Daniel Nettle

What is happiness What makes us happy Why do we strive for happiness And how might we achieve it Daniel Nettle explores the origins and purpose of our pursuit of happiness and uses the results of recent psychological studies to find answers to these questions and more

This book explains why. Given that the biological mechanisms underlying language are the same in all normal human beings, would we not be a more successful species if we spoke one language? Daniel Nettle considers how this extraordinary and rich diversity arose, how it relates to the nature of language, cognition, and culture, and how it is linked with the main patterns of human geography and history. Human languages and language families are not distributed evenly: there are relatively few in Eurasia compared to the profusion found in Australasia, the Pacific, and the Americas. There is also a marked correlation between biodiversity and linguistic diversity. The author explains the processes by which this distribution evolved and changes still. To do so he returns to the earliest origins of language, reconstructing the processes of linguistic variation and diffusion that occurred when humans first filled the continents and, thousands of years later, turned to agriculture. He ends by examining the causes of linguistic mortality, and why the number of the world's languages may halve before 2100. Linguistic Diversity draws on work in anthropology, linguistics, geography, archaeology, and evolutionary science to provide a comprehensive account of the patterns of linguistic diversity. It is written in a clear, lively and accessible style, and will appeal broadly across the natural and human sciences, as well as to the informed general reader.

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Los seres humanos, sea cuál sea su cultura, el lugar o la época que les haya tocado vivir, han buscado la felicidad, se han planteado cuál es su naturaleza y, la mayoría de ellos han deseado alcanzarla. Pero, ¿que es realmente la felicidad? ¿podemos medirla? ¿por que algunas personas son felices y otras no? ¿cual es ese fuerte instinto que nos lleva a perseguirla? Si la felicidad es algo tan importante ¿por que la evolucion humana no ha desarrollado en nosotros los mecanismos adecuados para ser mas felices? Daniel Nettle usa, en este libro, los resultados de los ultimos estudios psicologicos para tratar de explicar que es la felicidad, que hace a la gente feliz o desdichada y para examinar nuestro impulso, antiguo como el mismo ser humano, para conseguirla. En ello tiene que ver nuestro sistema cerebral o pueden tenerlo las drogas que alteran nuestra percepcion de la realidad, sin olvidar que, especialmente en una sociedad como la actual, la felicidad se nos vende casi como una mercancia mas.