Science of Happiness

Derek - Hello and this evening we have come to Colchester County High School and with me is Sheena Elliott who set up the experiment we're going to be doing today. This is another easy experiment that you can do at home. Sheena, what are we going to be doing today?

Sheena - We're going to be making matchstick boats.

Derek - Ok, and we've also got to volunteers who've kindly offered to help us with this experiment. So could you please give me your names and what year you're in please?

Zoe - I'm Zoe Taylor and I'm in the upper sixth.

Yichen - I'm Yichen Gau and I'm from the Upper Sixth as well.

Derek - Well thanks for coming along. Are you guys into science? Zoe, what about you?

Zoe - Yep. I do physics and chemistry.

Derek - And yourself Yichen?

Yichen - I just do physics.

Derek - And is this something you're going to carry on doing and you're enthusiastic about?

Yichen - Definitely.

Derek - Well this is great, we've been given some wonderful volunteers here today. So I'll just begin by telling you the things you need to get at home because it's very easy. You need a tray or basin or even your kitchen sink will be fine and you need to put some water in it. You also need some matchsticks, some washing up liquid and finally a knife to cut the matchstick with. We do advise a bit of caution there. Next, Sheena's going to tell us what to do with all these things. Could you explain and perhaps direct Yichen and Zoe about how to set the experiment up here?

Sheena - Firstly what you need to do is take your matchstick and cut it along one end so it looks like a bit of a Y shape. At one end you're just splitting it down the middle so you can open the bits up into the letter Y.

Derek - Ok, is it a bit fiddly work? Is it difficult to do that?

Sheena - All I would say is keep your fingers up the other end of the matchstick when you hold it so you're not anywhere near the knife when you're doing that.

Derek - Ok then. What next?

Sheena - Next we're going to fill up our tray or basin with water. Any depth is fine; just a couple of centimetres or something.

Derek - Ok so Zoe and Yichen do that for us please? We're in the Colchester County High School lab, so go ahead. What now?

Sheena - Now we need to place our matchstick in to the bowl so it's floating horizontally.

Derek - So we're going to be floating it flat and it'll look like a Y shape from above. So Sheena's just dropped it onto the water there and it's floating around very happily.

Sheena - The next thing you need to do is to put a little drop of washing up liquid behind the matchstick. What you're going to be doing is placing it by the side of the matchstick where the Y is opening up; the top of the Y if you like. And you don't want to be touching the matchstick with the washing up detergent. You're just putting it in the water next to it.

Derek - Is it just a drop?

Sheena - Yes, just a drop is fine.

Derek - Ok so you're just dropping a drop of washing up liquid just behind the matchstick, and this means the side of the matchstick where that Y shape has been splayed out. We're not going to do this now of course. We're going to do it later in the show when we reveal to you what the result is. But Zoe and Yichen are hear dying to know what's going to happen. So I'm going to ask them what they think might happen.

Zoe - Maybe the matchstick will move?

Derek - Any idea how or in what way?

Zoe - I don't really know.

Derek - And yourself Yichen? Any idea?

Yichen - I think it will move in some sort of direction.

Derek - Ok well we will see. We also encourage you to try this at home and let us know your result. Until then we will be going back to the studio and coming back to Colchester County High School a bit later on to find out what happens and an explanation from Sheena as well. So until then it's back to the studio.

LATER...

Derek - Hi there and welcome back to Colchester County High School where we do indeed have this experiment ready to go. Sheena has helped us to set up this basin with a layer of water in it and we've got a matchstick that has been cut at the ends so that there's a Y shape at the back of the matchstick. It's floating in the water and we're ready to drop in some washing up liquid. Would you care to instruct Zoe and Yichen about what to do?

Sheena - If you take your washing up liquid and drop a tiny drop just where the Y opens up into the water.

Yichen - Wow! It flew all the way to the end of the tray.

Derek - Ok Zoe, what happened do you think?

Zoe - I don't know but the matchstick moved away from the washing up liquid in the opposite direction.

Derek - yeah that was rather interesting. It kind of propelled it away down the tray. Sheena is grinning gleefully because she obviously knew what was going to happen. Can you explain this for us?

Sheena - This all comes down to surface tension, and so I'm going to explain a little bit about surface tension and what that is. If you imagine that you're a water molecule right in the centre of a tank of water, water molecules have an attractive force between them so you'd be being pulled in every direction by all the water molecules around you. Now if you imagine that you're a water molecule at the surface; you'll be being pulled in every direction from the side and from below but you're not being pulled from the top at all because you've just go air above you there. So what would be the effect on you? Well you might find that you're being squished down a bit and you end up with a more dense film of molecules on top of the water. That's basically what surface tension is. That's why you can get a needle to float on top of the water. It's because the top of the water is more dense. So what's happening with the washing up liquid when we add that? Washing up liquid is something we call a surfactant, and a surfactant is something that breaks this tension. It basically reduces this pulling force of the water molecules. So by adding washing up liquid, one side of the matchstick has the attraction between the water molecules broken, whereas on the other side of the matchstick they're still attracting each other. So what the matchstick feels is a pulling force from all the molecules one side where they're still trying to get closer to each other, but on the other side they're no longer feeling that force. So rather than being repelled by the washing up liquid, it's actually being pulled from the other side.

Derek - So this property of washing up liquid, that it's a surfactant, is this related to its ability to clean things?

Sheena - Yes. It also worked between oil and water as well as water and air. So it's exactly the same thing. It's breaking up this pulling force between materials that are the same.

Derek - So molecules on the surface are pulling in all directions when you lay that matchstick on the surface, but as soon as you add washing up liquid on one side, suddenly the pulling is not there. But there's still pulling from all the other directions and that makes it go in a straight line. Do I have it correct in my head?

Sheena - Yes, that's exactly it. One thing is that if you tried to repeat this experiment, you wouldn't be able to do it without fresh water. That's because a tiny bit of this washing up liquid will pollute your system because you no longer have that surface tension anymore.

Derek - And finally, why is it that we made that Y shape at the end of the matchstick?

Sheena - That just increases the area that you're acting on and gives it a longer bit of match to act on.

Derek - And if people tried it without doing that, what would happen?

Sheena - If your matchstick is at a slight angle, you might find that it spins a bit. It might not shoot forward quite so impressively.

Derek - But still a cool effect and we want you to try it at home if you haven't already. Zoe and Yichen did do it for us so thank you very much. Zoe, what did you think of our experiment?

Zoe - It was really good.

Derek - And Yichen, had you ever heard of surface tension before?

Yichen - Vaguely at school.

Derek - But does this make it a bit more well-explained in your head?

Yichen - Yes it does.

Derek - Great stuff. Well thanks very much for coming along and doing this for us and thanks to Colchester County High School for having us and thank you Sheena for doing the experiment for us. We'll be back next week with some more science that hopefully you can do at home. Until then, it's goodbye from us.

Chris - What are you going to be talking about when you go to Borders on Wednesday?

Felicia - The science of well-being. There's an enormous amount of interest at the moment in happiness and we're going to broaden this out an talk about the fundamental science that underlies all this interest.

Chris - So why people want to be happy, as opposed to being sad.

Felicia - Exactly, and that's an important part of it. Up until now, medicine and psychology has always been focussing on the problems people have and disorder and dysfunction. But it's time to start asking questions about what makes people well and what makes them feel good. And there are a whole load of different things that make people feel good and we need to try to understand.

Chris - What are nature's feel-good factors then, Felicia?

Felicia - Well I'll come back to that in a second. Feeling good is important because it makes us function well and this is why we talk about the science of well-being as opposed to just the science of happiness. So what makes people feel good? It turns out that, not surprisingly, friends and family are incredibly important. Knowing your strengths and utilising them; being really engaged in the things you do, and actually doing things for other people. These all seem very key.

Chris - So it almost seems as though the good Samaritan was something we were programmed to do. Why is it good for us to have friends, sing in a choir, go to church, play a musical instrument or say our prayers? All these things have been proven to help people live longer. Why should that be a fact?

Felicia - We evolved as social animals and so presumably in a part of our evolution, those of us who had good friendships and worked for other people were the ones that were more likely to survive in hard times. That stayed with us.

Chris - Animals are the same aren't they?

Felicia - Absolutely right, yes. There are a lot of social animals and there are other animals that are less so.

Chris - In insects such as ants, wasps and bees, they might not as far as I know experience sensations of pleasure, but they must get some sort of reward from helping each other.

Felicia - Yes.

Kat - So recently David Cameron the leader of the Conservative Party made a speech saying that we need to be happy and we need to think about general well-being rather than money in the pocket. If you were running this country, how would you go about increasing general well-being?

Felicia - I think you can do it at various different stages of the life course. I think we should start very early because the evidence from animal research is that how you nurture very small animals makes an enormous difference to their mental health and their capability throughout the rest of their life. So we need to focus on those early years to make sure that parents know how to bring that child up in a way that maximises their physical and mental health. In the school years, encouraging children to learn about social and emotional intelligence is really very important. It increases their own well-being and increases the chance of them having friends. There is a lot of evidence too that if you are feeling positive, you perform much better in every aspect of your life. You concentrate much better, you generate more ideas and are more resilient in a stressful situation. You bounce back much faster and these are all very good reasons. At the other end of the spectrum, because I'm quite interested in older people as well, one reason why older people may not function as well as possible is due to our negative stereotypes of aging. If in our society we could make people more positive about aging, and there's experimental evidence for this, if old people feel more positive they are more confident, their memory and learning is better, their numerical skills are better, and their stress reactivity is better. So by feeling confident you get into this upward spiral where everything is better. So at every stage in the life course I think there are things we could be doing in our society to improve well-being generally.

What we usually find is that they have lower blood pressure, paradoxically. If you lose, say, a leg, then there's less blood that needs to be pumped out of the heart and into the main blood vessels in order to get it around the body. You obviously have a big chunk of your body missing and it doesn't need any blood, and so your heart is doing less work. As a result, your blood pressure tends to drop a little bit. If you have people who've lost both their legs, they often have lower blood pressure because they've got fewer areas of tissue that need to be reached by the blood and so the average blood pressure in the vessels is lower.

You have to do this in a fairly cold room. When you compress a gas, they got hotter. You'll have seen this when you pump air into a bicycle tyre and the tyre gets hot. Conversely, if you expand the gas, it'll get colder. So What I think is happening is that when you squeeze all the air into your mouth, it's compressing and heating up a bit and absorbs some water from your mouth. When you let it out again it gets colder, and when it gets colder it can't hold as much water in it. This is exactly the way clouds form. Clouds go up and contract as the air gets colder. The water comes out and forms a cloud.

The whole planet is engulfed in a dense blanket of air molecules and as your car drives along it has to push those air molecules out of the way. The reason a car makes a noise as it goes along is because it's creating turbulence and making air molecules bash against each other and the car and that sort of ripples away. What this means is that static charge builds up on the car because it's isolated from the road. This is because most cars have rubber tyres and rubber is a good insulator. It's a little bit similar to when you have a storm cloud and want some lightning. You've got lots of water molecules and little ice crystals called hydrometeors. The wind currents inside the clouds bash these things around and as they slowly rub against each other they transfer charge. You end up with a cloud that has one charge at the top of the cloud and the other charge at the bottom of the cloud and that's why you get a lightning bolt. So it's sort of doing a similar experiment with your car at road level. When you step out of the car, the car body carries a charge and you are connected to the ground. You are also isolated from the car and so when you then touch the car to close the door, then the charge difference between you, the ground and the car neutralises itself using you as the vehicle by which to do that. People who wear rubber soled shoes will get these shocks worse than people who don't because you can't earth yourself to the ground as well.

The average human produces between half and one and a half litres of flatulent gas every day. This is partly oxygen and nitrogen that we've swallowed when we eat. But partly it's things like gases that are produced by microbes in our guts. We know that bacteria make these gases. Food passes from your mouth into your stomach and then into your small intestine within about one to two hours of eating it. It then takes five or six hours to get through your small intestine and then twelve to twenty four hours to get through your large intestine and colon. Most of the bacteria that make these smelly gases hang out in your colon, but some especially gassy people have a lot more of these bacteria in their small intestines further up the intestinal tract. This is probably what Dan is finding. The bacteria are getting to work on the food much quicker and so he's probably finding that he's getting gas much quicker than other people.

Well it produces crystals and beams of light, which travel in straight lines until they hit something. Crystals are probably the obvious example of something solid that is made with straight lines. If you look at a salt crystal it will have flat faces and the corners will be sharp. The corners will be in straight lines because of all the little atoms that stack in a big pile.