Finding Joy with Professor Morten Kringelbach

This episode is quite heavy on the neuroscience, which is one of my favourite subjects and it was recorded in person, in Oxford. I'm in conversation is with Professor Morten Kringelbach, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University, director of the centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, a fellow of Linacre College and Professor of Neuroscience at Aarhus university in Denmark.

I first met Morten in 2024 when I went to Oxford to interview him for a piece I was writing for the Guardian on Anhedonia, which is the inability to feel pleasure, which you can read here.

Professor Kringelbach and I talk about what joy is, why it matters, what brings us most joy and why seeking pleasure for the sake of it is often a road to displeasure and addiction. We also touch on depression and psychedelics. Real, proper, lasting joy doesn’t really exist by itself, it has to have context and that context often means other people. And to experience real joy in life we need a purpose. I ended my anhedonia piece saying something I discovered like a bolt of lightning researching it and I stand by it: the meaning of life is that it has to have meaning. That’s really the root of finding joy. 

You can learn more about Professor Kringelbach and his work here.

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Produced by Hester Cant. Art work by Lo Cole. Music by Toby Dunham.

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