Happy Mind: The Philosophy and Science of Happiness

 

The word ‘hedonism’ conjures up a ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle’, so you might expect David Pearce, the Brighton-based author of The Hedonistic Imperative, to be a womanising party animal. Instead, David leads a quiet life, running a small web hosting business and, in his spare time, expanding his website, listening to music and meeting friends at his home from home, Starbucks in Borders, where he drinks copious amounts of black coffee and keeps up with the news.

HedWeb, which includes David’s numerous writings and musings, started in 1996 and now gets around 200,000 unique visitors a month. The core idea of David’s online manifesto is that we should use biotechnology to abolish all forms of suffering throughout the living world. More speculatively, David predicts that our descendants will be motivated by gradients of bliss which may be orders of magnitude richer than anything we can experience today.

 

 

Katherine Power writes about the science of love.

 

Expressions like 'madly in love', 'crazy for you' and 'lovesick' may be more accurate than we think. When we fall in love, our brains experience an explosion of powerful chemicals. The neural profile that emerges has led some scientists to compare the initial stages of love to mental illnesses like obsessive compulsive disorder and mania, the manic phase of manic depression.

Helen Fisher, a researcher at Rutgers University and the author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love believes we evolved three systems related to matters of the heart: the first deals with lust, the second with romantic love – also known as attraction, obsessive love, passionate love or 'being in love' – and the third with attachment. Fisher's theory is that the three systems motivate us, respectively, to mate, focus our attention on a particular partner, and stick with that partner long enough to look after the children we may have.