The essence of happiness

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 3 days (www.nature.com)

Neuroscientists have gained an insight into how the brain comes to take pleasure in abstract rewards. Animals, they suggest, have a reward system that focuses on specific outcomes—what an action would achieve—which in turn plugs into a more general system that lets us know what feels good.

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Sex and Drugs and Singing Mice

Vincent submitted, created time 7 months 2 weeks (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Mice can whistle and chirp like birds--and researchers now say their songs seem to be happy ones. New experiments associate the rodents' ultrasonic chatter with the brain's dopamine-based reward system, and investigators hope that studying the songs may eventually point toward genes behind human emotional disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.

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It's True--Money buys happiness