Arjan Haring will give the introduction of this beautifull
event. Arjan will tell how his Thoughts on Happiness led to this
event. Positive feelings like pleasure, or hedonic liking, are
e.g. linked to food and procreation and as such crucial for
survival of the individual and the species. Romantic love,
maternal love and other social pleasures belong also to this
basic set. And than there are higher order pleasures including
artistic, musical, altruistic, monetary and transcendent
pleasures. A pathological loss or absence of such positive
feelings, anhedonia, is present in affective disorders, such as
depression, schizophrenia, autism and addiction. Reward is the
active process of the brain that reacts to a pleasant stimulus.
Liking, wanting and learning of reward are represented in
different brain areas. The occurrence of pleasure is coded by
neural activity in many brain sites, including the prefrontal
cortex, amygdale, thalamus, nucleus caudatus, nucleus accumbens
and the ventral pallidum. The brain regio