Now that schadenfreude, which I always thought meant ''shades of Freud'' but actually means taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune, has been located in the brain, I am awaiting news on the location of ennui, angst, misery, malaise and ''feeling pretty.''


I think my expectations are reasonable. After all, brain scans -- which were used in the detection of schadenfreude -- have clearly reached the level of sophistication required to identify states of mind described by complicated German words. Soon they will advance to states of mind truly expressible only in French, and ultimately to the kind of internal experience until now captured only in our best musical comedies.

Tania Singer at University College London and her colleagues, who published a schadenfreude paper in Nature, were not actually searching for schadenfreude when they used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch the brains of subjects in action. Their primary interest was variation in levels of empathy, which can be detected by the activity in ''pain-related areas'' like the ''fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices'' of the brain when a person is watching someone else in pain.



I wouldn't exactly call that schadenfreude, although Nature made it the core of its press release and most news coverage emphasized the big German word. Dr. Singer didn't actually put the word in her paper, either, but in an interview she defended the idea that the emotion she was viewing came under the heading of schadenfreude. She did acknowledge that the word included other feelings.

When someone slips and falls on the ice, celebrities have wardrobe malfunctions and rich people lose money, your reward center may light up. Sometimes envy inspires schadenfreude. Sometimes it's just a good camera angle. Another example, not mentioned in the Nature press release, might be when a competitor, say the journal Science, publishes papers by Dr. Hwang Woo Suk that turn out to be fabricated and you (Nature) publish a paper by the same author about an improbably cloned Afghan hound that has held up to scrutiny so far.

There is a small flaw in my wish to see what part of the brain lights up when Maria sings ''I Feel Pretty'' in ''West Side Story.'' With brain scans, a lot depends on context. What Dr. Singer and colleagues saw was a reward center lighting up and the empathy circuits dimming. She said the same reward center might also be active in anticipation of chocolate, for instance, and in drug addiction.

Still, even if we need to bring in context, there is a great big world of emotions and mental activity out there to be scanned. There's amusement, bemusement and disillusionment. One could be dazed, or confused, or dazed and confused. Would those be different?

Not to mention the blues. There are the morning blues, the poor man's blues, the white boy blues, the Chicken Cordon Blues and the ''blues you get from trying to keep your Uncle Bill from dying and he afterward forgets you in his will.'' Are they all the same?

These questions may not be answered in my lifetime, but I hope for the resolution of one question that has always plagued me, the difference between ennui and boredom.

Suppose one performed brain scans of adolescents refusing to do their homework, prisoners serving life sentences and graduate students suffering from ennui. Based on the self-assessments of adolescents I know, I predict that the prisoners and the adolescents will show similar brain activity -- anger toward the warden turned inward.

I don't know where that happens in the brain, but I'm betting the graduate students are just going through periods of involuntary celibacy and trying not to be obvious about their desperation.

Drawing (Drawing by Ruth Marten)