We need a radical rethinking of our educational system and our scientific enterprise to focus more attention on the human rather than the physical world. (Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, argues that universities should be teaching and studying “humanics.”33) It sounds odd to say that happiness should be an engineering discipline, but that seems to be the inevitable conclusion. Such a discipline would build on basic science—a better understanding of how human minds work at the cognitive and emotional levels—and would train a wide variety of practitioners, ranging from life
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