Haidt, Jonathan

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

New York

Basic Books

2006

"The brain started off with just three rooms, or clumps of neurons: a hindbrain (connected to the spinal column), a midbrain, and a forebrain (connected to the sensory organs at the front of the animal)."

If you live in a relatively new suburban house, your home was probably built in less than a year, and its rooms were laid out by an architect who tried to make them fulfill people's needs. The houses on my street, however, were all built around 1900, and since then they have expanded out into their backyards. Porches were extended, then enclosed, then turned into kitchens. Extra bedrooms were built above these extensions, then bathrooms were tacked on to these new rooms. The brain in vertebrates [End Page 9] has similarly expanded, but in a forward direction. The brain started off with just three rooms, or clumps of neurons: a hindbrain (connected to the spinal column), a midbrain, and a forebrain (connected to the sensory organs at the front of the animal). Over time, as more complex bodies and behaviors evolved, the brain kept building out the front, away from the spinal column, expanding the forebrain more than any other part. The forebrain of the earliest mammals developed a new outer shell, which included the hypothalamus (specialized to coordinate basic drives and motivations), the hippocampus (specialized for memory), and the amygdala (specialized for emotional learning and responding). These structures are sometimes referred to as the limbic system (from Latin limbus, "border" or "margin") because they wrap around the rest of the brain, forming a border.
(pp. 9-10)

Architecture::Rooms

Reading

Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis. New York: Basic Books, 2006. <www.happinesshypothesis.com>

06/12/2009