happiness optimism

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Can you buy hapiness?

Is a bottle of old Lafitte wine really worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Is a small portion of Kobe beef really worth 160 dollars? Is pasta with white truffles worth a 120 dollars?

Can happiness be bought? To find out, author Benjamin Wallace sampled the world’s most expensive products, including a bottle of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, 8 ounces of Kobe beef and the fabled (notorious) Kopi Luwak coffee. His critique may surprise you.

If you know a wine is expensive you probably will taste it but also your brain on MRI signals that you experience more pleasure.

 

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2008 Conference on Happiness and Its Causes


This is a comment in a blog post on Trusted.MD about this years conference. Get a taste and check the prices before you sign up for next years conference in Sydney

I’ve been thinking about happiness more than usual for a few days, ever since receiving a brochure describing a grand conference in Sydney, Australia on Happiness And Its Causes. The event, sponsored by the Vajrayana Institute, a Buddhist think tank, took place in early June. It attracted a sellout audience of over 3,000 delegates. The featured speaker was The Dalai Lama. A conference report at the event website noted that his Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama spoke about ‘Happiness in a Material World in 2007.’ Other speakers included noted American happiness experts Richard J. Davidson (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Stephen Post (Case University), Alan Wallace (Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies) and Tal Ben-Shahar and Daniel Gilbert (Harvard) and Martin Seligmann (University of Pennsylvania).