In Depth:  Kirsten Birkett

Kirsten Birkett

The 2024 World Happiness Report is out, and Finland is on top (the UK is number 20).

I have recently been listening to the marvellous Moomin books by the Finnish author Tove Jannson (on Audible, read by Hugh Dennis). They reveal a quirky sense of humour and a penetrating understanding of human nature that, if typical of Finnish people, might contribute to a happy experience of life. On the other hand, understanding human nature well could equally lead to despair. (There is, indeed, a dark undercurrent in the stories, which may be why not everyone likes them.)

Kirsten Birkett

A lot of people seem to mean a lot of different things by ‘prayer’.

I once went to what was advertised as an Augustinian prayer day. That sounded eminently attractive, I thought: I’m interested in Augustine, and I’m interested in prayer. What we were told to do, however, was to sit in silence, individually, for 30 minutes, concentrating on our breathing.

Kirsten Birkett

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist who has been extremely helpful in explaining why people think about right and wrong in the way they do.

One particularly useful insight of his was to point out that those who leaned to the liberal left tended to decide that things were morally wrong if they harmed people; conservative people would agree, but also tended to have a whole extra moral category – purity.

Kirsten Birkett

I recently read that Richard Dawkins underwent an experiment in 2003 where magnetic fields were applied to his head.

It was meant to stimulate the temporal lobes and create a religious experience. It failed on Dawkins; apparently his temporal lobe sensitivity is much lower than average. On others, however, the same treatment had triggered a sense of an invisible presence or out-of-body experiences.