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[Background speech]
>> I think the grand challenge that we have at UCL is try
and bring together the 4,000 researchers that we have
across the institution to say, what it is that we're doing
at UCL that will make us understand, first of all,
what wellbeing is and then how it is that we might able
to change behaviour or society or how the people live
so that we can actually achieve a greater sense of wellbeing.
>> It's a very difficult concept of different aspects
and different functionalities
of what human wellbeing actually is.
I think UCL has the great challenge
of bringing all its resources together to be able to find
out what that is and put that around the world and that way,
we have us a global influence in the wellbeing challenge.
And that to me, is what this challenge is all about.
>> Myself, I've often wondered,
given that we all know what is good for us, so to speak,
we know we should enough sleep, to go to bed early,
to eat a good diet, to get exercise, rest, read a book,
relax, be kind to ourself and others.
We know experientially we all experience that this is good,
is good for our well being.
And so the question arises if we know this,
and if we experience this, why are we disruptive.
And I've recently seen that the answer to that is that most
of us live in a state of chronic stress.
And this means that our bodies
and ourselves are kept compromised functioning,
compromised cellular functioning.
[Pause]
>> I was involved in a project for the government
to define what is the wellbeing and how can improve it.
You can learn to improve it and we can develop tools both
to measure it and to create intervention to improve it.
And what it suggested is also to do it as a project
in the university that we can we can measure it for the student,
for the staff and create an intervention that can help later
to improve it and measure it and do research
on each one of these dimensions.
>> One of the most interesting aspects of wellbeing,
it seems to me, is the difference
between the subjective experience of wellbeing,
which can be triggered by an enormous variety
of circumstances and can be felt under an enormous range
of objective conditions.
And the ways in which objectively we seek
to measure wellbeing.
I'm not yet convinced that the literature has managed to sort
out ways of reconciling these differences
and I would therefore be quite wary of any attempts
to develop a set of indicators of objective wellbeing.
>> The idea that captured me the most was the architectural idea
of designing spaces in which people could enjoy wellbeing
in their own terms, as a political scientist,
that really struck me because perhaps that's what we should be
doing with political policies and with laws and budgets
and money, is creating space, cities, cultures,
in which people can pursue their own individually freely
generated notions of wellbeing.
[Pause]
>> Its about our relationship between our concept of self,
our concept of something that transcends self
and our behaviour
in marketplaces and in institutions.
And the essential point is that our wellbeing consists actually,
in some sense, of a, sense of harmony between those ideas,
which is not actually found by denying ourselves,
but actually more in the boundary between self
and non-self, which is achieved
through dissolving the idea of self.
This is all a very complicated way of saying
that you can't actually tell somebody
that their self doesn't exist, but you can say
that it would be happier if you got past the limiting idea
that you have one in the first place.
>> Well, I think that in order to understand human wellbeing,
it's essential that we have some sense
about its culturally constructed and that we learn from the ways
in which other cultures understand
and construct wellbeing, the extent to which we deal
with the consequences of our perceptions that we live
in an unhealthy society, which is to say is, is unhappiness,
actually a healthy or an appropriate response
to the perception that society is not a healthy place.
[Pause]
>> One of the deepest questions
in understanding wellbeing is how wellbeing relates
to other experiences that you've had
and other experiences other people have had.
So how far can you actually make a judgment about how good
or bad an experience is without thinking about other experiences
of your own or others.
And if that's right, that if everybody's experiences get
substantially better, say your society becomes wealthier
and your experiences become more enriched
and so do everybody else's, do you actually feel any better.
Now a deep question for policy is,
if you don't feel any better,
then is there any point enriching our experiences?
Or maybe that should indicate instead that the enrichment
of experiences is a -- while a good thing, not being picked
up in the, in a, in a measure of happiness,
or alternatively is it just telling us that our measure
of wellbeing or happiness isn't good enough?
[Pause]
>> I think what would be really interesting
in the grand challenges would also be
if the grand challenges were to somehow reveal paradoxes
about the notion of wellbeing
so that it's not simply what people predictably think
wellbeing's about, for example, health,
but it can show much more interesting things
that perhaps unhappy feelings, we heard tonight
about how an unhappy memory could be transformed
into something really treasured and cherished in the present.
So I think that the --
I'd be really interested to see how things that we don't expect
to find in a wellbeing program can be brought to the full.