So Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, one of the most famous statements in all of humankind. Aristotle, and I'm paraphrasing him in Nichomachean Ethics said, "That's right, Socrates. But you know what? The purposeless life isn't worth examining in the first place." Don't you love that two-sided coin. It's important to examine your life, but it's really important to examine your life that has purpose in it. So the two really work hand in glove to form this beautiful match, and that's what we're going to be talking about. Socrates by the way, was a Street Philosopher. He had a lot of famous students, including the person on the left in this David painting, the person with his head down, with gray hair, although actually David was wrong, he was lot younger, that guy was Plato. So Plato was the student of Socrates, and Socrates was considered so smart, and every once in a while though on the street, remember he is a Street Philosopher, every once in a while, one of his students would ask him a question that he really had a hard time with and said, "I need to consult my inner daimon, my true self." Remember the Othman, this god-like self or true self, the Greeks had this term for that true self and was called the daimon. So every once in a while, if Socrates was stumped, he'd pop back into an alley, may be on the street, and consult this inner daimon to figure out, "What's the right answer? Twenty minutes later he may come out and go, "I know exactly what the answer is." So his students likened him interestingly to the Greek terracotta sculptures. There are all these terracotta sculptures that Greeks would make, they're beautiful. But if you tap them very often the Greek sculptures would put this little golden figurine in. The golden figurine was usually of some major gods like Zeus, and they call that little golden figurine the daimon, and they said, "You know, Socrates is just like that." Socrates may not be handsome on the outside, but inwardly he has this daimon and he's so in touch with this true god-like self, that special inner daimon, it's so cool. In fact, Plato, again the student of Socrates, and by the way, Aristotle was a student of Plato, so these guys were all contemporaneous, but you have Plato saying that keeping the well-ordered daimon that lives within us is really important. If you can do that, you will become, in his words, supremely happy. Isn't that cool? So keeping well-ordered the daimon that lives within him, he must indeed be extremely happy. So think about this word daimon. That's the root word of a word we use a lot now, the Greeks used it all the time in ancient Greece, but we use it a lot now in science, eudaimonic. Eudaimonic really refers to being in touch with this true self, this inner god-like self that you have. But Aristotle also said that there are two forms of happiness. There is this eudaimonic form of happiness, but also there's a hedonic form of happiness, and I'm guessing you all know what that means too. So hedonism refers to pleasure, it refers to immediate gratification. So it might refer to being super attractive or super-rich or having great prestige, or having a trophy spouse, or having super nice car, whatever those things are that are materialistic, having hedonic happiness relates to their materialism. By the way, Aristotle wasn't totally down on hedonic happiness or well-being, he said all of us have that, all of us have both in fact, but we have different mixtures of both. So some of us may be more eudaimonically well and happy than others are. Others are very hedonically well or happy. But if all we are a hedonically happy people then, and he uses this term, then we are like grazing animals. Well, we all like to graze, we all love good food or good wine or good sex or nice car, or good vacation, a good experience. In general, all of us like pleasure. We all like, and to some extent crave some hedonic happiness. We all need to have also this eudaimonic well-being, this eudaimonic happiness. So we want to explore that and unpack that just a little bit because modern scientists now have actually started looking at what's going on when you're a eudaimonically happy person versus a hedonically happy person, and this is a very cool study that was done looking at a part of the brain that relates to rewards, the ventral striatum. So if you're a little kid and you hear the ice cream truck going by on the block, and you hear that nice ding, ding jingle, and you're going, "Oh my god, that's so cool." Your ventral striatum is getting more oxygenated blood flow, it's becoming more active. That ventral striatum is our reward center. These very clever neuroscientists said, "Well, let's find out whether some people are rewarded by some things more than other things." Really cool study. So here's what they did. While in MRI, people were asked two questions. One question was, here's some money, now how would you spend that? Think about how you might spend it on other people. So this is very focused on eudaimonic well-being. Then while in MRI, they were also asked this question. Here's some money, now how might you spend it on yourself? So there'd be more hedonic. Some people it turns out, their ventral striatum really got a lot of blood flow when they're thinking about how they would spend it on other people. Whereas others got no more oxygenated blood flow in that case. Whereas some other people in MRI got more blood flow when they were thinking about how to spend it on themselves. So hope that's making sense. So they could essentially define eudaimonically happy people from hedonically happy people by what their brain was doing, and what's cool here is that brains don't lie. I mean, you might lie on a survey when asked these questions, but your brain is not going to lie because your brain's reward system it's going to go off depending on what the question was and you can't control that. So it's a really cool study. Now what they also did even before they were going into MRI, these subjects completed a form to look at their depressive symptoms. So how depressed they were before going into MRI. Then they were asked these questions, and then a year later they were re-asked these depressive symptoms questions, and they found an interesting outcome. They found that the eudaimonically well people, the people who had more blood flow going into their ventral striatum when thinking about how they would spend money for other people a year later, they had fewer depressive symptoms. The hedonically well people had more depressive symptoms, and this wasn't a little finding, it was a very big effect. So it's very cool about this study, is that brains don't lie. Your brain is essentially telling these researchers whether you're eudaimonically motivated or hedonically motivated, and it turns out that the eudaimonically motivated people end up becoming healthier mentally a year later, really amazing. So let's look at this idea of eudaimonic and hedonic. These are pretty odd terms, they're old Greek terms. Let's look at a more modern terminology for eudaimonic and hedonic. It might be transcending or self-transcending. I'm thinking about things bigger than myself, I'm thinking about love or community or gratitude, or empathy. Whereas hedonically well people are thinking more self-enhancing way. So they're thinking more about fame and fortune and attractiveness, and things like that, so much more self-enhancing. So there's been a lot of research that use those terms, but we might be able to map both eudaimonic well-being with self-transcending and hedonic well-being or purpose with self-enhancing. So let's take a look at the idea of self-transcending values. We wanted to find out whether these self-transcending or eudaimonic values produced different neural responses when we were threatening people with a health message. So we started with people who are sedentary, these were couch potatoes. They really needed to get off the couch and start working out. When you start telling a sedentary person, a couch potato, you need to get off the couch and start working out more, that's a threatening message. So we wanted to take a look at couch potatoes or sedentary people who were self-transcending, who had a lot of very strong self-transcending values versus sedentary people who had very self-enhancing values, we wanted to see the difference in responses to this threatening message, "Hey, you need to work out more." So this is what we did. We took these self-transcending versus self-enhancing people, put them into MRI, we sent them this threatening message, "Hey, you need to work out more." Here's what happened to their brain. Their amygdala, and let me explain what an amygdala is. The amygdala is a reptilian part of our brain, it's a very old, hundreds of millions of years old in our brain, and it relates to fear and aggression, very ancient part. As opposed to our ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which is very modern and superhuman, this is, we often call it the reptilian part of our brain. Here's what we found. We found that the transcending people when threatened had very little amygdala response. They had very little response related to fear or aggression in the brain. Whereas in the brain, if you had a more hedonic or self-enhancing set of core values when we threaten them that they needed to work out more, that amygdala went nuts, that amygdala had a lot more oxygenated blood flow going to it, it became very active. In other words, that fear and aggression center became super-active. So the next logical question, at least to us was, what happens when we enhance self-transcendence, and we thought we could enhance self-transcendence while they're in MRI. So while in MRI we asked sedentary people to think more about their most important transcending values versus their least important values, and sure enough, when thinking about their most important values, more blood flow went into this ventral medial prefrontal cortex, is very special part of our brain, that's really important to know. Now we did that through enhancing their core self-transcending values. But we also did it in one other way. We had them think about love and kindness, and we did it through what's called loving-kindness meditation, which is a really beautiful meditation. When we had them engage in either thinking about their core purposeful values or in a separate study, we had them thinking about love and kindness through loving-kindness meditation, we found more blood flow once again, going into this ventral medial prefrontal cortex. Here, by the way, is the actual brain composite and the activation. So you see there is right in that vmPFC, that's super important. So let me explain loving-kindness meditation, very cool meditation. In fact, it's my very favorite meditation. This is a meditation where you express happiness and freedom from suffering to yourself, to your loved ones, to strangers, and even to people that you don't like. What's been shown now in three separate studies, is when you express happiness and freedom from suffering through this loving-kindness meditation, it actually improves your purpose in life, which is so cool.
