What I've been reading

I never read any review or knew about this book but sheer curiosity of the catchy title made me "listen" to this book and I am so glad I did.

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner is one hilarious and a thought provoking book.
Weiner (!!) goes on a whirlwind tour around the world - Holland, Swiss, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova, Thailand, UK, India and USA on the look out for happy places.

Having lived in India and USA, I can tell his narrative was bang on target.He also agrees happiness is relative to culture and neuroscience has also been telling us lately how different parts of our brains acts to differently according to our culture/social status. David Brooks says it all in his column this week.

“Keely Muscatell, one of his doctoral students, and others presented a study in which they showed people from various social strata some images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdala (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families.

Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa studied Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations. The two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.

Mina Cikara of Princeton and others scanned the brains of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched baseball highlights. Neither reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. This is a look at how tribal dominance struggles get processed inside.

Jonathan B. Freeman of Tufts and others peered into the reward centers of the brain such as the caudate nucleus. They found that among Americans, that region was likely to be activated by dominant behavior, whereas among Japanese, it was more likely to be activated by subordinate behavior — the same region rewarding different patterns of behavior depending on culture.

All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as utrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that.”