The Brain Case for Happiness

Recently we posted a brief discussion of the effect of sadness on memory. Now let’s discuss happiness.

Turns out, happiness is good for your brain. And this seems obvious, but there’s proof in the form of real-time brain scans, and the long-term effect happiness has on improved cognition.

The case for sadness says that when people are sad, they are more likely to create more accurate memories. This is not in contradiction to the case that happiness improves cognition. It’s like saying that concentrating on painting can make you remember the details, while being happy an make you a better painter.

Nor is the case that you have to decide between one or the other. The case for sadness suggests that rather than be worried about the occasional sad moment, know that it can allow for increased concentration and the formation of reliable memories.

Those moments of sadness are the exception that prove the rule of general happiness. A happiness which makes your mind better at doing—well, whatever it is you want to do.

So, consider this: having fun makes you happy, and being happy makes your brain work better. Incorporating fun into learning makes the learning that much more effective. It’s a win-win.

Scare Your Brain for Fun and Profit

“Brains!” says the zombie before you. The word gurgles out of his mouth as he shuffles in your direction, one inexorable step after the other. Your vision becomes super acute, noticing every detail: his pant leg ripped to shreds, the way one shoulder is hitched higher than the other, the yellow glow in his eyes. Your heart is racing, your fingers are tingling, your legs coiled and ready to run. And all the while, your frontal lobe calmly evaluates the situation, and keeps you in your seat. Instead of running, you shove another mouthful of popcorn in your face

There’s a reason why people love scary movies, but an even better reason why they don’t run away in panic at the sight of the first undead brain-eater. Basically, while your amygdala, deep inside your limbic system (your “old” brain”) processes emotions, making you “scared,” your frontal lobes in your “modern” brain are evaluating your options and making decisions.

Your amygdala is in communication with your adrenal gland, which is pumping out the chemicals to prime your body for flight. And as everyone who’s ever watched a Mountain Dew commercial knows, adrenaline can be a rush, a thrill.

But it’s no fun to actually be chased down by blood-thirsty monsters. Your frontal lobes know the difference between reality and fantasy, and so all of the fear is, for want of a better word, fake. You know you’re safe, but you feel scared, and this ironic situation is fun. (For some people, it’s even funny).

Laughing as the scream, popcorn flying out of their mouths, as the zombies reaches out, fingers curled in filthy claws, his mouth drooling bile as he moans “Braaaaaaaains!”

Your Brain Isn’t Forgetful, It’s Just Happy

If ignorance is bliss than is bliss ignorance? Maybe, according to scientists.

Its been known for a while now that one difference between depression and elation is the brain’s tendency to focus in the former and flit from through to thought in the other. This is something we’ve all experienced: when we’re sad, we sometimes feel like we can’t think about anything except whatever’s getting us down.

Experiments and tests on this have been thoroughly performed to find all kinds of effects. Some experiments have even shown how people who were in sad moods remembered more and better details in certain situations than those who were neutral or happy. Those who were in good moods were more likely to add extraneous or inaccurate details.

This makes sense, considering the associative network which our brain uses to learm process, and store memories. If a person is happy, she’ll associate an experience with more different thoughts than someone who is sad, dwelling on only one thought.

So how do we use this phenomena? It’s less a matter of what we can do in advance, than he we go about evaluating someone’s memories. Its not likely that we can “make” ourselves sad so that we are better equipped to remember a given experience.

But we can note that, if there are inconsistencies in our recall, maybe that’s proof we had a good time!

Go to Sleep, Clean Your Brain

Your brain’s in a fog. You’re staring at the computer screen, trying to remember something—but you can’t even remember why you’re trying to remember it. You're hunched, slack-jawed. What’s going on? Is this some kind of dementia? Alzheimer’s?

No, you’re just tired. It’s 1:30 in the morning, and you’ve had a rough day. You were up early, traffic was a nightmare, and work seemed to take forever. You went to dinner with some friends, which got you home late, and now you’re up past your bed time, trying to get a few things done online before finally hitting the hay.

You take your hand off the mouse, turn off the monitor, and wander, bleary-eyed, into bed. You’re asleep before your head even hits the pillow. And the next day… you’re fine. Maybe a bit groggy, but that clears right up. Your brain is yours again, ready to face challenges head-on.

Some people can get by on just a few hours sleep. Some are useless unless they get their full eight. Everybody’s different, but everybody does sleep. It’s more essential than food, and when we’re tired, even more compelling than thirst. Scientists still aren’t sure why sleep is such a necessary part of human existence.

But they’re one step closer to finding. Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, studying the brains of mice, has discovered that sleep allows for the flushing of built-up proteins. These proteins may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

It seems that when we’re asleep, not only do brains create far fewer of these proteins, but lower brain activity allows more room for spinal fluid to wash through, removing toxins.

Brushing your teeth every day, taking a shower, getting a good night’s rest—these are all ways of staying clean and healthy.

Your Brain was Built to Procrastinate

But here’s the good news: you can redesign it to get things done.

Very basically, we procrastinate because we have two brains. Our old brain, in the limbic system, does everything automatic, and drives us to take care of the basics. You rarely forget to eat, for example, because your limbic system will remind you. Or newer brain, with parts like the frontal cortex, deal with higher concepts, like all the steps needed for going to the grocery store. If the frontal cortex doesn’t keep the idea of going to the store fresh in our minds, and we’re not hungry, there’s no motivation to go. So we put it off. Until we’re too hungry to wait any longer. And since our limbic system doesn’t bother with grocery lists and recipes, it goes for the shortcut, (often the fast food option).

It’s like the limbic system and the frontal cortex speak a different language. But the frontal cortex can take foreign language classes, so to speak, and develop heuristics—little sub-routines that automate certain processes (like driving a car—after a while, it’s not something you have to think about doing, it’s just something you do). This is similar to how we develop habits, like your weekly-whether-you-need-to-or-not trip to the grocery store.

So far so good. But what about non-routine things that we don’t want to do? Like paying taxes? It’s February 22nd, still plenty of time to get the paperwork done. Your frontal cortex won’t motivate you unless it can think of a reason, a reward or a consequence, so doing taxes leaves your mind until something reminds you of it later. April 15th is too far away for your frontal cortex to find very compelling.

They key is to give yourself a more imminent reward (or consequence). And not something arbitrary. If you say to yourself “I’ll eat a piece of cake as a reward for doing my taxes,” your limbic system might pipe in with “I want that cake now.” Or, it might even say “cake? We don’t want cake at all.” In fact, if you have control of the reward, it’s harder to force yourself through the task when you always know you can have it anyway.

So, you’ll need to give yourself a different kind of reward. The reward of getting the thing done itself. Actually, this can be very motivating, once you’ve started the task. But you’ve got to start the task! This is why “just do it” works when you “just do it.”

Here’s how you trick yourself into starting something you don’t want to do but will be glad you did: allow yourself to not finish. Set a timer for 25 minutes, and promise yourself you can stop when the timer is done, whether you’re finished or not. And then, when the timer goes off, stop. Take a break. Then set the timer again.

This is called “the pomodoro technique” and its effectiveness is based on how your brain responds to rest, in terms of memory and learning. With this technique, you can actually “learn” how getting something done is its own reward.

Use Your Brain Like a House

Chet is driving home from work, and traffic, for a change, is not so bad. His usual thirty minute commute might only be 20 minutes today. It’s sunny outside, unusual for this time of year. And the local alt-rock station is finally playing something decent. 20 minutes should go by quickly.

The song on the radio ends, a few ads come on. One of them is for a concert this weekend, a local band that Chet’s been meaning to check out. He reminds himself to look up ticket prices on the web when he gets home. The next ad is for cut-rate mortgage loans, which reminds Chet he needs to send in his home insurance payment . He adds that to his mental to-do list. As his mind wanders, Chet thinks about other things he should do when he gets home: call his mother, collect the recycling for tomorrow’s pick-up, set the DVR to record the baseball game, take some chicken out of the freezer to thaw.

Even though he’s driving, can’t take notes or use an app on his mobile device, Chet has no problem remembering all these things. When he gets home, everything he needs to do is as fresh in his mind as if he’d written down. You see, Chet uses a mnemonic device called The Method of Loci.

As he was driving, Chet imagined a rock band, complete with guitar player, keyboards and drums, performing on his front porch. Behind his front door, on the bench where he puts on his shoes in the morning, he pictured an enormous checkbook with the word “house” written on it. In the hall leading to his kitchen, he imagines a large photograph of his mother. On the kitchen table, he pictures a tall, teetering stack of tin cans. Continuing his mental walk, he places a pile of baseballs on his dining room table. Finally, in the living room, sitting on his couch is a giant chicken, wearing a scarf.

The Method of Loci, memory palace, or journey method, has a long history of usage, dating back to ancient Rome and Greece. In modern times, memory champions use this technique to quickly memorize random digits or sequences of shuffled playing cards.

For those of us who want a more practical use, the Method of Loci is very easy to use. Simply think of a path with which you’re already very familiar—walking through your house, or your office at work, or a favorite route through the city with stable landmarks. Then associate each room, or piece of furniture, or landmark, with an object that represents what you want to remember.

You’ll find that remembering 10, 20, or even 30 things is as easy as deciding where to put them. Be creative—the more interesting, or “novel” you make each image, the easier it is to remember.

The Roots of Modern Brain Training through Games

In 2008, Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, and Walter J. Perrig presented a paper called “Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory” in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”.

Jaeggi et al conducted experiments on fluid intelligence by having subjects play a “dual n-back” game. (FAQ at gwern.net). Players are shown a grid which contains a letter in one square. Then a different letter in a different square is shown. Then a third, and players are asked if this third letter/position is the same as the first. A fourth is shown, and players answer if it is the same as the second. And so on. The challenge is to keep new information in memory while recalling and processing an older memory. The experiment was to see if, as players improve at the game, they would see improvements in their “working memory.”

Subjects were given a preliminary IQ test, and then played the game over spans ranging from 8 to 19 days. A subsequent IQ test showed better results, and those who played the game over 19 days showed more improvement than those who played for only 8.

Subsequent experiments, (including two more led by Jaeggi, with different teams) one led by Qiu Feiyue, and one led by Susanne Schweizer have produced similar results. These results contradict the conventional wisdom that IQ is hardwired and immutable. And while research into these methods for improving intelligence s still relatively new, controversies about improving intelligence are forcing us to reconsider just what the nature of intelligence is.

Authorities such as Michael Merzenich and Robert Plomin have provided additional grist for the controversy mill. Merzenich argues that improving one’s ability at a game merely makes on better at the game itself, and doesn’t necessarily translate to improvements in other areas. Plomin points out that since the idea of intelligence being unchangeable is flawed, science that contradicts this notion is not very remarkable.

But a collection of other studies show that, if nothing else, brain stimulation does result in physical changes in the brain, whatever the current definition of “intelligence” might be. Consider a study done of London Taxi drivers, which found that after intense practice for their licensing exams, (up to four years of practice) these cabbies had enlarged areas of the hippocampus. No one’s giving them Nobel prizes, but no one can deny the intellectual achievement of memorizing 25,000 streets.

And then there’s the Nun Study at the University of Kentucky, which has found a correlation between positive emotions and low incidence of Alzheimer’s. Intriguingly, they even found cases where nuns with physical (post-mortem) evidence of disease did not display any cognitive symptoms during their lives.

Perhaps this is pushing the boundaries of what IQ means, but if a group of women are living, happily, thirty and forty years past the average age of death, I’d call that pretty smart.