{"id":3094,"date":"2025-01-10T05:45:58","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T05:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/?p=3094"},"modified":"2025-01-10T05:46:00","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T05:46:00","slug":"the-neuroscience-of-happiness-a-deep-dive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/deep-work\/the-neuroscience-of-happiness-a-deep-dive\/","title":{"rendered":"The Neuroscience of Happiness: A Deep Dive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Number of words: 158<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scientists can watch this effect in action all the way down to the neurological level. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without<a><\/a> changing anything concrete about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Excerpted from page number 78-79 of \u201cDeep Work\u201d by Cal Newport.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Number of words: 158 Scientists can watch this effect in action all the way down to the neurological level. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a &#8230; <a title=\"The Neuroscience of Happiness: A Deep Dive\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/deep-work\/the-neuroscience-of-happiness-a-deep-dive\/\" aria-label=\"More on The Neuroscience of Happiness: A Deep Dive\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49,57],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Neuroscience of Happiness: A Deep Dive - BullsEye<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/deep-work\/the-neuroscience-of-happiness-a-deep-dive\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Neuroscience of Happiness: A Deep Dive - BullsEye\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Number of words: 158 Scientists can watch this effect in action all the way down to the neurological level. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a ... 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