For true fulfillment, seek satisfaction, not happiness

Why couldn't Mick Jagger "get no satisfaction"?

"He just wasn't trying hard enough," says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Emory University in Atlanta.

Berns should know. As a scientist and author of "Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment," scheduled to arrive in bookstores this week, Berns has examined satisfaction from the inside out -- looking at the exquisite interplay between brain structure and experience -- and from the outside in. He has studied people who engage in an array of activities, including solving crossword puzzles, running ultra marathons and engaging in sadomasochistic sex. The explanation for why some people pursue these activities, and why they find them satisfying, can be found deep inside the brain.

"I used to think that we want pleasure and happiness, and now I don't think that is the case at all," says Berns. "Happiness and pleasure are passive emotions, and you don't have to do much to achieve those feelings. I think of satisfaction in terms of a much more active component. Nature never said you had to be happy. It said you had to learn to adapt to the world."

Satisfaction is one of a number of positive emotions such as joy, love and happiness to which psychologists and neuroscientists have only recently started paying attention.

Dubbed "positive psychology" by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman in 1998, the focus of this work contrasts sharply with the preoccupation with dysfunction and emotional pain that has dominated psychology and psychiatry for much of its history.

"People who study positive psychology really are interested in what makes life worth living," says Shelly Gable, professor of psychology at UCLA.

Until recently, this research has been largely focused on behavior, on self-reports of emotional states and various other approaches to cognitive assessment. In the words of psychiatrists, the observation has been much more phenomenological than biological.

A small group of neuroscientists such as Berns has tried to discover what happens in people's brains during such nuanced emotional experiences as happiness, satisfaction, motivation, even social conformity. It is relatively simple to frighten people who are undergoing a brain scan and see what parts of their brains light up; it's quite another to contrive a study that will explore these subtle emotional states.