Everyone strives for happiness in their life, but where is it actually located? I don’t mean where you have to move to in order to find it, or what you have to do to get it, but rather where happiness is located in the brain. An article from CTV News explains more in depth.
This idea is fascinating, as people experience happiness (or unhappiness) in different ways and is largely left to interpretation of the individual. A team of Japanese scientists have conducted a study in order to find out where exactly happiness “lives” in the brain. Waturu Sato of Kyoto University in Japan used an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to answer this question. “The discovered that the combination of positive emotions and satisfaction derived from life events had an impact of the precuneus, which is part of the parietal lobe.
Dr. Sato’s team analyzed the brains of 51 participants “to measure their subjective happiness as well as the emotions they felt.” The team gave each participant a questionnaire in order to determine their happiness, intensity of emotions, and how happy they are with their lives.
The study showed that the participants who were happier had more grey matter in the precuneus than those who were less happy. Waturu stated” Several studies have shown that meditation increases grey matter mass in the precuneus”.
This is good news for those of us who feel like we could be happier in our lives. Practicing some type of meditation is shown to actually make you happier. So, what’s stopping you?