Sunday, October 4, 2009

"hyperthymia"

Good news in the Sunday morning Times: my favorite living novelist, Richard Powers, has a new book exploring, guess what, happiness.

"The central figure of Generosity is a woman ostensibly afflicted with hyperthymia — an excess of happiness. The new book poses the question, What if there were a happiness gene?"

Jay McInerney isn't wild about passages like “A revolution is afoot, one that looks almost like retooled Lamarck ism, calling into question the centrality of the gene and all the old dogma of fixed inheritance.” But I like 'em fine.

And what if there weren't a happiness gene? No problem, right?

No comments:

KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News