Happiness Is in Your Genes

ISBN-13: 9781412091275 / Angielski / Miękka / 2006 / 176 str.

Geoff Hudson

Opis

Happiness is in Your Genes, is really about how to be happy. The title says it all. Happiness is in your genes: you just have to know how to find it. The search needs a deeper consideration of the genetic influence on our behaviour than is usual. An idea which is central to this exploration, is that many inherited influences are suggestions rather than commandments. They are subject to modification or suppression by our thoughts at the time they become active.
To avoid using a whole phrase like Environmentally Qualified Genetically Inherited Predisposition, the word Inwilling is used for these influences.
The source of inwillings is explored, and this produces a method to identify inwillings from learnt behaviours, and also to suggest actions and practices to accommodate these inwillings. More than 50 inwillings are listed and around a dozen are analysed using this method. Two examples are:
Why toddlers eat dirt, vomit with ease, crawl, and knock food to the floor. These behaviours are presented as a linked set of inwillings. The case that obesity arises from frustration of these inwillings is presented.
Why smell is so important for life in general and happiness in particular. Ways to strengthen male-female relationships are derived from this analysis.

These explorations offer an increase in happiness, especially in home life. However, many readers are expected to hold the view that hardly any human behaviour is genetically inspired. This is directly addressed in Chapter 2 which advances 6 reasons why that view is as common as it is.
The book also considers how behaviour could be stored in the genome. Besides presenting an analysis of the limits of geneticcontrol on brain structure, a genetic method of producing the golden number, 1.618, in our cells is postulated.