Hector and the Search for Happiness (14 page)

‘Well, I could tell you that I feel good, happy, cheerful, optimistic, positive, in great shape. Obviously if you’re a Martian, I’ll need to make you understand all those words, to explain to you what emotions are. And emotions are like colours, they’re difficult to explain.’

‘Absolutely!’

‘It might be easier to explain that I’m happy with my life, that things couldn’t be going better. That I’m content with my work, my health, my friends, my . . . love life.’

‘Not bad! Not bad! What else?’

Hector couldn’t think of anything else.

‘Have you ever seen a foal in a field in springtime?’ the professor asked, abruptly.

Hector had, of course, and the image made him think of Ying Li singing in the bathroom and standing before him smiling and full of life.

‘Yes,’ Hector said, ‘I saw one only recently.’

‘And? How did you know that it was happy, huh? You’re the Martian now in relation to the young foal.’

This was another peculiar comment, but Hector was beginning to get used to the professor’s way of looking at things.

‘Yes, I see. I understand that he’s happy because he whinnies and capers, and runs about . . . I might smile, sing, laugh, jump for joy, do cartwheels in front of my Martian, and explain that we humans do these things when we’re happy. Or at least that while we’re doing them we’re in a good mood.’

‘That’s right,’ said the professor, ‘you’ve discovered the three main methods of measuring happiness.’

And he explained to Hector that the first method of measuring happiness was to ask people how many times they had felt in a good mood, cheerful, happy during the day or week. The second was to ask them if they were happy in the different areas of their lives. The third was to film people’s facial expressions and then measure them in complicated ways. (You could even record a dozen different types of smile, including the smile you have when you’re genuinely happy and the smile you give just to show that you’re not annoyed when actually you are.)

‘We know we’re measuring the same thing because if we test a group of people using all three methods and then classify them according to their score, they score more or less the same in all three!’

And the professor looked very pleased when he said this. He looked as if he was about to do cartwheels. Hector remembered Agnès telling him that he’d spent part of his life proving that these three methods of measuring happiness were more or less complementary.

Seeing the professor looking so pleased reminded Hector of lesson no. 10,
Happiness is doing a job you love
, and lesson no. 13,
Happiness is feeling useful to others.
He asked the professor, ‘And what do you do with the results?’

‘We use them to apply for more grants. I’ll be able to begin a new study soon!’

And he began to tell Hector a rather complicated story: he wanted to find out if happiness depended on things going well in people’s lives or if it depended above all on their characters — if people were born to be happy, as it were. This was why he had for years been studying a group of young girls (now grown-up women) by asking them every year to fill in lots of questionnaires about how happy they were and what had happened to them during the year, but also by studying their photographs from when they were twenty years old.

‘And do you know what?’ said the professor. ‘There’s a relationship between the sincerity and intensity of a smile at twenty years old and happiness at forty!’

Hector would have liked to see the photographs of the young women, but the professor had already begun explaining another study. They’d followed the progress of twins from childhood and tried to discover whether they were both equally happy, even when afterwards they’d led very different lives. It required doing lots of calculations, of the kind Alan liked.

The professor began to explain the calculations on a blackboard and Hector told him not to trouble himself, but the professor insisted. ‘Yes, yes, you’ll see, you’ll understand, huh?’ Hector told himself that he was a bit like those skiers who take you up the steep slopes and tell you you’ll have great fun, as described at the beginning.

Hector was getting a little tired, and so he asked, ‘Has anyone done any calculations on the lessons on my list?’

The professor turned around, irritated. ‘Yes, yes, that’s what I was about to show you.’

He looked at Hector’s list and told him that, thanks to a lot of studies and calculations, they’d shown that if you compared yourself to others and didn’t find yourself wanting, if you had no money or health problems, if you had friends, a close-knit family, a job you liked, if you were religious and practised your religion, if you felt useful, if you went for a little stroll from time to time, and all of this in a country that was run by not very bad people, where you were taken care of when things went wrong, your chances of being happy were greatly increased.

Hector was pleased: according to what the professor said, he had every chance of being happy. Apart from the fact that he didn’t exactly have a close family, and wasn’t very religious — still less was somebody who practised his religion. On the other hand, he knew a lot of people who were married and lived in a perpetual hell of arguments or eternal boredom, and among his patients were very religious people who practised their religion and were very unhappy because they always thought they were bad even when they were being very good. He told this to the professor.

‘Well I can’t help that!’ said the professor. ‘These are our findings. Single men are much less happy than married men and for that matter they have more health problems. And according to all our estimates religious people who practise their religion are happier than everybody else. Of course all this is true on average and may not be true in individual cases. But look at all the studies that have been done!’

And he showed Hector a large cupboard containing stacks of papers. These were hundreds of articles written by people like the professor, or Agnès.

Hector felt rather proud at having discovered with the sole aid of his little notebook what people like the professor or Agnès had discovered after carrying out lots of complicated studies. But that’s science: it isn’t enough just to think a thing, you must try to verify whether it’s true. Otherwise people could think and say what they liked, and if those people were fashionable, then everybody would believe them. (Hector recalled that there’d been quite a few fashionable people like that in psychiatry, who liked thinking, and especially talking, but who hated verifying. And as a result they’d said quite a lot of silly things.)

‘Well,’ said the professor, ‘now I’m going to show you something really interesting.’

He took Hector down to the basement. They walked into a large tiled room. In the middle was a huge, rather complicated-looking contraption and an armchair hooked up to some enormous machines that were humming above it, and Hector told himself that this was it, this was a space-time machine and the professor was going to take him on a tour of Mars.

S
TANDING next to the machine was a lady in a white coat. She wore glasses and looked a bit like a schoolmistress, but when you got closer you could see that she was quite pretty.

‘My dear Rosalyn!’ the professor said.

He seemed all excited, well, even more excited than before.

‘My dear John . . .’ the lady replied, smiling.

‘I’ve brought you an ideal subject for your experiment: a psychiatrist!’ the professor said, introducing Hector.

‘Experiment?’ asked Hector.

‘Yes, but don’t worry, it’s completely harmless. Come along, Rosalyn hasn’t got all day, there’s a very long queue!’

And Hector found himself sitting in the armchair surrounded by the machines humming above his head. He saw Rosalyn and the professor, who were standing behind a window in front of a control panel that was as complicated as the one in a big plane.

‘Now,’ said the professor, ‘I’m going to ask you to think of three situations in any order: you’re going to imagine yourself in a situation that makes you very happy, in a situation that makes you very sad, and lastly in one where you’ve felt very scared. It’s easier to choose from memories. I’ll tell you when you can begin imagining the first situation. But don’t, whatever you do, tell me which one it is!’

Hector preferred to begin with the worst. And so he imagined himself sitting in the storeroom that smelt of dead rat, thinking about the people he loved whom he was never going to see again and who would also be very sad. He remembered it so clearly that he felt his eyes prick with tears, even though when he’d been in the real situation he hadn’t even cried.

‘Good,’ said the professor, ‘now imagine the second situation.’

This time, Hector imagined that he was watching Clara sleeping. As she worked so hard, she would often sleep in on Sundays. And he would wake up before her and he loved watching her sleeping; it made him very happy, and at moments like those he felt that nothing could go wrong between them.

(You might be wondering why he didn’t think of Ying Li. Well, because it didn’t make him feel exactly happy thinking of Ying Li so far away in China.)

‘Good,’ said the professor, ‘and now the third situation.’

And Hector pictured himself on the old plane that was vibrating and whirring, with the ducks and chickens making a lot of noise before they landed.

‘All right, we’re done,’ said Rosalyn.

Hector climbed out of the armchair, taking care not to bang his head, and the professor said to him, ‘First you thought of the situation that made you sad, then the one that made you happy and finally the one when you were scared.’

Hector knew that the professor would be able to tell (he had heard about this type of machine) but he was still surprised.

The professor took Hector over to the complicated-looking control panel while Rosalyn turned a few knobs. An image appeared on a colour monitor.

‘Look,’ the professor said, ‘look!’

It looked like an intricate stain made up of lots of pretty colours ranging from very dark blue to bright orange. In fact, it was a photograph of Hector’s brain, as though somebody had taken a very fine slice and spread it out flat on a piece of glass.

‘This is a map of the oxygen consumption in your brain. The blue areas aren’t consuming much. The orange areas, in contrast, are very active.’

Rosalyn pressed some more buttons and three smaller images of Hector’s brain appeared in a row. It was clear that in each one different parts of the brain were active.

‘Sadness, happiness and fear,’ said the professor, pointing at each image. ‘Fabulous, isn’t it?’

‘Happiness is in this area, then,’ Hector said, pointing to a little orange spot glowing on the screen, ‘on the right side of the brain.’

‘Because you’re a man,’ said Rosalyn. ‘In women the area is more diffuse, on both sides of the brain. And similarly when they’re sad, for that matter.’

She explained to Hector that since they’d begun using this kind of machine, they’d realised that the brains of men and women didn’t work in quite the same way, even when they read or did calculations. Everybody had suspected this for a long time, mind you. But, as previously mentioned, science is about verifying things.

‘Imagine if we discovered a drug that activated that area,’ Hector said; ‘we’d be permanently happy.’

‘But we already have! Rosalyn, could you show him the images of the Japanese men’s brains?’

And now three images of Japanese men’s brains appeared (you’d have to know beforehand that they were Japanese otherwise it would be difficult to guess).

‘Now, look closely,’ said the professor.

This time, all the brains were bright orange. Above all, in the happiness area. The Japanese men must have been really happy when these were taken.

‘But what is this drug?’ Hector asked.

He wanted to try some immediately and even take some home for Clara.

‘It’s saké,’ said Rosalyn. ‘These were taken a few minutes after they’d drunk a large glass of saké.’

Well, thought Hector, that explained why everybody felt so good when they drank saké or beer or champagne or the wines Édouard liked.

‘But look at the next ones,’ Rosalyn added. ‘These images were taken three hours later.’

Here, the Japanese men’s brains looked bluer than at the outset. They even looked like images of sadness. The Japanese men can’t have been in very good shape when these were taken. When you saw these images you almost wanted to give them more saké to reactivate their brains (some people have worked all this out on their own without the need for this type of experiment).

Rosalyn also showed Hector images of the brains of men who’d been shown pictures of very beautiful women, and women who were only pretty. And, well, when they saw the very beautiful women, the areas that were activated in these men’s brains were the same ones that go very bright after taking the harmful drug produced by Eduardo! This confirmed Hector’s idea that you should beware of beauty, but, alas, it was so difficult!

Rosalyn explained that with this type of machine you could find out lots of things about the way healthy people’s brains worked, but also about the way they worked when people were sick, and which areas drugs affected. She even showed Hector the effect psychotherapy had on somebody who was very scared of going out of his house. After therapy — which consisted of gradually getting him used to going out again — the images of his brain had gone back to normal!

Hector said that he found this very interesting. He was glad he knew which bit of his brain was being activated when he was happy.

‘In fact, your images are like seeing the brain smile.’

Rosalyn and the professor looked at one another.

‘The brain smiling!’ said the professor. ‘What a nice idea!’