Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson

Author:Steven Johnson [Johnson, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Psychology, Science, Medical, General, Self-Help, Neuroscience
ISBN: 9780743258791
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2004-01-26T21:00:00+00:00

Recognizing the peripheral effects of the brain’s emotional system doesn’t always involve tracking individual chemicals. The major neurotransmitters are themselves each involved in many forms of brain activity, while our felt emotions are the sum total of dozens of physiological and chemical changes in our body. The language of emotion is filled with references to the body: our skin crawls, our hearts race. These are not only metaphors: the chemicals released during emotional states trigger specific events throughout the body-so much so that William James famously argued that emotions were nothing more than the aggregate of those bodily changes. You don’t feel fear and then feel your heart start to race-fear, James proposed, is your heart racing.

But while emotional systems can’t be reduced to single “magic bullet” chemicals, they nevertheless produce reliable peripheral effects, and learning to recognize those effects can make it easier to inhabit your own head. Several years ago, Antonio Damasio led a team of researchers in a study that performed PET scans on people’s brains as they recalled intense emotional experiences from their past. The subjects were asked to relive as vividly as possible events that involved happiness, sadness, fear, or anger. When the subjects felt the emotion consume them again, they signaled to the researchers. Damasio and his team were trying to determine the regions of the brain responsible for creating the feeling itself-in other words, which parts reported on the changes in the body’s physiological state brought about by the emotion. And indeed they found dedicated areas that lit up at the exact moment the emotion was felt, and that each emotion created a precise neuromap that could be readily distinguished from the others.

But the researchers also stumbled across another observation that hadn’t been central to their experiment. Sadness was marked by decreased activity in the prefrontal cortices, while happiness triggered an increase in such activity. Prefrontal cortical activity is a strong predictor of idea generation and overall liveliness of thought. When you’re thinking on your feet, when you’re full of ideas, your frontal lobes are firing on all cylinders. What Damasio found was that happiness elevated those firing rates, while sadness dampened them. In other words, one of the side effects of the way the brain creates the feeling of sadness is a reduction in the overall number of thoughts that the mind produces.

When I first read about Damasio’s study, this finding struck me immediately as liberating. I thought of all the times over the years when I’d been feeling blue for some reason, and while wallowing in my mood, I’d note that I hadn’t had an interesting idea in a disturbingly long time. My sadness would quickly deepen into a gloomy self-doubt: not only was I blue, but I was also becoming stupid! It was hard enough being sad, but now I had to deal with being dim-witted as well. Contrast that downward slide with my usual response to coming down with a head cold. Being sick makes me feel dense as

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