How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness, by Rick Hanson There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.” gobyg It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind. But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain. Fact one: As the brain changes, the mind changes, for better or worse. For example, more activation in the left prefrontal cortex is associated with more positive emotions. So we can see that as the brain changes, the mind changes. Fact two: As the mind changes, the brain changes. This is known as “self-directed neuroplasticity.”
Emotional Wiring Different in Men and Women Men and women are actually from the same planet, but scientists now have the first strong evidence that the emotional wiring of the sexes is fundamentally different. An almond-shaped cluster of neurons that processes experiences such as fear and aggression hooks up to contrasting brain functions in men and women at rest, the new research shows. For men, the cluster "talks with" brain regions that help them respond to sensors for what's going on outside the body, such as the visual cortex and an area that coordinates motor actions. For women, the cluster communicates with brain regions that help them respond to sensors inside the body, such as the insular cortex and hypothalamus. "Throughout evolution, women have had to deal with a number of internal stressors, such as childbirth, that men haven't had to experience," said study co-author Larry Cahill of the University of California Irvine. Cahill and his co-author Lisa Kilpatrick, scanned the brains of 36 healthy men and 36 healthy women.
Why Do We Love Music? | Life's Little Mysteries Music has been with us as long as we can collectively remember. Musical instruments have been found dating back tens of thousands of years. Yet no one knows why we love music, or what function, if any, it serves. Researchers have yet to find a "music center" in the brain. One study found that when focusing on harmony in a piece, a subject experiences increased activity in the right temporal lobe's auditory areas. Other studies have focused on our emotional responses to music. A 2001 experiment at McGill College used brain scans to study the neural mechanics of the goosebumps that great music can sometimes induce. Blood flow in the brain rises and falls to swells of music in areas associated with reward, emotion and arousal. As stimulation for food and sex are important for a organism's survival, the fact that similar neural activity is observed in responses to features in music suggests that there could be some evolutionary advantage to the ability to hear — or hum — a good tune.
U.S. researchers map emotional intelligence of the brain We tend to think of reason and emotion as being two different things, but it turns out that there may not be a choice between the heart and the head. A University of Illinois team, led by neuroscience professor Aron Barbey, has made the first detailed 3D map of emotional and general intelligence in the brain, that shows a strong overlap of general and emotional intelligence. Reason and emotions aren’t opposites, but rather two types of intelligence or, perhaps, two aspects of one intelligence. Reason comes under the heading of general intelligence. There are a number of theories about how general and emotional intelligence are related. Relationships between general and emotional intelligence The study was based on computed tomography (CT) scans taken of the brains of 152 US Vietnam War veterans. The CT scans provided the first detailed 3D map of the regions of the brain associated with general and emotional intelligence. In the video below, Aron Barbey discusses the study.
What Makes You Feel Fear? : Shots - Health News hide captionMovies like The Shining frighten most of us, but some brain-damaged people feel no fear when they watch a scary film. However, an unseen threat — air with a high level of carbon dioxide — produces a surprising result. Warner Bros. Movies like The Shining frighten most of us, but some brain-damaged people feel no fear when they watch a scary film. In shorthand often used to describe the brain, fear is controlled by a small, almond-shaped structure called the amygdala. But it's not quite that simple, as a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience demonstrates. One of the best ways to figure out how parts of the brain work is to study people who have damage in those specific areas. A few years ago, SM told Justin Feinstein, then a graduate student at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, that she'd never felt fear, even when she'd been confronted by a knife-wielding assailant. Feinstein put her claim to the test.
What Do Emotions Have to Do with Learning? Thinkstock When parents and teachers consider how children learn, it’s usually the intellectual aspects of the activity they have in mind. Sidney D’Mello would like to change that. The University of Notre Dame psychologist has been studying the role of feelings in learning for close to a decade, and he has concluded that complex learning is almost inevitably “an emotionally charged experience,” as he wrote in a paper published in the journal Learning and Instruction earlier this year. During the learning experiments described in his paper, he notes, the participating students reported being in a neutral state only about a quarter of the time. Another counter-intuitive contention made by D’Mello is that even negative emotions can play a productive role in learning. Confusion motivates us to restore our equilibrium through thought, reflection, and problem solving, and deeper learning is the result. animated agents discussing scientific case studies. Related
Happiness Associated With Longer Life Happy people don't just enjoy life; they're likely to live longer, too. A new study has found that those in better moods were 35% less likely to die in the next 5 years when taking their life situations into account. The traditional way to measure a person's happiness is to ask them about it. But over the past few decades, psychologist and epidemiologist Andrew Steptoe of University College London (UCL) says, scientists have realized that those measures aren't reliable. It's not clear whether they "assess how they're actually feeling or how they remember feeling," he says. When answering, people are more likely to count their blessings and compare their experience with the lives of others. The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing tried to get more specific. Of the 924 people who reported the least positive feelings, 7.3%, or 67, died within 5 years. The research shows that good moods are correlated with long life, but it's not proof that happiness makes people live longer, Steptoe says.
Action for Happiness :: Authentic Happiness :: Using the new Positive Psychology The theory in Authentic Happiness is that happiness could be analyzed into three different elements that we choose for their own sakes: positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. And each of these elements is better defined and more measurable than happiness. The first is positive emotion; what we feel: pleasure, rapture, ecstasy, warmth, comfort, and the like. The second element, engagement, is about flow: being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity. There are no shortcuts to flow. There is yet a third element of happiness, which is meaning. “Your 2002 theory can’t be right, Marty,” said Senia Maymin when we were discussing my previous theory in my Introduction to Positive Psychology for the inaugural class of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology in 2005. “The 2002 theory in the book Authentic Happiness, is supposed to be a theory of what humans choose, but it has a huge hole in it: it omits success and mastery.
Money <em>can</em> buy happiness… if you spend it on other people | Not Exactly Rocket Science “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” – Douglas Adams In this pithy paragraph, the sorely missed Douglas Adams sums up a puzzling paradox of modern life – we often link happiness to money and the spending of it, even though both proverbs and psychological surveys suggest that the two are unrelated. Across and within countries, income has an incredibly weak effect on happiness once people have enough to secure basic needs and standards of living. I can’t get no… satisfcation But a new study reveals that money can indeed buy happiness… if it’s spent on others. Finally, Dunn tested this theory through an experiment. Hey big spender There is a silver lining then.
Thinking vs. Feeling: The Psychology of Advertising Do ads with facts work better than ads that appeal through emotion and aspiration? Shutterstock Imagine two commercials for a new light beer. The first ad begins with a super-zoom of the luxurious, golden liquid tumbling into a tall clear glass. The second ad starts in a bar. You can probably guess where I'm going here. So what does science really know about advertising? Here's a good example from Clay Warren, director of the Communications Program at George Washington University. The literature on rational versus affective advertising is very long and mostly inconclusive. If this sounds basically intuitive, then good. The most successful ads -- in the eyes of advertisers at least -- have broad emotional and cognitive appeal. "In 2004, Goody, Silverstein & Partners, developed what would be a "Campaign of the Year" for Hewlett Packard's digital photography," he wrote in an email.
60 of the world's happiest facts 1. A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. 2. If you fake laugh long enough you’ll start to really laugh, really, really hard. 3. The book cover to the prize winning short story collection, Spellbound, was chosen because author, Joel Willans, bought his wife’s engagement ring with poker winnings. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.The kingdom of Bhutan use ‘gross national happiness’ as a key national indicator. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 2013 is the first year since 1987 that consists for four different digits. 59. 60.