I need you to listen to me

Talking about ourselves—whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter—triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money, researchers say.

About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can't help sharing our thoughts.

"Self-disclosure is extra rewarding," said Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves," Ms. Tamir said.

I'm sure you'd give up money to hear about me, too. What a special treat for you. Here's a picture of a brain scan.

Bragging gives the same sensation of pleasure as food and money. The same areas of the brain are activated, scans show. If you had yellow arrows sticking in your head, you'd probably be talking a lot, too.

I don't know whose brain that is, but I know my head feels like that when I'm trying to think about stuff.

A little health secret: gratitude

I always thought this was a bit corny, but having an "attitude of gratitude" is very real.

Gratitude has recently become the favorite feast of psychologists studying the consequences of giving thanks. Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked.

How do you get started? One suggestion: start with “gratitude lite.” 

That’s the term used by Robert A. Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, for the technique used in his pioneering experiments he conducted along with Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami. They instructed people to keep a journal listing five things for which they felt grateful, like a friend’s generosity, something they’d learned, a sunset they’d enjoyed. 

The gratitude journal was brief — just one sentence for each of the five things — and done only once a week, but after two months there were significant effects. Compared with a control group, the people keeping the gratitude journal were more optimistic and felt happier. They reported fewer physical problems and spent more time working out. 

Further benefits were observed in a study of polio survivors and other people with neuromuscular problems. The ones who kept a gratitude journal reported feeling happier and more optimistic than those in a control group, and these reports were corroborated by observations from their spouses. These grateful people also fell asleep more quickly at night, slept longer and woke up feeling more refreshed. 

“If you want to sleep more soundly, count blessings, not sheep,” Dr. Emmons advises in “Thanks!” his book on gratitude research.

I'm going to give this a try. I'm grateful that I came across this article.

Your amazing brain

Your brain know a lot more than you realize, neuroscientist David Eagleman writes, He explores the processes and skills of the subconscious mind, which our conscious selves rarely consider.

Are there transvestite chicks?

Let's start with chickens.

When chicken hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing gender is known as chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females, which will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, which are typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for meat. So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female chicks look exactly alike. 

Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which experts could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique. 

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not say what those cues were. They would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in. 

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The student would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained to a masterful—albeit unconscious—level.

And let's conclude with baseball.

On August 20, 1974, in a game between the California Angels and the Detroit Tigers, The Guinness Book of Records clocked Nolan Ryan’s fastball at 100.9 miles per hour. If you work the numbers, you’ll see that Ryan’s pitch departs the mound and crosses home plate—60 feet, 6 inches away—in four-tenths of a second. This gives just enough time for light signals from the baseball to hit the batter’s eye, work through the circuitry of the retina, activate successions of cells along the loopy superhighways of the visual system at the back of the head, cross vast territories to the motor areas, and modify the contraction of the muscles swinging the bat. Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a second; otherwise no one would ever hit a fastball. But even more surprising is that conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second. So the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it.

Think I'd rather be a baseball player than a chicken.

Be your own therapist

Positive psychology involves more than just thinking happy thoughts. Positive psychology focuses on the strengths and virtues that help people thrive, such as courage, gratitude, compassion, resilience and creativity. While most therapists attempt to "fix what's wrong," positive psychologists also want to "build what's strong."

Therapists who practice positive psychology help individuals see their strengths and virtues and find ways to foster them. They also help people identify positive experiences and the circumstances that brought them about, as well as encourage behaviors that give life a sense of meaning and purpose. Here are some positive psychology techniques you can try:

Identify and use signature strengths. Write down your top five strengths and try to use them more and in new ways each day.  

Keep a gratitude journal. Often recommended by Oprah Winfrey, this positive psychology technique involves writing down each evening three good things that happened to you and noting why you think they happened. Many people focus on negative emotions or events and ignore the positive ones. Keeping a gratitude journal is a way to shift your focus to the more positive aspects of your life and to reflect on them.

Express appreciation to other individuals. Extend your gratitude to the important people in your life. 

Perform acts of kindness. Turning your focus to improving the lives of people around you can increase your own happiness. Try to help others in ways both random (like holding the door open for someone or letting someone go in front of you in line) and planned (such as volunteering or donating blood).

Do it yourself and save big bucks. 

Give your mind a break

About one in ten Americans practice meditation, and the number seems to be growing. The practice has been around since antiquity, and today the term means different things to different people. It's become an avenue of research looking into its health benefits. According to Wikipedia:

Since the 1960s, meditation has been the focus of increasing scientific research of uneven rigor and quality. In over 1,000 published research studies, various methods of meditation have been linked to changes in metabolism, blood pressure, brain activation, and other bodily processes. Meditation has been used in clinical settings as a method of stress and pain reduction.

A new research report finds that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

Britta Hölzel, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, said the participants practiced mindfulness meditation, a form of meditation that was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s. It traces its roots to ancient Buddhist techniques.

“The main idea is to use different objects to focus one’s attention, and it could be a focus on sensations of breathing, or emotions or thoughts, or observing any type of body sensations,” she said. “But it’s about bringing the mind back to the here and now, as opposed to letting the mind drift.”

Other research: a 2009 study suggests that meditation may reduce blood pressure in patients with coronary heart disease. And a 2007 study found that meditators have longer attention spans.

It makes sense when you consider that from waking to sleeping we are bombarded with artificial sensations and distractions created by other human beings. Which is why simply walking in unstructured nature also contributes to our well-being.

Mellowing out as we get older

From Johns Hopkins University Health Publishing:

Although memory function may decline with age, emotional stability increases, according to a study reported in the Journal of Neuroscience. Forget the myth that older people are crankier than younger ones. In fact, the reverse is true: Age brings increased emotional equanimity.

Australian researchers evaluated 142 people between the ages of 12 and 79. All were in good physical health and had no current or past history of mental illness. The study participants were asked to complete a questionnaire that assesses emotional stability, with higher scores suggesting more positive emotions.

In addition, the individuals' brain activity was assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed images of various facial expressions. Scores on the questionnaire kept in step with age, rising along with seniority. The brain fMRI images revealed that the older adults' emotional reactions were primarily influenced by the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain needed for conscious thought.

In contrast, the emotional reactions of younger people were centered in the amygdala, a part of the brain implicated in automatic fear responses. This reorganization of the brain's emotion system may happen as older people integrate their accumulated life experience and find meaning and patterns in that experience.