What Emotions Can Tell You

For most of human history, the emotions have been disparaged because they're so difficult to analyze-they don't come with reasons, justifications, or explanations. (As Nietzsche warned, we are often most ignorant of what is closest to us.) But now, thanks to the tools of modern neuroscience, we can see that emotions have a logic all their own. The jitters of dopamine help keep track of reality, alerting us to all those subtle patterns that we can't consciously detect. The emotional brain is especially useful at helping us make hard decisions. Its massive computational power-its ability to process millions of bits of data in parallel-ensures that you can analyze all the relevant information when assessing alternatives. Mysteries are broken down into manageable chunks, which are then translated into practical feelings.

The reason these emotions are so intelligent is that they've managed to turn mistakes into educational events. You are constantly benefiting from experience, even if you're not consciously aware of the benefits. It doesn't matter if your field of expertise is backgammon or Middle East politics, golf or computer programming: the brain always learns the same way, accumulating wisdom through error.

There are no shortcuts to this painstaking process; becoming an expert just takes time and practice. But once you've developed expertise in a particular area - once you've made the requisite mistakes - it's important to trust your emotions when making decisions in that domain. It is feelings, after all, and not the prefrontal cortex, that capture the wisdom of experience. Those subtle emotions saying shoot down the radar blip, or go all in with pocket kings, or pass to Troy Brown are the output of a brain that has learned how to read a situation. It can parse the world in practical terms, so that you know what needs to be done. When you overanalyze these expert decisions, you end up like the opera star who couldn't sing.

And yet, this doesn't mean the emotional brain should always be trusted. Sometimes it can be impulsive and short-sighted. Sometimes it can be a little too sensitive to patterns, which is why people lose so much money playing slot machines. However, the one thing you should always be doing is considering your emotions, thinking about why you're feeling what you're feeling. In other words, act like the television executive carefully analyzing the reactions of the focus group. Even when you choose to ignore your emotions, they are still a valuable source of input.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide

Short-term Decision Making

The problem with credit cards is that they take advantage of a dangerous flaw built into the brain. This failing is rooted in our emotions, which tend to overvalue immediate gains (like a new pair of shoes) at the cost of future expenses (high interest rates). Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of an immediate reward, but they can't really grapple with the long-term fiscal consequences of that decision.

Paying with plastic fundamentally changes the way we spend money, altering the calculus of our financial decisions. When you buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss-your wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract, so that you don't really feel the downside of spending money. Brain-imaging experiments suggest that paying with credit cards actually reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative feelings.

Jonah Lehrer
How We Decide

The Brain: Complex Beyond Belief

The human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth. And for the first time, researchers are getting a peek at what they do. Even though the brain’s synapses are less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter, scientists at Stanford have pieced together pictures of one to create a three-dimensional image (see the video below). The senior author of the paper explaining the study, Stephen Smith, says the brain's complexity is beyond anything they'd imagined, almost “beyond belief.” The brain has hundreds of trillions of synapses connecting some 200 billion nerve cells. To put it in perspective, if the synapses just in the cerebral cortex were stars, they would fill 1500 Milky Way galaxies. Details of the study are in the Journal Neuron.

Stephen Goforth

Meeting of the Minds

There's a scientific evidence that backs up the claim that we "click" with some people during a engaging conversation. Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed synchronizing during storytelling. So, there may be a neurological truth to the idea of being on the same wavelength. A special type of MRI device showed that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. In fact, during a good conversation, people will unconsciously begin imitating each other, using similar sentence structures, speaking rates, and physical gestures and postures. Listeners can get so tuned in that they can even begin to anticipate what the speaker is about to say. Details are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Stephen Goforth

Magnet Affects Moral Reasoning

Researchers at MIT say they’ve been able to affect people’s moral reasoning with magnets. The neuroscientists applied a magnetic field to the scalp of subjects near the the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ). It’s highly active when individuals are faced with determining right from wrong. The magnet appeared to make them more likely to make moral judgments based on end results rather than intentions. In one case, a woman put a spoon of white powder in her friend’s coffee, thinking it’s sugar when it’s really poison. The coffee drinker dies. When people heard this story with the magnet in place, they were less empathetic to the woman and more focused on the result of her action.

Stephen Goforth

Sweet Daydream

Want to increase your brain power? Spend more time daydreaming. That's the implication of a new brain scan study by New York University neuroscientists. They found if people were allowed to rest their minds after looking at pictures, they were better able to recall what they saw later. In other words, daydreaming improved recall. The researchers conclude that if you don’t give yourself a break, then you may be “hindering your brain’s ability to consolidate memories and experiences.” Their suggestion: Less multitasking and more opportunities for your brain to breath.

Stephen Goforth

Finding Our Way

A Nokia Maps survey named London the most confusing city in the entire world. So, it comes as no surprise that the cities cab drivers, who must memorize some 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks in order to pass a driving test for the job, have a larger hippocampus than most of us. That’s the part of their brain dealing with spatial relationship. According to University College London neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, the longer they had been driving, the larger the cabbie’s hippocampus.

Even more curious was Maguire’s finding that the drivers' back side of the hippocampus was large while the front was smaller. Could it be, they are paying a price for proficiency? Is the brain so easily shaped by the demands we place on it that we lose agility in one area by concentrating our efforts in another?

Is this the unintended consequence of our blind obedience to GPS devises, disconnecting us from the world around because there’s really need to pay attention? It’s worth noting that studies have tied a shirking hippocampus to increased risk of dementia.

Perhaps we should take time to enjoy the freedom of getting lost, so we can practice the adventure of finding our way back home. And since we must exercise this skill in the physical world to keep it.. does this mean we must practice finding our way in the spiritual world as well?

Stephen Goforth

Stretching Your Head

"Becoming involved in new things and keeping your brain active are all hallmarks of activities that would tend to preserve your cognitive skills. And these are all things that searching the Internet for new information really does.”

Neuroscientist Susan Bookheimer in an interview with National Geographic News about a study that appears to validate the view that seeking out new ideas and interests helps to keep the brain stimulated and healthy. UCLA researchers found after two weeks of using Internet search engines, brain scans showed increased blood flow in areas involved in decision-making and short-term memory.

Stephen Goforth

Wrapped up in a Daydream

Daydreaming may bring you closer to a solution to problems rather than further away. New research shows letting your mind wander will give parts of your brain time to do a little problem solving.

The University of British Columbia study put people in an fMRI scanner. The less subjects were aware that their mind was wandering off a simple task, the more parts of the brain associated with complex problem-solving lit up. Researchers believe this shows the brain is very active when we daydream – more than when we are simply focused on routine tasks. So while letting your mind wander may hurt your performance in the task at hand, it allows you to work on more significant issues and goals.

Details of the study are in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Stephen Goforth

Brain Scans & Personality

Physical differences in our brains indicate our personality type. That’s the finding of a study of brain scans by scientists at England’s University of Hull, Italy’s University of Parma and Washington University in St Louis. They say variations in the size of specific regions of the brain that appear to be linked with certain tendencies that have been a part of us since birth. The differences could explain why person grows up diligent and introspective while another is outgoing and impulsive.

The researches say the study suggests four personality types.

People with smaller amounts of tissue in the brain above the eye sockets (known as the orbito-frontal) had harm-avoidance personalities. They were more pessimist, shy and tended to find comfort in outside sources such as food or drugs.

Novelty seekers were more impulsive and were structurally bigger in the same area.

Reward-dependence personalities had smaller amounts of tissue in the fronto-striatal and limbic areas of the brain. These are more an addictive personalities.

And those labeled Persistence tended to be industrious, hard-working and perfectionist.

The scientists say the differences support the concept that different children will learn in different ways. An approach tailored to the personality of the individual could make all the difference as to whether they are able to grasp the lesson.

Details of the study will be published in the Brain Research Bulletin.

Slower but Wiser

If your mind doesn't seem as nimble as was at one time, it could be that you are just taking longer to process the information because you have more experiences to cross-reference it with. It’s not that your brain is sluggish, you’re probably just a bit wiser. That’s the conclusion of a set of aging studies. They are analyzed in the latest edition of the journal Progress in Brain Research. The New York Times explains more of what’s in the neurology book in this article.

Stephen Goforth

A Stroke of Insight

The annual TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference costs $6k to attend. But you don't have the pay to see some of the remarkable presentations at the gathering tagged "ideas worth spreading". They are posted online. You might start with Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's remarkable account of her stroke. While I would not fully embrace her interpretation of the event, there's nothing like coming completely unraveled to make you rethink who you are and why you are here.

Stephen Goforth