What brain mechanisms are related to pleasure, happiness or the human ability to give meaning to one’s own existence? These are key questions that the emerging and interdisciplinary research fields of the science of pleasure and human flourishing are trying to answer, mainly developed by three leading centres linked to UPF, the University of Oxford (UK) and Aarhus University (Denmark) over the last few decades.

The scientific journal Neuron has just published the most cutting-edge international research in these fields conducted by Morten L. Kringelbach (Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Linacre College, University of Oxford), Peter Vuust (Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University, Denmark), and Gustavo Deco (Center for Brain and Cognition, UPF). Their work is presented in the article “Building a science of human pleasure, meaning making, and flourishing”, which reviews the main advances in these fields.

According to professor Gustavo Deco, “in order to really understand the phenomena of pleasure mechanistically at the neuronal level and, above all, what goes beyond pleasure and refers to the Aristotelian concept of doing and living well (eudaimonia), it is necessary to discover how the brain is hierarchically organized and how this organization is responsible for our different cognitive, emotional, and general states of consciousness”. Professor Gustavo Deco compares the brain to an orchestra: “… its different regions perform different types of processing, much like individual musicians who must read music, play their instruments and also listen and adapt to the sounds made by others. However, the brain does not just have a sole conductor but many in order to orchestrate its complex dynamics”.

The joint efforts by Oxford, Aarhus and UPF have begun to shed light on an important unsolved problem in neuroscience: how does the brain orchestrate itself, and what changes in this orchestration take place in different cognitive, volitional, emotional and conscious states?

The science of pleasure

Although pleasure appears to be a highly subjective phenomenon, it can be studied even in human and animal infants by measuring their behavioural and affective expressions to pleasurable stimuli. The researchers have generated significant analytical paradigms to understand the mechanisms underlying the brain networks underlying subjective brain states of emotion and pleasure associated with stimuli such as food or sex.

Important human research in this field was carried out in the 2000s by Morten L. Kringelbach together with Kent Berridge, who conducted pioneering experiments on rodents in the preceding decades. Berridge had established the fundamental difference between wanting and liking. Wanting is related to the brain mechanisms that are activated by the prospect of receiving a reward, and liking is the pleasure triggered by receiving a reward. Similar mechanisms have since been discovered in the human brain.

The research used strong pleasure stimuli (the taste of sugar, the smell of strawberries, the appearance of a baby’s face or the sound of a baby’s laughter). This allowed the researchers to identify the main brain networks involved in processing pleasure. They also showed that the processing of pleasure in the brain over time is cyclic, with a phase of appetite, consumption and satiety, closely related to learning mechanisms needed for survival. If it does not work properly, this can lead to neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression and schizophrenia. The researchers have developed whole-brain models for analysing the entire brain, which has enabled them to gain a much better understanding of what characterizes the orchestration of the brain dynamics that generate pleasure in the healthy brain, and thus, in the longer term, be able to find better treatments for people with neuropsychiatric diseases.

Which brain dynamics are involved in happiness?

Even more complex is investigating the brain dynamics involved in the creation of deeply subjective mental states, such as meaning-making. The researchers have shown that certain types of stimuli and experiences can lead to subjective meaning-making states, typically associated with music, social interaction, (especially with infants), psychedelics and meditation.

This line of research has led to the creation of a specific branch of neuroscience on human flourishing, which is based on a theoretical framework that analyses the brain as a whole. This powerful framework, partly partially based on principles of thermodynamics, has already been used in previous studies to investigate other forms of brain activity. In such studies, it had already been discovered that the orchestration of the different brain networks is significantly different depending on whether the person is at rest or performing different cognitive tasks. Importantly, however, there is a core of brain regions that is always at the top of the hierarchy, irrespective of brain state.

The researchers now aim to use a similar strategy to identify the orchestration system of brain regions inherent to human flourishing, using whole-brain models based on large-scale neuroimaging data. While there are still many unknowns in understanding the brain mechanisms that explain happiness, this may eventually lead to more flourishing lives for many people who are currently suffering.

Reference article:

Morten L. Kringelbach, Peter Vuust, Gustavo Deco, Building a science of human pleasure, meaning making, and flourishing, Neuron, Volume 112, Issue 9, 2024, Pages 1392-1396, ISSN 0896-6273. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.03.022