Unhappiness Is a Palate-Cleanser

Happiness, in one form or another, seems to be a common goal that most of us would like to attain. We often behave as though we might find a route to contentment—comfort, satiety, warmth, or some other reward—and be happy all the time if we could just make the right choices. But pleasure is often fleeting, even from the most appealing experiences, giving rise to ennui and sparking the drive for something new and sensational. As a neuroscientist, I can’t help wondering whether the transience of our satisfaction may not in fact be inescapable and instead may reveal an inevitable aspect of the way the brain works, the understanding of which might provide a clue to how to contend with it.

Many moment-to-moment functions of the brain seem so natural that we can hardly distance ourselves enough to reflect upon them: The brain notices. It is obvious, once we consider it, that a basic job of the brain is to perceive; with those perceptions it can evaluate; and based on those evaluations, it can act. This work is carried out by neurons of the nervous system. They detect and represent input from the outside world (and the inside world), analyze the data, and then respond to this analysis with an appropriate action. Action generally involves movement: Neurons send the signals that make muscles contract and let you do things. The input is sensory, the analysis is often called associative, and the output is motor. The sensory-associative-motor triplet is the neural version of perceiving, evaluating, and doing.

How do the neurons that compose the brain conduct the business of detecting and analyzing what is happening out there in the world? information. Tiny protein molecules sit on the membranes of those cells and translate (or, to use the technical term, transduce) physical stimuli from the outside world—light, sound, chemicals, and heat—into electrical signals called action potentials, which form the language of the brain. The transduction proteins form or connect to a minuscule pathway, or ion channel, through which charged particles called ions, like sodium and potassium, enter or exit the cell. The movement of ions makes the electrical signals. Each electrical signal spreads along the length of the cell by means of other proteins—which also form ion channels—ultimately culminating in the release of a chemical neurotransmitter. The next neuron receives the neurotransmitter via other receptor proteins, which also are themselves ion channels or are coupled to ion channels. Our ability to notice lies largely in our ion channel proteins.