Where does happiness live in the brain?

It’s nice to know where things live. You begin to understand the feisty attitude of a beaver when you see the time and effort they put into building their lodge. Likewise you learn a lot about a person when you enter their home. So we have a natural desire to see where things live as part of understanding them, which is partly why we are keen to know where happiness lives in the brain and researchers think they may have found a crucial part of the answer.

People who feel happiness more intensely, feel sadness less intensely, and are more able to find meaning in life have a larger part of the brain known as the "precuneus".

In the study the researchers scanned the brains of subjects using MRI and gave them questionnaires to establish how happy they are generally, how intensely they feel emotions, and how satisfied they are with their lives.

When the researchers compared the questionnaire results to the brain scans there were some interesting findings. The analysis showed that people who feel happiness more intensely, feel sadness less intensely, and are more able to find meaning in life have a larger part of the brain known as the “precuneus”.

Biologically the precuneus is a piece of parietal lobe that flops over on the inner wall of each hemisphere. In medical jargon, the precuneus is the medial aspect of the parietal lobe. It is hidden in the medial longitudinal fissure between the two cerebral hemispheres and the fact that it “hides” is poetic indeed because the precuneus is though to be the seat of the self. Certainly the precuneus is involved in self-related activities and is essential to your sense of “self”. Your cortex is equipped with egocentric maps that locate your own body with respect to other things in the surroundings and these maps reside in the parietal lobe, and the precuneus seems to get active when observing your own ego, the “I” you talk about, and is essentially involved in your sense of your self in the world.

No wonder then that the precuneus is intimately involved in happiness; may your precuneus forever enlarge.