication here.

Happiness, happy catchiness.

Not happiness.

I was gonna say infectious, but then no, again.

It’s a tough word in a pandemic.

Infectious, pandemic happiness, right?

But also, is it unethical, Laurie, this is a question to slip like a teaspoon of psilocybin to the one you love, just in a cup of coffee.

I’m pretty sure that’s against the law in most places.

But in the happiness universe, it is completely ethical.

Yeah, for sure.

We have another question from Amy McCormick on Instagram.

Can you explain the science behind seasonal affective disorder?

Ooh, good one, sad.

Yeah, sad.

Seasonal affective disorder is just part of the many environmental things that affect our happiness.

So we were just talking about one, right?

Being around other people that are happy can make you a little bit happier.

But we’re really affected by our environment and many of us are really affected by light, right?

Just the sheer amount of light that you get in.

We’re also affected by kind of walks outside in nature.

There’s this wonderful Japanese concept of forest bathing where you go out in the forest and it’s thought of as a big booster for your happiness.

But there’s some empirical evidence suggesting that simply getting outside and being around nature can be a really powerful boost for happiness.

But why does light matter?

I mean, I say that only because the sun doesn’t, in different parts of the world, have very different amounts of sunlight.

And winter nights can be very long in the northern and very southern climate, southern south of the equator, of course, because it’s symmetric in six-month shifts.

So what I don’t understand is when you come indoors, there are lights everywhere.

You turn on the lights.

We’re not walking around with candles.

You have halogen bulbs, not anymore.

We have very bright LEDs.

So why does the sun matter at all?

You’re such an astrophysicist to be defending darkness right now.

It was dark for so long.

The light doesn’t even get here that fast.

Yeah, exactly.

No, no, but I think a couple of things.

One is we can fake it, right?

This is one of the treatments for seasonal affective disorders to just get yourself some light and make sure you’re surrounded by light.

But another reason that the wintertime affects us so badly if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, that is, right, is that you tend to behave differently.

You know, think of the number of social connections you make in the summer.

Think of how much like nature bathing you do in the summer when you’re walking around outside.

What happens when it’s cold out and it’s dark?

You know, it’s me in front of a screen, right?

You know, not paying attention to, you know, my health, right?

And so I think it’s partly the light, but it’s a lot our behaviors that depend on different light states.

So that’s a factor that’s not otherwise described because it’s saying it’s just light, but you got a whole matrix of elements that plug into that, which make much more sense to me.

And this is the big problem of human behavior.

You know, I wish, as a psychologist, we have, you know, we talk about, people talk about physics envy or astrophysics envy.

Yep, it’s there, because you guys can’t isolate your variables.

We can’t isolate anything, you know?

I’d love to be able to put somebody in a box and be like, okay, you get this amount of light versus this amount of light and not mess up their emotion levels by having them inside a box.

But they’re people, not particles.

Negin, her husband is still in a box around the corner.

How come, why do we only see Laurie, but not her husband?

This is real shady, Laurie, this is shady.

To be fair, he’s actually an MIT physicist, so, you know.

He puts up with my physics envy in a different way.

All right, give me some more Negin.

Okay, so from the handle TyrellNéquan on Instagram, are there long-term scientific methods to generating happiness?

This is the quintessential question, actually, from-

I’d like that, because long-term implies I don’t need to be happy just in this moment because I had a great meal.

Give me something that really I can translate to my lifespan.

Yeah, and so I think the biggest ones are gratitude, so taking time to count your blessings, all kinds of evidence that gratitude in the moment and in the long-term can really help you, right?

Sort of forming a habit about gratitude, social connection.

Is that the same thing as, when all else fails, lower your expectations?

People think that grateful people are more resigned of like, oh, I’m so grateful I’m not going to change the situation.

Turns out gratitude…

You’re going to say, I’m grateful that I have two legs.

No, can you up the bar on that a little?

What the evidence really suggests is so grateful people tend to be more interested in changing the status quo.

It’s kind of like you have some emotional resilience, so you’re like, I can put in the work to do things.

This comes out a lot.

One big question I get when I talk about gratitude with my students who are very interested in social justice and things, they often ask, well, if I’m grateful, then I won’t fight for the changes that we want to see in the world.

And that evidence suggests the opposite.

When you’re grateful, that’s when you work really hard, because you have some emotional resources to help people who are not yourselves.

Right.

I forget about that, because you’re going to make a change.

You got to reach into yourself in your fuel tank and start applying that emotional energy to affect change.

That’s interesting.

Exactly.

Very cool.

Negin, we have time for maybe one and a half more questions.

Give it to me.

Sarah Stile asks on Instagram, do we want to be happy or do we need to be happy?

Is it luxury or a survival instinct?

Oh my gosh.

That’s great.

Remember, lightning round.

I think need to be happy.

Happiness affects our immune function.

Happiness affects our longevity.

Happiness affects how we interact with other people.

My students sometimes joke that happiness is a first-world problem, but all the data suggests that happiness matters more, matters for the fundamentals.

Keep going.

Negin.

You started to answer this one, but this question kind of came up a lot.

From edixsona on Instagram, can we fool ourselves into being happy?

Can we convince our brain into releasing dopamine?

You mentioned gratitude.

Is there another trick?

Yeah.

Other tricks are having more social connection, being around other people more.

Another easy one are like healthy habits like exercise and sleep.

One study shows that a half hour of cardio can reduce symptoms of depression as well as one of the leading anti-depression medications.

And then a final one is presence.

Just try to be in the present moment.

Like notice what is happening in your body right now.

Follow your breath.

It sounds kind of cheesy and hippie dippy, but the data suggests it can really boost well-being.

Science can support hippies.

There’s no law against that, right?

Sometimes they’re right.

They’re reading the latest scientific journals.

Let me end with one.

I’ll take host rights and end with a question here.

So let’s say I’m fabulously rich and I have servants and I sleep in the most comfortable bed all and I can detect if there’s a pea underneath the bed, like the princess and the pea, and then I have to sleep on a cot, okay?

And I’m miserable.

Meanwhile, there’s a homeless person who’s been sleeping under an overpass and then you put them in a cot and they say, oh my gosh, this is comfortable.

So it seems to me you cannot speak of happiness on absolute terms.

It’s always going to be just relative to the person.

And if there’s no such thing as an absolute scale, then how do you sink your teeth into what is and is not true in what you study?

Yeah, I think one thing to know is that’s definitely true.

Everything we know about happiness suggests that it’s relative.

It’s relative to where we were before.

It’s also a lot relative to other people.

So one of the worst things you can do for your happiness is look at lots of happy people on Instagram or social media.

That makes you compare yourself.

You feel kind of crappy.

There’s a word for that.

What do they call that?

Social comparison.

Okay, but I was thinking.

FOMO.

FOMO.

Fear of missing out.

Fear of missing out, which affects you emotionally.

But the whole point is that those things, it’s not happiness in the universe not being objective.

It’s for me.

It can be very objective for me.

I have my 1 to 10 scale.

As I go up, if I get more luxuries in life, then going back down to the cot might make me feel kind of crappy.

But the key is that what you want to be having is positive changes for yourself.

Another kind of happiness tip is not to always have the best things in life.

When you start flying first class every single time, that one time that there’s no seat available and you have to go and coach, you’re hating life, right?

But if you just occasionally with high variance get the first class, that’s a way to kind of boost up your happiness.

So there’s a mantra called split your gains and combine your losses in the field of psychology.

And the idea is you want those really great things to happen only once in a while because that’s when you’ll get the sort of biggest happiness transition.

So what you’ll feel most is how big the change was between where you were and what you then experienced.

And that’s what you then record.

That’s exactly right.

All we’re recording mentally are the changes in the transitions.

And so I joke with my students, I don’t know if you know this DJ Khaled song, All I Do Is Win.

And I joke with them, I was like, that would be the worst for a happy life because if all you did is win, there’s no transitions.

You’re just like at ceiling and your life would suck.

Laurie, have you seen the Twilight Zone episode on this?

Yes, exactly.

Oh my gosh.

There’s a criminal who gets like shot and then he shows up and he’s like a gambler, womanizer, criminal type and he gets shot and dies.

Okay.

And he shows up in this place and this man appears and says, oh, you must be, you know, Johnny Smith.

You right on time.

Oh, wow.

What is, where am I?

Oh, no, don’t worry about that.

Okay.

And he says, oh my gosh, it’s a pool hall.

Can I go play pool?

Yeah.

And so he goes and hits the ball and all the balls get sunk at once.

And then he bets on the roulette table and he wins every time.

And then all these women come in and they just throw themselves at him.

And he says, Doc, you know, I forgot what his name was, but I said, Doc, you know, I don’t think I deserve this place.

This is, you know, everything’s going to, you know, take me to the other place.

And this is the other place.

It was like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

So there he was with every single thing he fought to get, risked his life to get as a criminal and as a thing.

Now he has it on command and he is the most miserable person for eternity.

Yeah.

So this is why happiness requires the ups and downs.

This is why we require the happy emotions and the sad emotions, right?

We want a life filled with both.

So maybe the mantra isn’t more beers and more babies.

Maybe it’s like split your babies and ration your beers.

Thank you, Negin, for that bit of wisdom to end the show.

Oh, you’re welcome.

We got to stop it there.

So Laurie, great to have you on.

This is such a fertile topic.

And I’m sure we can find other angles into this and we’re going to call you back because you’re just up the street in New Haven, Connecticut.

And Negin, always great to have you on here.

It’s fun and your book is hilarious.

And I delighted in being a guest on your show.

And Laurie, I don’t know if I have anything to contribute to your podcast.

But if you need, I’ve been happy my whole life, I think.

So if you need some data point, call me.

And by the way, for me, I have a lot of hobbies and hobbies bring, they help re-center me when I go back to them and they reassess where I am in life and then take the next step.

So anyhow, okay, guys, we’re calling it there.

This has been Star Talk Cosmic Queries, The Happiness Edition.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking up.