Jayne Jubb

Romantic relationships can begin anywhere. When Cupid’s arrow strikes, you might be anywhere. My own romance with Sjoerd started with some hilarious double-entendre Dutch-language mistakes, together with an incident in the gas cyclinder storage cupboard (well, better than a bike shed, even if we are in Holland!). Sometimes, however, Cupid seems to have emigrated…so instead of waiting for him to get back to work, people are increasingly joining online-dating sites to assert some control over their romantic lives.

For millennia cultures have invented practices to fulfill the evolutionary requirements of mating and reproduction. In the Western world today, individuals are largely expected to identify romantic partners on their own, a process that can consume significant time, effort and emotional energy. The ability to hunt for dates online offers singles a sense of control over a seemingly random process and grants them access to hundreds, potentially thousands, of eligible mates.

The unprecedented opportunity to pursue romance beyond one’s social circles and neighbourhood haunts has developed into a huge money-making industry. Most online-dating sites work in this way: users create profiles describing themselves and then search a Web site for possible romantic partners according to various criteria—within a town or city, for example, or perhaps by educational levels, age range or religion. Some sites attempt to play the role of matchmaker and use mathematical algorithms to suggest pairings between users, whereas other services give their customers free rein.

Two decades ago almost no couples met online, whereas now it is the second most common way to find a partner, trailing slightly behind connecting through friends. Rather than dabbing on perfume or after-shave and preparing for a night on the town, singles can peruse potential partners while drinking their morning cup of coffee, during meetings at work or when lying in bed for 10 minutes before nodding off. In short, online services have fundamentally altered the dating landscape.

The changes are not all constructive, however. Critical assumptions lurk in the mechanisms of online dating. One supposition is that people are good judges of which qualities described in an online profile will appeal to them in person. A second premise is that comparing multiple potential partners side by side is an effective way to evaluate compatibility. A third is that having many options allows people to make good decisions about their romantic future. Several lines of scientific work suggest that none of these guesses is likely to be true.

This disconnect between the assumptions underlying online dating and the realities of human psychology often yields dissatisfaction. Users may invest tens of hours every month in browsing profiles and only rarely arrange a date. They may contact dozens of users and hear back only from a small fraction of them. They may set up dates with individuals who seem perfect “on paper” only to learn on the first date that as a pair they have no chemistry.

For online daters, what follows is a ‘science-based survival guide’. For others, it will be a look at how today’s dating methods offers reveal insights into the human psyche.

Set Limits for Yourself

Online dating is almost nothing like a typical night out on the town (or ‘on the pull’ as we used to say in Northern England). At a bar, a man might size up the room before letting his gaze settle on the thirtysomething brunette with the welcoming smile and the serious eyes. If he approached her and managed to strike up a conversation, he could take in her nonverbal cues–such as her gestures, posture and scent—as he tried to make her laugh.

If he were instead reading her profile on an online-dating site, he would have learned that she plays board games on the weekends, works as a pastry chef and loves horror movies. A connoisseur of art-house films, he might have already dismissed her for her questionable taste.

With the carrot of romance always dangling a mere mouse click away, the temptation to scan—and quickly dismiss—dozens of profiles is strong. We all value having options, but too many can produce choice overload, undermining our ability to make good decisions. In a famous illustration of this effect, supermarket shoppers encountered a tasting booth that displayed either six or 24 flavors of jam. Although shoppers were more likely to stop at the display with the larger array of jams than the booth with the smaller selection, they were 10 times more likely to purchase an item from the smaller group than the larger. Presumably the larger choice paralysed them with indecision.

Similarly, several studies in the romantic domain suggest that people become overwhelmed as the number of online-dating profiles they browse grows larger. In a recent study, participants viewed either four or 20 such profiles. Those considering the larger set were more prone to misremembering information in them. In a second experiment, as the number of profiles grew from four to 24 to 64, users increasingly switched from time-consuming choice strategies that attend to and integrate multiple cues to more frugal strategies that examine few elements and do not combine them effectively.

No studies have investigated how satisfied online daters are with their choices after considering small versus large numbers of profiles, but other research suggests that exposure to numerous options leads to low satisfaction with a given choice. Those who selected one chocolate out of six, for example, thought the treat tasted significantly better than did participants who picked their chocolate from an array of 30. By analogy, online daters choosing from a small rather than a large batch of potential partners are more likely to enjoy the person with whom they end up sharing a candlelit dinner.

These cognitive biases are hard but not impossible to counteract. Remain aware of how many profiles you have scanned in a browsing session and impose a time limit. View profiles in manageable clusters and consider reaching out to, say, one out of every 20 users. Keep in mind that behind the profile is a flesh-and-blood person, with nuance and depth that is easily lost online.

Monitor Your Mind-set

People also tend to evaluate romantic prospects differently depending on how they encounter them. Many studies in nonromantic domains have demonstrated that people frequently prioritise different qualities when they compare multiple options side by side—referred to as a joint evaluation mind-set—than when they size up one specific possibility in isolation, known as a separate evaluation mind-set.

A study of new first-year university students explored this idea in the context of their accommodation assignments. Before learning which one of 12 student houses they would be randomly assigned to, the students tended to predict that physical features, such as the building’s location and the size of its rooms, would strongly influence their future happiness. None of these attributes ultimately predicted their well-being. Instead experiential qualities—such as the relationship with one’s roommate and the social atmosphere of the student house—far outweighed any of the lodgings’ physical characteristics.

One explanation for this discrepancy between expectation and reality is that the new students were in a joint evaluation mind-set when making the predictions and in a separate evaluation mind-set when living in the assigned student house. Before moving in, they were more sensitive to unimportant physical variations simply because those differences were easy to judge. Browsing profiles of potential romantic partners is also likely to trigger a joint evaluation mind-set and cause users to overvalue qualities that are easy to assess but unlikely to determine compatibility. Indeed, profiles are chock-full of details that tend to be largely unrelated to the hard-to-discern, experiential characteristics that promote relationship well-being. Levels of education or physical attractiveness can be easily assessed through a profile, for example, whereas rapport and attraction are best evaluated face-to-face.

Engaging in joint evaluation can also strengthen so-called assessment mind-sets and undermine locomotion mind-sets. When in an assessment mind-set, a person critically evaluates a specific option against available alternatives. A person in a locomotion mind-set focuses on a certain selection, such as a desirable mate, and pursues it vigorously. To be sure, all dating involves some degree of assessment. The side-by-side evaluation of countless online-dating profiles, however, seems to invoke a strong assessment mind-set regarding the general pool and a weak locomotion mind-set with respect to any single person. One way to ward off a problematic mind-set is to take a moment to imagine what it might be like to talk to any profilee face-to-face. Mentally simulating a social interaction is likely to make you less critical and more motivated to consider possible ways you might be compatible. As with managing choice overload, do not waste time comparing a profile with too many others.

Cast a Wide Net

Studies suggest that online daters typically aim too high. They contact the most objectively desirable individuals at massively higher rates than others. In a real-world dating scenario, attendees at a party would not all strive to mob one attractive individual, which is effectively what happens online, because these daters cannot see how much attention a person is already receiving. These highly sought-after people are the least likely to respond to e-mails, and both the deluged daters and the pursuers can experience frustration as a result.

Part of the problem appears to stem from the attitudes that daters adopt, intentionally or not, when on these sites. In one 2010 study Rebecca Heino of Georgetown University and her colleagues described online dating as “relationshopping.” The metaphor of shopping is apt. Much like hunting for size 42 leather shoes online, online daters seek partners by searching through profiles using attributes such as income and hair colour, as opposed to arguably more important factors, such as a sense of humor or rapport. One online dater illustrated the shopping mentality as follows: “You know, ‘I’ll take her, her, her’—like out of a catalogue.” A second online dater agreed: “I can pick and choose; I can choose what size I want, it’s like buying a car, what options am I looking for.”

This checklist mentality underscores our lack of self-knowledge when it comes to romance. In one experiment, research participants who evaluated an online dater’s written profile expressed more attraction toward a person whose description was rigged to match their own idiosyncratic preferences. After a brief live interaction, however, the participants’ ideals no longer predicted romantic interest. These experiments tell us a few things. First, daters by and large think they covet the same people. Further, we are bad at predicting what we will find attractive in real life. Last, the easy accessibility of profiles may exacerbate these tendencies by encouraging us to evaluate potential partners in an ineffectual manner.

Rather than reaching out to the most desirable people “on paper,” consider looking for more idiosyncratic features that are likely to appeal to some daters more than others. More important, get away from profiles as soon as you can and do not expect too much from them in the first place. Stay open-minded about whom you might end up falling for—and who might love you back.

Communicate with Care

Online-dating sites include easy methods, such as e-mail and online chat functions, for users to communicate with prospective dates. In fact, dating hopefuls must converse through one of these methods before switching to a personal e-mail account or arranging for a telephone call. If these interactions go well, the romance seekers typically agree to meet in person in short order.

Unfortunately, many matches never get the chance to blossom. One reason is that not all profiles on a site represent paying or active users. In addition, responses to initial overtures can be few and far between. In one recent study, men replied to one out of four messages they received through a dating site, and women replied to one in six. More promisingly, this study found no evidence that eager responses were a turnoff; the faster the reply, the more likely that reciprocal communication continued. If you sense a spark, don’t play hard to get.

Putting some effort into the initial e-mail can also pay off. A linguistic analysis of 167,276 initial e-mails sent by 3,657 online daters revealed that the messages more likely to receive a response were characterised by less use of the pronoun “I” and of leisure words such as “movie” and by higher use of the pronoun “you” and of social-process words such as “relationship” and “helpful.”

At this stage, the incipient relationship is still fragile. Do not wait too long to set up a date. Most of the pairings that start communicating outside the dating site’s messaging systems meet face-to-face within a month, frequently within a week, according to two studies from 2008. Doing so is wise, as research shows that although a small amount of emailing or chatting online can increase attraction when two daters meet, too much of it tends to instill overly specific expectations.

Ultimately there is something that people must assess face-to-face before a romantic relationship can begin. Scholars are still working to identify exactly what that something is, but it appears to reside at the intersection of experiential attributes, chemistry and gut-level evaluations. Some emotional reactions could even be based on sensory experiences, such as smell, that cannot be gleaned any other way. Meeting in person also serves as an important reality check before intimacy progresses: people are less likely to misrepresent their observable attributes in a real-world setting as compared with online correspondence.

Don’t Bet on Matching Algorithms

Several high-profile dating sites promise to match users with an especially compatible individual using a ‘proprietary matching algorithm’. Unfortunately, these companies have so far failed to offer convincing evidence supporting this claim. Sp please consider this limitation before investing the sometimes considerable money required to join such services.

To their credit, dating-site algorithms can probably discern which people have an increased risk of experiencing relationship problems by assessing individual differences such as neuroticism and a history of substance abuse. Evidence that some people are better at sustaining intimacy than others is strong and unequivocal. By assessing these types of characteristics, online-dating sites can in principle screen out the relationally challenged more efficiently and effectively than a human can. This is a potentially useful service, as long as you are not one of the unlucky folks who gets eliminated!

This filtering service, however, yields far less than what algorithm-based matching sites typically promise their users. They pledge to identify potential mates who are particularly compatible with their customers—even soul mates—a claim that is hard to swallow for two simple reasons. No matching site has mustered any scientifically compelling evidence that its algorithm is effective. Second, decades of research on relationships suggest that the most important determinants of a relationship’s fate emerge only after the pair have met—factors such as the way the couple navigates interpersonal conflict, responds to unpredictable events or shares good news. Because matching sites have demonstrated insufficient ambition or creativity, their approaches are based solely on qualities of individuals that can be known prior to meeting in person. As a result, these algorithms are poorly equipped to predict whether strangers on a date will linger over dessert or quickly demand the check. Discerning whether two people will live happily ever after is even further out of reach.

Particularly exasperating is the fact that these matching sites could so easily test whether their algorithm actually works. If the proprietors would reveal their secret sauce, scientists could test its validity by randomly assigning online daters to one of four experimental conditions. In the wait-list control group, participants would experience no intervention. A placebo-control group would consist of subjects who believe they are being matched by the site’s algorithm but are actually matched at random. Daters in a relationship-aptitude control group would be paired with people who tend to be good at relationships in general and are not, say, especially neurotic. Last, individuals in an algorithm group would view profiles selected by the site’s matching technology.

If the members of the fourth group experienced romantic outcomes superior to those of the participants in the other three groups, then we would have evidence that the algorithm is effective. It seems suspicious than no site has so far done so—or allowed independent scholars to perform the study on its behalf. Until matching sites that claim to use science actually conduct minimally adequate experiments, online daters should think twice before paying a large amount of money for such services.

Know What Works

Some aspects of online-dating services are marvelous. They open up access to potential sources of romance that might never otherwise be available to their clients. They can transcend geographic and social-network boundaries to an unprecedented degree. These benefits may be especially powerful for those people who need it the most—including those who are socially anxious, have struggled to find like-minded partners or have recently moved to a new city.

Even though our decision making falters under trying conditions, it is worth noting that we are actually quite skilled at deducing certain personality characteristics from sparse amounts of information. Past research demonstrates that people can accurately assess a broad range of facts about others based on a brief exposure to their photographs. For example, when study participants viewed snapshots of the faces of chief executive officers from Fortune 1000 companies, their ratings of those CEOs’ leadership ability correlated strongly with the companies’ profits. What people cannot discern from an image, however, is how compatible they might be with the individual pictured. This capability also so far eludes online-dating sites, unfortunately.

In general, however, online-dating sites present a unique opportunity to bring happiness into the world. The industry is still in its infancy, which is probably one reason it contains so many flaws. As these services increasingly incorporate the best relationship science, they will evolve and improve. When wielded with skill and structure, these tools can help millions of ‘free-and-singles’ find love.

References:

Formal Intermediaries in the Marriage Market: A Typology and Review. Aaron C. Ahuvia and Mara B. Adelman in Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 54, No. 2, pages 452–463; May 1992.

When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 79, No. 6, pages 995–1006; December 2000.

Sex Differences in Mate Preferences Revisited: Do People Know What They Initially Desire in a Romantic Partner? Paul W. Eastwick and Eli J. Finkel in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 94, No. 2, pages 245–264; February 2008.

Dating in a Digital World. Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis and Susan Sprecher. Scientific American Mind (September/October 2012), Vol. 23, 26-33.

Matching and Sorting in Online Dating. Guenter J. Hitsch et al. in American Economic Review, Vol. 100, No. 1, pages 130–163; March 2010.

Intimate Relationships. Thomas N. Bradbury and Benjamin R. Karney. W. W. Norton, 2010.

I always smile enormously when science starts to catch up with what the healing-therapy-natural medicine community has been doing.

So this month I share with you the latest scientific findings on mindfulness and EMDR.

Mindfulness to Reduce Social Anxiety

Many people who suffer the pain, depression and negative health effects associated with social anxiety or loneliness do not respond to common therapy tactics or drugs. Two new studies offer hope from an unlikely source: rather than focusing on your relationships with others, turn inward for relief.

Mindfulness meditation—which has been around for well over 2,000 years—has many forms, but an extensive body of research supports the effectiveness of one training program in particular. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is an eight-week program developed in 1979 by a U.S. physician. Initially created to help patients suffering from chronic pain, the program has been found to reduce symptoms of stress, depression and anxiety, even among people with cancer and HIV.

In one of the new studies, published in the October 2012 Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 55- to 85-year-old adults were randomized to either receive MBSR or be put on a waiting list for the program. The loneliness of the participants who received MBSR decreased after training, whereas the loneliness of the wait-listed control subjects increased slightly. MBSR also reduced inflammation—the cause of loneliness-related health risks such as heart attack or stroke—as measured by levels of stress proteins and proinflammatory gene expression.

The other study, published online in August 2012 in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, found that MBSR reduced negative emotions in people with social anxiety disorder.

Mindfulness training teaches people to be fully attentive to their present experience in a nonjudgmental way, which is believed to help reduce the rumination common to mood disorders. A mindful perspective teaches people how to apply a brake between a single lonely thought and what could be a resulting chain of distressing thoughts and feelings.

Recent research supports the effectiveness of EMDR

Imagine you are trying to put a traumatic event behind you. Your therapist asks you to recall the memory in detail while rapidly moving your eyes back and forth, as if you are watching a high-speed Ping-Pong match. The sensation is strange, but many therapists and patients swear by the technique, called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Although skeptics continue to question EMDR’s usefulness, recent research supports the idea that the eye movements indeed help to reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Much of the EMDR debate hinges on the issue of whether the eye movements have any benefit or whether other aspects of the therapeutic process account for patients’ improvement. The first phase of EMDR resembles the start of most psychotherapeutic relationships: a therapist inquires about the patient’s issues, early life events, and desired goals to achieve rapport and a level of comfort. The second phase is preparing the client to mentally revisit the traumatic event, which might involve helping the person learn ways to self-soothe, for example. Finally, the memory processing itself is similar to other exposure-based therapies, minus the eye movements. Some experts argue that these other components of EMDR have been shown to be beneficial as part of other therapy regimens, so the eye movements may not deserve any of the credit. New studies suggest, however, that they do.

In a January 2011 study in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, for example, some patients with PTSD went through a session of EMDR while others completed all the components of a typical EMDR session but kept their eyes closed rather than moving them. The patients whose session included eye movements reported a more significant reduction in distress than did patients in the control group. Their level of physiological arousal, another common symptom of PTSD, also decreased during the eye movements, as measured by the amount of sweat on their skin.

One of the ways EMDR’s eye movements are thought to reduce PTSD symptoms is by stripping troubling memories of their vividness and the distress they cause. A study in the May 2012 Behaviour Research and Therapy examined the effectiveness of using beep tones instead of eye movements during EMDR. The researchers found that eye movements outperformed tones in reducing the vividness and emotional intensity of memories.

Those studies relied on self-reports of symptom severity, however, so researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands sought more objective confirmation of a change in vividness by also measuring participants’ reaction times to fragments of a previously viewed picture. The work, published online in July 2012 in Cognition and Emotion, compared two groups of participants who had committed one detailed picture to memory. When asked to recall the picture and focus on it mentally, one group was instructed to perform eye movements. That group had slower reaction times to the familiar picture fragments in a subsequent memory test, and subjects reported that the vividness of the recalled pictures had decreased.

These studies and others from the past several years have helped validate EMDR—so much so that the American Psychiatric Association, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and the Departments of Defense and of Veterans Affairs have deemed it an effective therapy.

Yet how it works remains unclear. Chris Lee, a psychologist at Murdoch University in Australia and co-author of the January 2011 study, says a common theory is that EMDR takes advantage of memory reconsolidation: every time we recall a memory, it is changed subtly when we file it away again. For instance, parts of the memory may be left out, or new ideas and feelings are stored alongside of it. Making eye movements during recall, Lee explains, may compete with the recollection for space in our working memory, which causes the trauma memory to be less intense when recalled again.

The experiments show that negative autobiographical memories are very rich in sensory detail, and by pairing them with eye movements, they lose this sensory richness. People describe that the memories become less vivid and more distant, that they seem further in the past and harder to focus on. What follows after this distancing is a reduction in the associated emotional levels. This means in summary: the traumatic memory stays, but its power has been diminished.

Practicing meditation might make you sick from colds less often, and botox treatments that prevent facial muscles from registering negative emotions and could help depression. Have I gone completely mad? Not in the least! The latest scientific research reveals both of these to be true.

Meditate Away Your Cold

To stop or get rid of your next (winter) cold, try meditating or exercising now. A new study from the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that adults who practiced mindful meditation or moderately intense exercise for eight weeks suffered less from seasonal ailments during the following winter than those who did not exercise or meditate.

The study appeared in the July issue of Annals of Family Medicine. Researchers recruited about 150 participants, 80 percent of them women and all older than 50, and randomly assigned them to three groups. One group was trained for eight weeks in mindful meditation; another did eight weeks of brisk walking or jogging under the supervision of trainers. The control group did neither. The researchers then monitored the respiratory health of the volunteers with biweekly telephone calls and laboratory visits from September through May—but they did not attempt to find out whether the subjects continued meditating or exercising after the initial eight-week training period.

Participants who had meditated missed 76 percent fewer days of work from September through May than did the control subjects. Those who had exercised missed 48 percent fewer days during this period. The severity of the colds and flus also differed between the two groups. Those who had exercised or meditated suffered for an average of five days; colds of participants in the control group lasted eight. Lab tests confirmed that the self-reported length of colds correlated with the level of antibodies in the body, which is a biomarker for the presence of a virus.

The big news in this is that mindfulness meditation training appears to work in preventing or reducing the length of colds!

Botox Fights Depression

A common complaint about wrinkle-masking Botox is that recipients have difficulty displaying emotions on their faces. That side effect might be a good thing, however, for people with treatment-resistant depression.

In the first randomised, controlled study on the effect of botulinum toxin—known commercially as Botox—on depression, researchers investigated whether it might aid patients with major depressive disorder who had not responded to antidepressant medications. Participants in the treatment group were given a single dose (consisting of five injections) of botulinum toxin in the area of the face between and just above the eyebrows, whereas the control group was given placebo injections. Depressive symptoms in the treatment group decreased 47 percent after six weeks, an improvement that remained through the 16-week study period. The placebo group had a 9 percent reduction in symptoms. The findings appeared in May in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

Study author Axel Wollmer, a psychiatrist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, believes the treatment “interrupts feedback from the facial musculature to the brain, which may be involved in the development and maintenance of negative emotions.” Past studies have shown that Botox impairs people’s ability to identify others’ feelings, and the new finding adds more evidence: the muscles of the face are instrumental for identifying and experiencing emotions, not just communicating them.

Traditionally psychologists have attributed negative body image to pictures in the media of unusually thin or beautiful people with whom the rest of us compare our own physique. In June 2011 the American Medical Association released a statement that urged advertisers to stop the use of digitally altered photographs after researchers found links among exposure to mass media, negative body image and disordered eating.

The impact of distorted body image is widespread. Almost half of adolescent girls report being dissatisfied with their appearance, and the number of males reporting serious body image dissatisfaction is also on the rise (although the exact number of males thousands suffer from a clinical body image disturbance such as an eating disorder or body dysmorphic disorder, in which people cannot stop thinking about minor or imaginary “flaws” in their appearance.

Yet the question remains: Given that everyone is exposed to images of presumably perfect bodies, why don’t we all have serious trouble with body image? Research indicates that various biological and environmental factors must come together to create a problem. One of the more recently studied, and perhaps biggest biological contributors, is difficulty with interoception. Interoception informs us of emotions, pain, thirst, hunger and body temperature. People vary on how well they receive such cues. A deficit in this internal sense plays a leading role in the development of anorexia, bulimia and body dysmorphic disorder. Identifying this sensory defect as a major contributor to these ailments suggests new treatments that could speed recovery.

Internal Difficulties

We know whether we are full or hungry, hot or cold, itchy or in pain when receptors in the skin, muscles and internal organs send signals to a region of the brain called the insula. This small pocket of neural tissue is nestled in a deep fold of the brain’s external layer near the ears. It cultivates an awareness of the body’s internal state and, in doing so, plays an important role in self-awareness and emotional experience. Interoceptive data combine in the insula with external information about the body. This region will, for example, connect the sharp pain we experience when touching a hot stove with the red welt that appears on our palm. This integration forms our body image—that is, what we think we look like.

The greater the contribution from interoception as opposed to external, visual cues, the better a person’s body image. A runner with good interoception, say, might focus on the steady thud of her heart and the jolt of her feet against pavement, cues she might use to guide the speed and length of her run. By paying attention to how her body is functioning, the runner feels good about it no matter its exact proportions. A runner with poor interoception, on the other hand, might be thinking about whether onlookers notice the jiggling of her thighs. Because she has little internal input to anchor her sense of self, she can become overly concerned with small visual details, potentially resulting in a diminished body image. Someone with body dysmorphic disorder also lacks this sense of self, inadvertently causing him to focus more on what his nose looks like than how his nose feels on his face.

Distorted body image—known formally as body dysmorphia—can range from mild worries about whether these jeans make one’s bum look fat to an almost delusional misinterpretation of body size and shape as seen in anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. People can also have misconceptions in the reverse direction: In a 2010 study almost one in 10 obese adults thought their weight was normal. One explanation for the positive distortion in body shape in these individuals is poor interoception.

In 2004 neuroscientists developed a way to easily and reliably measure this internal experience. Healthy subjects were asked to try to count their heartbeats without taking their pulse while researchers electronically monitored their heart rate. The investigators found that the people whose guesses were closest to their real heart rates also scored highest on other measures of interoceptive awareness, such as questionnaires and brain scans of insula activity.

These heartbeat tests correlated well with how people judged other physiological changes, like feelings from their stomachs. Even those who are good at sensing their internal state do not know they have this talent because they have no way to compare themselves with others. As a result, most people who take the heartbeat test are at least somewhat surprised by their score. (To take the heartbeat test yourself, see the FREEBIE section)

Image Issues

The score does matter. Differences between women in interoceptive skill predict their level of body satisfaction. In a study last year, 214 college-age females were given tests for psychological problems ranging from social anxiety to disordered eating. They found that those who scored lower on measures of interoceptive ability had not only higher levels of body dissatisfaction but also more symptoms of eating disorders than those who were more in tune with their body.

People with anorexia have problems interpreting hunger and fullness cues. Someone with damaged interoception may not be able to physically sense her weight loss and so persists in thinking her body weight is normal or high even as she becomes emaciated. In anorexia patients, these difficulties extend to all areas of interoception: when they perform the heartbeat task, they typically do worse than people without the disorder.

In a study published in 2008 it was found that 28 anorexic women were about 68 percent accurate in sensing their heart rate compared with a 77 percent accuracy rate for women who did not have an eating disorder. This result represents a significant difference in interoceptive ability. Besides being worse at interoception, the anorexic women also had more psychological problems, such as depression and anxiety, lower body weights and significantly higher body dissatisfaction. (Virtually all the imaging studies done in anorexia patients have involved women because of the low number of males diagnosed with the illness.)

Underlying the interoceptive issues of anorexic individuals may be an unresponsive insula. In a study published in 2005 functional MRI was used to scan the brains, at rest, of 12 women who had recovered from anorexia nervosa. They found diminished blood flow—suggesting lower activation—in the insula of these women relative to 11 control subjects who had never had anorexia. An fMRI study published in 2003 had shown similar results. Both studies suggest that recovered anorexics are relatively slow to process interoceptive information, a bottleneck that likely leads to less input to their brain about their body and may complicate the recovery process.

Outside Influences

In addition to interpreting internal cues at rest, the insula typically responds with a burst of activity when a person is looking at a picture of herself. When normal, healthy women see photographs of themselves, blood rushes to the insula, suggesting that the picture enhances a person’s experience of what it is like to be inside her own body.

In anorexic women, however, the insula remains mute, even when prodded by such images. In a study published in 2008, researchers asked 10 anorexic women and 10 other females to view photographs of themselves and of others while in an MRI machine. Although seeing images of themselves caused a boost in insula activity in the healthy women, no such increase in activity appeared in the anorexic women (see MRI images below).

This finding hints that anorexics lack the ability to link external cues about their appearance to internal knowledge of their body, which was likely minimal in the first place. (The differences disappeared when the women looked at pictures of other people: in both groups, the insula was quiet.)

Compounding the problem, deficiencies in interoception may make your body image more vulnerable to other visual influences. In a 2011 study 46 female college students were tested using an unusual type of visual cue: a rubber hand. In what is known as the rubber hand illusion, a person can be made to feel as if a rubber hand is part of his body by having him place both hands on a table and blocking his view of the left hand with a cardboard divider. Immediately to the right of the divider, an experimenter places a lifelike rubber hand. Then he or she gently strokes both the person’s left hand and the rubber one with a small paintbrush. After a minute or two, many people begin to believe that the rubber hand is their real hand. Amazingly, the temperature of the left hand also drops significantly, suggesting that the brain loses ownership of the real left hand and gains ownership of the rubber hand.

Based on the results of the heartbeat test, the women were split into two groups: those with high scores—the group average was better than 80 percent—and those whose scores were below 50 percent. They found that the females with lower bodily awareness could more easily be fooled into thinking that a rubber hand was part of their body. Similarly, researchers think media images of thin women will have an outsize effect on those who lack internal awareness. People with good interoception, with their solid sense of themselves, would be less affected by seeing someone skinnier or, by some standards, more attractive than they are.

People with body dysmorphic disorder may have an additional perceptual problem. Evidence suggests they have visual-processing abnormalities that distort what they see. This distortion probably combines with low interoception to create a particularly poor body image.

Those who lack a keen awareness of their internal state also seem to be easily swayed by the opinions of others. They may evaluate their goals and attributes based on how they think others perceive them rather than by their own standards. In a study in 2004 scientists asked adult women with body dysmorphic disorder to recall specific memories from childhood. The researchers found that these women were significantly more likely to relate personal experiences as if they were happening to someone else. Instead of describing an event using a first-person perspective (for instance, “I saw …”), the patients with body dysmorphic disorder told the story as if they were a narrator in a novel (“this happened …”). Building better interoceptive awareness, then, could not only improve body image, it could also bolster a fragile sense of self.

Minding the Body

One way to increase your internal sense is to practice mindfulness, a mental mode characterized by attending fully to the present moment without elaboration or judgment. In numerous studies in the past decade researchers have found that incorporating mindfulness training into cognitive-behaviour therapy and other treatments for eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder has diminished symptoms and enhanced quality of life. Training people to closely heed their current, ongoing physical sensations may improve their interoception, scientists theorize.

Recent studies have tested yoga as a potential therapy for eating disorders. Certain forms of yoga, such as hatha or vinyasa yoga, encourage the participant to focus on both their breathing and the different bodily sensations produced by each pose—practices central to mindfulness.

In 2010 clinical psychologists assigned 27 adolescents receiving outpatient eating disorder treatment to eight weekly hour-long yoga sessions. The researchers hoped that by focusing their attention on the yoga poses and their own body, the adolescents would decrease their obsessions with food and weight.

The strategy seemed to work. At the start of treatment, these adolescents were so disconnected from their body that they had trouble balancing on one foot. After eight weeks of yoga, the teens had gained enough interoceptive skills to easily find their balance. They also showed greater improvements in all areas of eating disorder psychopathology, including body dysmorphia, than did 27 similarly afflicted youth who did not take yoga. It appears that yoga helps to give the young people a way to be more in tune with their body.

References:

Functional Neuroimaging in Early-Onset Anorexia Nervosa. B. Lask et al. in International Journal of Eating Disorders, Vol. 37, S49–S51; 2005. Discussion on pages S87–S89.

Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial of Yoga in the Treatment of Eating Disorders. T. R. Carei, A. L. Fyfe-Johnson, C. C. Breuner and M. A. Brown in Journal of Adolescent Health, Vol. 46, No. 4, pages 346–351; April 2010.

Just a Heartbeat Away from One’s Body: Interoceptive Sensitivity Predicts Malleability of Body-Representations. M. Tsakiris, A. Tajadura-Jiménez and M. Costantini in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Vol. 278, pages 2470–2476; August 22, 2011.

Inside the Wrong Body. C. Arnold. Scientific American Mind (May/June 2012), Vol. 23, pages 36-41.

When someone approaches you to ask, “What’s wrong?” you know that you are broadcasting unhappiness, whether or not you said a word. Perhaps it was a grimace or your sluggish gait that conveyed the message. You cannot help but communicate your mood to colleagues, neighbours and fellow commuters through numerous subtle cues.

Sensing the emotional states of others is an important part of social interaction. If you could not do this well, you might end up incongruously slapping the back of a person who is teary or stopping an anxious co-worker on his way to a meeting. People with autism and schizophrenia find it virtually impossible to detect other people’s feelings and as a result have extreme difficulty relating to others.

Being a master of these social hints is critical to success in many domains. You can solidify friendships by recognizing when a person is sad and doling out appropriate comfort, for example. To succeed in business, you also need to accurately detect the sentiments of other people when pitching a new idea or deciding when to ask for a promotion. National security can even hinge on sensing emotions. In the U.S., millions of dollars are spent every year on training law-enforcement and security officials to read feelings in people’s faces. Suspects who are faking, say, regret or calm might, after all, be hiding a criminal act or the intention to commit such an act.

In the past, scientists focused largely on the muscles of the face and a region of the brain responsible for detecting facial features. Lately, however, researchers have found that contextual cues—including a person’s posture, the tone of his or her speech, and the attitudes of bystanders—are critical to emotion perception. By pinpointing the regions of the brain that subconsciously assemble those clues within milliseconds, scientists are now beginning to understand how our senses shape our social skills.

Face First

In pioneering studies on emotion perception back in the 1970s, psychologist Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, then both at the University of California, San Francisco, classified expressions by what they called “facial action units,” which consist of combinations of physical changes in the face. For example, to generate a smile we raise the sides of our mouth and contract muscles that create wrinkles at the corners of our eyes. Some two decades later psychologist Nancy Kanwisher, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her colleagues identified a blueberry-size region in the brain, the fusiform face area (FFA), that responds specifically to faces.

In reading the emotions of others, the FFA collaborates with the amygdala, a processor of emotions. In 2001 neurologist Patrik Vuilleumier of the University of Geneva and his colleagues found that an individual’s amygdala responds to the appearance of fearful expressions even if that person is paying attention to something else. The FFA also responded more strongly to fearful than neutral faces, suggesting that the amygdala sends feedback that can augment the firing of neurons there.

Yet researchers now know that faces alone do not always betray feelings with great fidelity. As a result, we typically evaluate an expression’s context, including body posture, surrounding faces and tone of voice. The combination, it turns out, makes our judgments more reliable. Faces that in isolation appear contorted in disgust look proud when they are attached to a muscular physique with arms raised in triumph. What seems like a scowl may instead signal fear if it accompanies a description of danger. In the close-up of tennis player Serena Williams’s face in the left photo below, she looks either angry or pained. But zoom out (photo on the right), and you see she is clearly triumphant after a big win at the 2008 U.S. Open.

The more ambiguous the expression, the more we look to other information. Researchers have begun searching for regions of the brain that can interpret all the incoming data—and then solicit more, if necessary. Neurons in such “convergence zones” would need to respond to more than one type of sensory cue—sound as well as sight, for example—and identify them as arising from a common source, taking the first step toward gaining insight into another person’s mind.

Sensory Switchboards

In a study published in 2000 evidence was found for one such zone. The researchers exposed volunteers to word fragments either by displaying them on a screen or by playing their sounds. The scientists asked them to assemble the pieces into words as quickly as possible while inside a brain scanner. Regardless of whether the subjects saw letters or heard their sounds, the words came faster when the fragment was presented a second time. Accordingly, parts of the prefrontal cortex charged with forming abstract thoughts reacted to repeats more weakly than they did to novel fragments, which suggests a boost in brain efficiency the second time around. Because these regions showed the same response for both visual and auditory input, they satisfied the criteria for a region that could integrate different streams of sensory information to yield an overall impression of an object or scene.

Analogous brain regions seem to assimilate emotional stimuli. In a 2010 study Vuilleumier and his colleagues monitored brain activity while volunteers viewed or listened to actors expressing five different emotions: anger, disgust, happiness, fear or sadness. The actor expressed each emotion with his or her body (and the face obscured), face (with the body out of view) or tone of voice (with no visual input). The participants then rated how intensely they thought the actor was feeling the emotion portrayed.

The researchers were able to pinpoint two brain regions whose responses appeared to represent the feeling rendered independent of whether the face, body or voice conveyed the mood. These were the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the social brain involved in understanding others’ intentions, and the superior temporal sulcus, a groove in the temporal lobe involved in perceiving biological motion and the direction of a person’s gaze [see below]. These cerebral hotspots may serve as part of the switchboard that gathers and analyses data relevant to recognizing emotion in others.

Odour perceptions seem to join other sensory data to form a swift impression of a person’s feelings. In a 2010 study Seubert and colleagues decided to analyse how the brain registers disgust, which can be difficult to recognize by a face alone. The researchers asked people to identify feelings from pictures of expressive faces— disgusted, happy or neutral—while inside an MRI scanner. Along with the pictures, participants were exposed to either pleasant or repulsive odours piped to their nose through narrow tubes.

If an unpleasant odour accompanied a disgusted expression, people recognised the revulsion much faster than they did with the face alone. As expected, odours did not speed up recognition of happiness. They found that the presence of an unsavory odour diminished activity in the FFA, suggesting that smell helps the brain process emotions more easily. It was found that similar decrements in responsiveness in pre-frontal brain areas and in the insula, which encodes disgust. Because sights and sounds also activate regions of the prefrontal cortex, these results bolster the idea that the brain contains a network of regions responsible for weaving together the emotional messages embedded in several types of sensory data.

Lower Thoughts

Not all of that sensory blending occurs at a high level in the brain, however. More basic cross talk between senses may also take place; for example, regions dedicated to sound perception may respond to the sight of moving lips. In 2002 a team led by psychologist Sophie Molholm of the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, N.Y., reported detecting brain-wave patterns indicative of early interactions between sensory components. The researchers asked volunteers to press a button as soon as they either saw a circle on a screen or heard a high-pitched tone. In some instances, a circle was accompanied by the tone. When the stimuli were simultaneous, people reacted significantly faster. The combination of sight and sound boosted the amplitude of a particular brain wave that appears within 50 milliseconds of a novel stimulus, beyond what the sum of the equivalent individual visual and auditory signals produced. Because a neural message from the eyes requires at least 50 milliseconds to travel to the first stage of processing in the brain, these results suggest that visual and auditory cues combine long before they reach the front of the brain.

In light of this and other evidence, scientists believe the brain deciphers emotional content in several stages. Its quick and dirty assessment, orchestrated largely by the amygdala, can combine related stimuli to initiate gut responses when a situation requires immediate action. Later, frontal brain regions may perform a more detailed analysis to guide more deliberate behaviour.

Whatever goes on in the brain, knowing that emotion perception involves knitting together an array of sensory input may help us read others more accurately. Software that can interpret the emotional cues in facial expressions and tones of speech already exists, and in the near future these technologies or other types of training regimens could help teach autistic individuals, people with schizophrenia or others who are poor at detecting feelings what to look for in social situations. For the rest of us, we should be aware that getting a good handle on another person’s mood may mean taking a step back to see what that smirk, smile or furrowed brow really means. The posture, manner of speaking or aroma that accompanies that facade could tell us all we need to know.

References:

◆ Supramodal Representations of Perceived Emotions in the Human Brain. Marius V. Peelen, Anthony P. Atkinson and Patrik Vuilleumier in Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 30, No. 30, pages 10127–10134; July 28, 2010.

◆ Processing of Disgusted Faces Is Facilitated by Odor Primes: A Functional MRI Study. Janina Seubert et al. in Neuroimage, Vol. 53, No. 2, pages 746–756; November 1, 2010.

◆ Context in Emotion Perception. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Batja Mesquita and Maria Gendron in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 20, No. 5, pages 286–290; October 2011.

◆ Sensational Senses: I Know How You Feel. Janina Seubert & Christina Regenbogen. Scientific American Mind, Vol. 23, nr. 1, pages 54-57, 2012.

I was standing in the queue, waiting to disembark from the airplane at Leeds Airport, when the strong acrid sweaty odour of a dishevelled man a few places in front of me, filled my nostrils. I found myself transported back into the sitting room of an old lady I used to visit when I was 17-years old as part of a community service program from my school. ‘Aunty Clara’ as I had to call her, would make me empty her urine and faeces filled toilet bowl that she kept in the sitting room….and she smelled old and sweaty. I did not like having to visit her for an hour on a Friday afternoon. I had not thought about her in years, but in that split second I was back in that little room, looking at the clock and watching the hands move round until I could finally leave after an hour. The powerful memories that smells evoke got me thinking…..

Memory comes in many forms. Every day we constantly receive and process sights, sounds, touches and smells from our surroundings, some of which will become our memories. The nature of those recollections, however, is inconstant. One memory can seem immediate and colourful, as if the event had just occurred, whereas another must be coaxed out of our brain little by little. Although a moment that excites our emotions is more likely to be recorded than a routine experience, the sensory qualities of the event we have buried in our brain also plays a part in how vividly and accurately we remember something. Although sight dominates our daily life, it has long been thought that smell might have a privileged relation with memory. Until relatively recently, however, the precise nature of that connection remained largely unexplored. Now scientists are revealing that recollections tied to smell can be stronger than memory of other types. Olfaction can transport our

thoughts back to some of our earliest experiences and tint these remembrances with feeling. On the flip side, its absence could be a sign—and potentially a cause— of cognitive decline. Scientists are at a very early stage of developing therapies to train people to smell better, which could one day stave off the deterioration of mental faculties.

Transported by Scent

Aristotle explored the apparent ties between odour and memory in his treatise from the fourth century B.C., On Sense and the Sensible. Since then, people have speculated that the memories elicited by smell are more intimate and immediate than other recollections. When we experience certain smells, we often find ourselves whisked back in time to a specific event or scene.

Psychology studies support the idea that memories associated with odours are unusually evocative. In a 2006 experiment psychologists Johan Willander and Maria Larsson of Stockholm University gave older adults one of three types of cues—visual, auditory or olfactory—and asked them to describe an autobiographical event that came to mind as a result. The participants also rated the event based on its emotionality, vividness and importance.

Although the volunteers came up with the same number of memories for each type of cue, odours elicited earlier memories, including far more from the first 10 years of life, than did sight or sound cues. Recollections emerging from scents were also associated with a stronger feeling of being brought back in time. The results suggest that memories tied to smell are both older and associated with a more time travel–like experience than are other types.

The use of odours to trigger memories has led researchers to reconsider the long-held notion that people recall more incidents from their teens and 20s than from any other time in their life. In 2000 psychologist Simon Chu and his colleagues discovered that although visual memories did peak between the ages of 11 and 25, odour-cued recollections crested between the ages of six and 10.

Rachel Herz, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University, sees olfaction as a potential key to a trove of past experiences that would otherwise remain locked. A whiff of a smell not encountered since childhood may bring us back to an event that we had all but forgotten existed, she theorises.

Smell might have this power because odours themselves are relatively rare, compared with, say, visual stimuli. Every day our eyes are constantly bombarded with images, many of which are quite similar, creating confusing interference in the brain. In contrast, our nose detects distinct odours only infrequently, a fact that Richard Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania, surmises is key to the evocative power of scent. Because smells are encountered rarely, individual odours are often tied to a unique experience, enabling a strong and stable connection.

Smell has a privileged relation with memory on an anatomical level as well. It is the only sense that connects with the memory system without stopping over in the thalamus, a sensory relay station. Signals travel from the nose to the olfactory bulb and then directly to the hippocampus, an essential hub of memory formation, and the amygdala, which processes emotion. Memory and odours are just sitting side by side in the brain!

The connection does not end there. In a parallel track, the olfactory bulb passes information to the olfactory cortex, which sits at the surface of the brain just above the ears. Part of this region is involved in complex learning and memory tasks. The olfactory cortex, together with an adjacent decision- making area, the orbitofrontal cortex, processes the information contained in a smell and sends the data back to the hippocampus. This back-and-forth communication ties scents with remembrances.

Sniffs of Young Noses

To understand why odours seem to strongly evoke very early life experiences, scientists began to search for other differences in how the senses interact with memory. In 2009 neuroscientist Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues taught subjects to pair pictures of objects with a smell or a sound, or both. Subjects then viewed pictures of the objects while in an MRI scanner and were asked to recall either the smell or sound associated with each image. In a second round, the researchers paired every object with an opposing odour or sound or odour-sound pair: if the first stimulus had been pleasant, this time, it was unpleasant—and vice versa. Another brain scan and test of these memories followed.

One week later the researchers presented the pictures a third time and asked participants to name the odour or sound that popped into their mind. Overall, people recalled the memories from the first round slightly more than those in the second set. The brain scans, however, produced a more nuanced picture. When a person thought of the first odour, the hippocampus became much more active than when he or she remembered the second smell, suggesting that the brain issues a special tag for first odour associations. In contrast, the hippocampus activity was the same for first and second sounds.

In addition, on the first memory test, the more the hippocampus responded during odour retrieval, the more likely a person was to later remember that first odour as opposed to the second. No such relation existed for sounds. Given the brain’s unique response to first odour memories, the smells of childhood may make early remembrances particularly durable.

Although its effect on our earliest recollections may be most pronounced, smell might also facilitate learning more broadly. In a study published in 2007 neuroendocrinologist Jan Born and his colleagues at the University of Lübeck in Germany asked people to inhale the smell of a rose while studying the locations of 15 pairs of cards on a computer screen. When the participants went to sleep that night in the lab, some of them were exposed to the rose odour, whereas others’ sleep was unscented. In the morning, all the participants were tested on their memory for the card locations. Those who had been exposed to the flower fragrance remembered 97 percent of them, compared with just 86 percent for those who had received an odourless stimulus, suggesting that odours can boost learning as memories are consolidated during sleep.

Waiting to Inhale

The memories that smell evokes also have a distinct emotional tint. In studies in which Herz and her colleagues asked people to rate the poignancy of various memories, those provoked by odours were steeped in more feeling than those brought to mind by visual, verbal, tactile and auditory cues. In these studies, the subjective responses of emotion jibed with physical changes, such as heart rate.

Consistent with the anatomical portrait of smell, odours also uniquely recruit brain regions that process both emotion and memory. In a 2004 study Herz’s team asked participants to identify a perfume that elicited a pleasant personal memory. One month later the people were shown a picture of the perfume as well as a photograph of a different perfume—and exposed to the odour of each— while inside a brain scanner. The researchers found that the odour related to the emotional memory generated more activity in the amygdala than did the pictures or the other odour. These chosen odours were also the only cues that boosted the neural response in memory-related regions. The brain’s response thus mirrors people’s subjective impressions that odours possess a unique power to summon emotional memories.

Accordingly, the loss of smell seems to have ripple effects on the integrity of memory and emotion centers. In studies published in 2010 and 2011 rsearchers at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany saw shrinkage of neural tissue in both the hippocampus and emotional brain structures in individuals with anosmia (the inability to perceive smells) and parosmia (the distortion of smells), as compared with people with no smell impairments, hinting that a loss of smell may impair memory or emotional processing, or a combination of both. Smell’s ties to emotion also become apparent in cases in which the loss of smell leads to depression—or depression leads to the loss of smell.

Whiff of Sadness

In addition to unleashing emotions from the past, the ability to detect scents also seems to influence a person’s current mood. Psychologist Bettina Pause, now at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, and her colleagues have shown that individuals who suffer from depression have a blunted sense of smell. Although it is not clear whether that sensory loss fed the depression or resulted from it, many researchers believe the influence runs in both directions.

For example, some data suggest a bad mood can impair smell. In a 2007 study a team led by psychologist Olga Pollatos, now at the University of Potsdam in Germany, coaxed participants into one of three emotional states—positive, negative or neutral—and then measured their sensitivity to an odour. The researchers found that the people in a negative emotional state had reduced sensitivity to the odour as compared with those in a neutral or good mood.

Anecdotal reports also hint that a loss of smell can spawn sadness. For instance, surgery in the nasal cavities to remove polyps often leads to mild depression, psychiatrists say. As a result of such observations, cognitive neuroscientist Rachel Herz of Brown University believes people can get into a “depression-olfaction loop”: sadness suppresses smell, and that sensory loss, in turn, deepens the depression.

The loss of emotional balance may subsequently affect a person’s ability to learn and form memories. Depression is often accompanied by a decline in both memory and learning ability. Sufferers have a smaller hippocampus, a key memory center, than nondepressed people and, as a study published in 2010 suggests, a smaller olfactory bulb.

Although it is not clear whether olfactory deficits directly impair cognition, they are often an early sign of a declining mind. In 2009 research psychiatrist Monica Scalco and her colleagues at the University of Toronto found that poor performance on a standard test of smell could serve as a very early indicator of cognitive decline in older people. Olfactory deficits in these individuals appear to precede cognitive impairment. Complete loss of smell is also a signature of incipient Alzheimer’s disease. In 2010 neurosurgeon Qing Yang and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University reported that they could use functional MRI to detect subtle deviations in the activity of the olfactory system in Alzheimer’s patients that were not present in people without the disease. In the future, doctors might look for such changes to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s at a very early stage.

Exercise Your Nose

No one yet knows whether improved detection of odours can enhance cognition. Given that it might, however, scientists are looking at the possibility of shoring up people’s sense of smell. In some cases, exposure to an odour can improve its detection. Take androstenone, a steroid found in sweat and urine. About one third of us cannot smell it at all, and for the rest, it smells like either sweaty socks or vanilla, depending on an individual’s genetic makeup. In 2002 a group led by Joel Mainland at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated that exposing insensitive individuals to androstenone for 10 minutes daily for 21 days gave them the ability to pick up its scent. The researchers’ data suggest the changes occurred in olfactory brain systems rather than in the nose itself.

In findings published last November, Wilson and his colleagues revealed that rats could gain or lose the ability to smell the difference between two similar chemicals, depending on the circumstances. The results hint that, as with rats, humans may be able to learn or unlearn how to smell as a result of everyday experiences. If we then inadvertently lose our ability to distinguish among odours—say, as a result of inattention or lack of practice—data suggest that the loss may affect other parts of our brain. Those of us who end up with declining olfactory abilities may be at risk for a loss of mental acuity or changes in our memories.

As a remedy, some kind of smell training might help ward off such a decline. Doty believes that regular exposure to odours from childhood on—or more mindful attention to existing odours—might thwart a subtle erosion of cognition. In addition, people might be systematically tested for loss of smell just as they are examined for hearing and sight impairments now. It could be a warning sign if your sense of smell starts to fail.

And with that in mind, my nose is starting to tell me that the bread I have baking in the oven is almost ready. I often hear from clients and friends who come in when have just baked bread or am in the middle of doing so, that that smell transports them back to happy times…See you next month!

References:

◆ Learning to Smell: Olfactory Perception from Neurobiology to Behavior. Donald A. Wilson and Richard J. Stevenson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

◆ The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. Rachel Herz. William Morrow, 2007.

◆ The Olfactory System and Its Disorders. R. L. Doty in Seminars in Neurology, Vol. 29, No. 1, pages 74–81; February 2009.

◆ The Privileged Brain Representation of First Olfactory Associations. Y. Yeshurun, H. Lapid, Y. Dudai and N. Sobel in Current Biology, Vol. 19, No. 21, pages 1869–1874; November 9, 2009.

◆ Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way. Molly Birnbaum. Ecco, 2011.

◆ Smells Like Old Times: our sense of smell sways our memory and thought. Maria Konnikova. Scientific American Mind, Vol. 23, nr. 1, pages 59-63.

The scientific community is just beginning to appreciate how the fields generated by living systems and the ionosphere interact with one another. For instance, the earth and the ionosphere generate a symphony of frequencies ranging from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz, and some of the large resonances occurring in the earth’s fields are in the same frequency range as those of the human heart and brain. Although researchers have looked at some of the possible interactions between the earth’s fields and human, animal and plant activity, scientists have barely scratched the surface of what is possible when we realise that these two fields could work together. But, I am jumping ahead of myself…!

A number of important findings already have emerged. For example, changes in the earth’s magnetic field are associated with:

• changes in brain and nervous system activity
• performance of athletic, memory and other tasks
• sensitivity in a wide range of extrasensory perception experiments
• synthesis of nutrients in plants and algae
• the number of reported traffic violations and accidents
• mortality from heart attacks and strokes
• incidence of depression and suicide.

It’s interesting to note that changes in geomagnetic conditions affect the rhythms of the heart more strongly than all the physiological functions studied so far.

There is also evidence in some cases that people’s brainwaves can synchronise with the rhythm of the electromagnetic waves generated in the earth’s ionosphere. When people say they “feel” an impending earthquake or other planetary events, such as weather changes, it is possible that they may be reacting to the actual physical signals that occur in the earth’s field prior to the event.

While it is not difficult to conceive that life-forms embedded in the earth’s magnetic fields could be affected by modulations in these fields, it is a more far-reaching proposition to suggest that the earth’s fields can be influenced or modulated by human emotions. Nevertheless, researchers theorise that when large numbers of humans respond to a global event with a common emotional feeling, the collective response can affect the activity in the earth’s field. In cases where the event evokes negative responses, this could be thought of as a planetary stress wave, and in cases where a positive wave is created, it could create a global coherence wave. This perspective is supported by research which has shown that emotions not only create coherence or incoherence in our bodies, but, like radio waves, also radiate outward and are detected by the nervous systems of others in our environment.

It is now clear that our nervous systems detect these electromagnetic waves generated by others in our environment, but does it work the other way around? Is there also evidence of a global effect when large numbers of people create similar outgoing waves?

Do Our Human Fields Affect the Earth’s Fields?

The events of 11^th September provided for the first time in our history the chance to monitor an outpouring of human emotion. In September 2001, two geostationary operational environmental satellites (GOES) orbiting the earth detected a rise in global magnetism that forever changed the way scientists view our world and us. The GOES-8 and GOES-10 each showed a powerful spike of Earth’s magnetic-field strength in the readings they broadcast every 30 minutes. It was the magnitude of the spikes and the time they occurred that first called them to the scientists’ attention. From a location of about 22,300 miles above the equator, GOES-8 detected the first surge, followed by an upward trend in the readings that topped out at nearly 50 units (nanoteslas) higher than any that had been typical for the same time previously. The time was 9a.m. eastern standard time, 15 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center and about 15 minutes before the second impact.

At the same time, Roger Nelson and his team at Princeton University for the Global Consciousness Project utilsed a worldwide network of random number generators. Their findings have provided convincing evidence that human consciousness and emotionality create or interact with a global field, which affect the randomness of these electronic devices. The largest change in the random number generators occurred during the terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Even more intriguing was the fact that the random number generators were significantly affected some four to five hours prior to the attack, suggesting a worldwide collective intuition about the impending event (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Evidence of Collective Intuition: Random Number Generator Data from Around the World per 9/11/01 Terrorist Attacks.

In addition, two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) space weather satellites monitoring the earth’s geomagnetic field also displayed a significant spike at the time of the September 11th attack and for several days thereafter, indicating the stress wave possibly caused by mass human emotion created modulations in the geomagnetic field (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Geosynchronous Operational Environmental Satellites – Measuring the Earth’s Geomagnetic Field.

The correlation between the events and the reading was uncanny. And it was undeniable. In light of the data, two questions had to be asked: Were the attacks on the World Trade Center and the satellite readings actually related? If so, what was the link? It’s the answer to the second question that sparked the research, and the ambitious initiative that has followed. Subsequent studies by Princeton University and the Institute of HeartMath, have found that the correlation between the GOES readings and the events of 9/11 are more than coincidences.

Following the discovery that the satellites had recorded similar spikes during events of global focus in the past, such as the death of Princess Diana, the factor that seemed to connect the readings was clear: the indications pointed to the human heart. Apparently, the last episode of ‘The Bachelor’ (when the Bachelor chose the woman he wanted to marry) also caused a large spike! It seems that the world loves a love story :=)

So it would seem more specifically that it is the heart-based emotions (not just love) of the world’s population that results from such events that seems to be influencing the magnetic fields of the earth. What makes this discovery so significant is that those fields are now being linked to everything from the stability of the climate to peace between nations.

References:

http://www.glcoherence.org/monitoring-system/about-system.html

http://sites.google.com/site/peaceandconflictresolution/miracleprayerchains/magnetic-fields

At this time of year many of us are trying to turn over new leaves, and make plans for the coming year. We might even be trying to forget some of the more painful events of the last year. But is it possible to actually erase traumatic memories?

For decades scientists believed that long-term memories were unchangeable—unstable for a few hours and then etched into the brain for good. Research now suggests that recalling a memory causes it to revert temporarily to an insecure state, in which the recollection can be added to, modified, even erased. Memory is thus more dynamic, more fluid and malleable than was thought.

That idea, brought to the fore about a decade ago, has opened up a new controversial research area exploring the possibility of deleting, or at least muting, parts of human memory with drugs or targeted therapies. Some experts have found that a drug used to treat high blood pressure works to unseat recollections; others are testing novel biochemical means or behavioral interventions to interfere with unwanted remembrances.

Although scientists and ethicists worry that such drugs might be abused or have unsettling side effects, these treatments could also liberate individuals from experiences that haunt them—including a traumatic event—and the emotions that linger, such as the agony from the death of a loved one or the crippling apprehension from a car accident or sports injury.

Window of Vulnerability

To create, or consolidate, stable long-term memories, the brain must synthesize specific proteins in the hours after events occur. Those proteins are part of a cascade of chemical processes that remodel some of the tiny junctions, or synapses, between brain cells to make these cells communicate more efficiently. The construction process often includes the production of more synapses, which further facilitates neuronal chatter.

A decade ago most memory researchers believed these synaptic connections were extremely stable and resistant to degradation. They might fade with time, but they could not be changed or erased. Yet Karim Nader, as a 33-year-old postdoctoral student at New York University back in 1999, was new enough to question that dogma. After attending a lecture on memory delivered by Nobel winner neuroscientist Eric Kandel, Nader wondered exactly what happens when we recall an event. To do so, it seemed to him, you would have to take the memory out of storage. What if you added new information or blocked the chemical processes needed to put that memory back? To find out, Nader and his colleagues created the kind of searing emotional memory that should have been permanent and immutable. He placed a rat in a cage and played a tone while delivering a shock through the metal floor. Soon all Nader had to do was play the sound, and the rat would freeze in terror. The two stimuli, convention held, had been permanently connected.

Fourteen days later the researchers played the tone and simultaneously injected a drug that blocks protein synthesis into the rat’s amygdala, an emo- tion hub in the brain with an important role in establishing emotionally rich memories. Nader’s intent was to see if the drug would interfere with the memory’s return to storage. The strategy worked. In subsequent trials, the animal no longer froze at the sound. It had forgotten the meaning of the tone and therefore had been liberated from its trauma.

The experiment provided powerful support for a theory called reconsolidation that was first floated back in the 1960s but largely abandoned because of lack of evidence. It holds that reminding a person or animal of something makes that memory temporarily unstable. During a brief window before the memory is “reconsolidated,” it is susceptible to being changed. We used to think the memories we had were pictures of the original event. Now we know that it is the last version of the memory because each time we retrieve it, it changes a little bit.

Shutting Off the Alarm

Nader’s findings were a revelation to Alain Brunet, a Montreal-based psychiatrist who had already been experimenting with ways to prevent the initial consolidation of traumatic memories as a preventive measure against PTSD. Brunet had drawn his inspiration from a series of groundbreaking experiments conducted by James McGaugh in the 1990s. McGaugh had demonstrated that a drug called propranolol, a so-called beta blocker used to treat high blood pressure and anxiety, could also weaken new memories.

Propranolol interferes with a key signaling agent that normally augments memory formation in response to an emotional event. Anytime we get emotionally aroused, the adrenal gland releases stress hormones, which trigger the release of a chemical in the brain called norepinephrine. This neurotransmitter binds to receptors in the amygdala, which in turn dis- charges a flood of chemicals that signal the rest of the brain to encode the memory. Propranolol binds to, and blocks, those receptors. McGaugh showed he could inhibit typical memory formation by administering propranolol, which he thinks interferes with the action of noradrenaline—thus preventing the memory-boosting signal from ever going out. Brunet, together with a Harvard colleague Roger Pitman, immediately recognized the potential for treating patients who had been exposed to trauma—triggering what Brunet calls “pathological remembrances.” In 2002 and 2003 teams led first by Pitman and then by Brunet administered propranolol to trauma victims who came through emergency rooms in Boston and in Lille, France. Both research groups demonstrated that administering the drug was far more effective at reducing the likelihood the participants would develop PTSD than a placebo was. Brunet and Pitman were both excited by the effects of the drug. Yet the limitations of the therapy were clear. The procedure would help patients only during the brief window before the long-term memory had consolidated, within hours of the initial event. By definition, PTSD does not set in until at least six months later.

Nader’s findings offered new hope. They showed that established memories could be made labile again just by taking them out of storage. So, in 2005, Nader, Brunet and Pitman joined forces to test whether propranolol might also be able to tweak older memories. The researchers asked 19 patients suffering from chronic PTSD to recall their trauma. They gave half of them propranolol and the other half a sugar pill. A week later Brunet monitored the physiological response of the patients as they listened to an audio account of their event. Those who had received the beta blocker still retained a memory of the factual details but were significantly less aroused than those given the dummy drug. A few theories attempt to explain propranolol’s action. As with the initial trauma, recalling an agonizing memory releases stress hormones, which may well be involved in reconsolidating the memory afterward. One possibility is that propranolol blunts the action of noradrenaline then, too. Alternatively, the drug might be inhibiting the protein synthesis needed to put emotional memories back into storage.

Either way the initial evidence for propranolol’s effects, published in 2008, led to a larger study. Brunet published the results of his study, which included 66 patients in Boston, France and Montreal, just last August. On average, physiological symptoms of fear such as a racing heart and sweating diminished by 50 percent for the 40 PTSD patients who took propranolol, compared with a 7 percent decrease for the 26 patients who did not take the drug. After the experiment, Brunet claims, roughly three out of four propranolol patients were so improved they no longer met the criteria for PTSD.

New Knowledge

Yet propranolol may not offer a foolproof way to forget. Neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps of N.Y.U. spent several years attempting to erase fear memories in mentally healthy people using propranolol. They found that the drug could only temporarily expunge a learned association between a visual stimulus (a coloured square) and a shock. The fear later returned as if the therapy had never been applied at all. Phelps believes the propranolol failed because her subjects still knew that the coloured squares were associated with the shocks—and that this conscious memory generated a fear response even after the emotional record of the initial event was erased. Exactly why the drug worked for trauma victims is unclear, but Brunet says their memories are starkly different from the associations Phelps studied. In Brunet’s study, people with PTSD are dealt with, whereas in Phelps’ study subjects are dealing with a simple task using squares and triangles.

In a study published in 2010 Phelps and Schiller demonstrated a method Phelps believes eliminates the potential interference from overt knowledge. Instead of simply sending subjects home after the visual reminder of the shock, the researchers added an experience designed to modify both the conscious and emotional aspects of the memory.

After showing volunteers a picture of the square, Schiller and Phelps waited for a variable period, then delivered “extinction training,” a kind of behavioural therapy intended to overwrite the dreaded association with one that is benign. In this case, the researchers exposed the volunteers to images of the coloured squares, but this time they did not deliver a shock so that these individuals would think of the images as “safe” again. The timing of this extinction training was key. Previous research held that the initial reminder, the square, would spark chemical processes that would render the memory of the shock temporarily vulnerable to modification or erasure while the memory was being reconsolidated. This so-called reconsolidation window would close once those processes were complete.

Some volunteers viewed the square 10 minutes before receiving this extinction training, a time point within the reconsolidation window. Others saw the square six hours before the extinction training—safely outside that window. A third group did not see the square prior to extinction training.

All three groups returned to the lab on a third night and were presented with pictures of the squares as researchers monitored their fear response. The response virtually disappeared in those who had received the extinction training during the reconsolidation window, whereas it returned for those who had not, providing evidence that human memories are malleable during this window and can be blunted without drugs. In fact, altering memory with new information in this manner might be especially effective because it adds to conscious knowledge, rather than just altering an instinctive fear memory—a strategy that might not work in the long run. (Other forms of behavioral therapy, such as memory suppression, may also work most effectively during recall, within the reconsolidation window.)

Chemical Intervention

If you asked one of Phelps and Schiller’s volunteers what happened the first night of the trial, they would very likely be able to tell you about the shocks, even if they no longer linked them with the squares. The same holds for the propranolol-taking trauma victims. But what if we could erase those memory traces altogether?

Neuroscientist Todd Sacktor is developing a compound that would do just that. In 1990 Sacktor and his colleagues discovered an enzyme known as protein kinase M-zeta (PKMzeta) they suspected might play a role in long-term memory. Not only was the enzyme present in the appropriate regions of the brain, but it also had chemical properties that scientists thought were ideally suited to supporting the maintenance of such neural traces.

In 2006 Sacktor’s team confirmed its hunch. The researchers trained a rat to avoid an area of a room where it received an electric shock. Then they waited a day and injected a drug that inhibited PKMzeta into the hippocampus, where the memory was presumably stored. When they put the rat back in the room, it could not remember what area to avoid. Blocking the actions of PKMzeta had wiped out the rat’s memory of the event, proving the enzyme had a role in maintaining the memory. This past March, Sacktor and his colleagues reported the same effect with a mutation that crippled PKMzeta. They also did the reverse and enhanced memory in rats with a genetic manipulation that caused the animals to produce additional copies of the enzyme.

Meanwhile Sacktor’s team had figured out how the enzyme worked. It catalyzes a reaction that enables the transport of key proteins to the synapses. These proteins respond to the neurotransmitter glutamate, allowing a neuron to detect the firing of a neighboring cell by its resulting release of glutamate. The upshot is effective information transfer.

A drug that shuts down PKMzeta, however, is like a “nuclear bomb,” Nader says; it obliterates all memory, not just the recollections you want to detonate. Yet Sacktor may have found a way around this problem. Every time a memory is pulled out of storage, he believes, the brain breaks down the PKMzeta connected to that memory. To put the memory back, he posits, the brain must create the enzyme anew. Sacktor has developed a drug that, in unpublished experiments, blocks the synthesis of new PKMzeta in rats for about two hours. In theory, then, a person could selectively shut out troublesome memories by recalling them, making them active and then taking this drug, which would stop the brain from restocking them. If the drug works as Sacktor imagines—a big “if” at the moment—it promises to be more powerful than propranolol.

Bioethicists such as Paul Root Wolpe worry about such strong medicine for the mind. “Memory is such a crucial part of what makes us who we are that we have to be extremely cautious about changing or erasing [memories],” Wolpe says. “To what degree will we use this technology in ways that threaten selfhood and personality?” He also frets that people with sinister motives could abuse a potion that makes others forget— enabling an intelligence officer to get away with torture, say, or a parent with the abuse of a child.

Yet the terror many trauma survivors endured is (in their own words) not a critical part of who they are. It can often accomplish quite the opposite: it cracked their sense of self. Only calibrating that recollection, in fact, could enable them to reassemble the person they had been— and the delightfully ordinary lives they had once led.

References:

◆ Storage of Spatial Information by the Maintenance Mechanism of LTP. E. Pastalkova, P. Serrano, D. Pinkhasova, E. Wallace, A. A. Fenton and T. C. Sacktor in Science, Vol. 313, pages 1141–1144; August 25, 2006.

◆ Preventing the Return of Fear in Humans Using Reconsolidation Up- date Mechanisms. Daniela Schiller, Marie-H. Monfils, Candace M. Raio, David C. Johnson, Joseph E. LeDoux and Elizabeth A. Phelps in Nature, Vol. 463, pages 49–53; January 7, 2010.

◆ Does Reconsolidation Occur in Humans? Daniela Schiller and Elizabeth A. Phelps in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol. 5, Article 24. Pub- lished online May 17, 2011.

◆ Trauma Reactivation under the Influence of Propranolol Decreases Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms and Disorder: 3 Open-Label Trials. Alain Brunet, Joaquin Poundja, Jacques Tremblay, Éric Bui, Émilie Thom- as, Scott P. Orr, Abdelmadjid Azzoug, Philippe Birmes and Roger K. Pit- man in Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 31, No. 4, pages 547–550; August 2011.

◆ Totaling recall. A. Piore. Scientific American Mind, Vol. 22, no. 6, pages 40-45, 2012.

There seems to be no escaping stress. Even the good things in life can stress you out! (After all, “desserts” spelled backward is “stressed.”)

You may think that the best way to reduce stress is through relaxation (e.g. yoga, meditation), but apparently that is NOT true……

Some experts suggest that a little stress is good for you. According to the latest research, this is misleading: these results were obtained from averaging data across many individuals. High levels of stress are harmful to most people, adversely affecting health, mood and productivity. And yes, most people do perform and feel better when faced with moderate levels of stress. It is bizarre but very few people know how to be productive when they are not being pushed by stressors—but it can be done. Just as some people are able to perform well under highly stressful conditions (think Olympic athletes), it is also possible to perform well when relaxed (think masters of kung fu). Wouldn’t it be gratifying to be able to lead a life that is productive but also virtually stress-free? Well, that DOES seem possible!

Bear in mind that there is only an approximate relationship between stress (our internal, adverse reaction to stimuli we perceive as threatening) and stressors (the threatening stimuli that actually surround us.) A traffic jam or busy train station might make us feel stressed one day but not the next. This is good news because it suggests that with the right training and preparation, we might be able to face any stressor in a much more relaxed way.

In real life, unfortunately, although we receive intensive formal training in writing and maths at school, but learning how to manage stress is left entirely to chance. Many people, overwhelmed by having to pay bills, traffic and abusive bosses, resort to destructive ways of coping, with drugs and alcohol being the most common. But research conducted over the past few decades suggests that there are at least four broad, trainable skill sets or “competencies” people can use to manage stress nondestructively. These are:

• source management (reducing or eliminating the sources of stress)
• relaxation (practicing techniques such as breathing exercises or meditation)
• thought management (correcting irrational thinking and interpreting events in ways that don’t hurt you), and
• prevention (planning and conducting your life so that you avoid stressors).

A new study looked at how an ethnically and racially diverse group of 3,304 people managed stress. The subjects ranged from 10 to 86 years old (average age was 34.9 years), and about 85 percent of them were from the U.S. or Canada, with the remainder from 28 other countries. They participated in the study by completing an online test accessible at http://MyStressManagementSkills.com.

Participants were asked to answer various questions and then to rate, on 10-point scales, how stressed they were, how generally happy they were, and how much success they had had in both their personal and professional lives.

You might assume that people with good stress-management skills would be not only less stressed but also happier and more successful both personally and professionally. Stress can really wear you down, after all, and can be brutal on relationships.

The main body of the test consisted of 28 questions about different practices that fall into the four broad competency areas mentioned above, with the questions asked in a random order. For example, “I often reinterpret events to reduce the stress I’m feeling” is an example of a test item that fits into the thought-management category. (To take a shorter version of the test, see the ‘Test Your Stress-Management Competence’ further on in this article). For each test item, people indicated on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement. On completion of the test, participants were immediately given a total score, along with results in each of the four competency areas and information about what the scores meant.

A Surprise, a Lesson and a Dire Need

When I first started to read about this study, I thought I could predict the outcomes fairly well….I would have said relaxation would have been the top predictor. After all, a number of studies confirm what common sense tells you about relaxation: people who learn and practice techniques such as breathing exercises, muscle-relaxation exercises, yoga, meditation, and so on benefit in multiple ways. Meditating regularly, for example, has been shown to lower blood pressure and also to help people feel “immunised” against stressors. As for thought management, it is perhaps the main thing that therapists and counselors teach their clients: how to reinterpret events in your life so that they stop bothering you. It is empowering to learn how to do that.

But the new study showed clearly that PREVENTION is by far the most helpful competency when it comes to managing stress. Prevention—doing things such as planning your day or year and trying to avoid stressors before they can affect you—was by far the most powerful predictor of all four of the outcome questions.

Also suggestive, the second most powerful predictor was source management. This broad category includes practices such as delegating tasks, organising your space and scheduling your time well, all of which can be considered preventive measures.

Least predictive were those other two competencies, relaxation and thought management—the competencies that people who are concerned about stress are most likely to try to improve through counseling or training. Relaxation, which can be practiced both proactively and reactively, fared better than thought management, which is almost always reactive. (My favourite example comes from Aesop’s Fables. Frustrated that he can’t reach the bunch of grapes, the fox reframes his thinking and concludes, “They are probably sour anyway.” Problem solved! Stress relieved!)

The lesson here is to manage stress proactively. Taking a deep breath or counting to 10 when you are stressed is all well and good, but you will be much happier in the long run if you can find ways to avoid the situations that make you feel stressed in the first place [see ‘An ounce of prevention’ further on in this article].

Can we actually learn to fight stress more effectively?

The study shows that

(1) people who have had training in stress management are better at it than people who have not, and

(2) the greater the number of training hours, the better the skills.

This suggests that no matter what our natural reactions are to stress, learning stress-management skills is likely to be beneficial. That said, only 17 percent of the subjects in this study had had any stress-management training—a figure that is probably much lower in the general population. Even more disturbing, the new data show that people are poor at prevention; it ranked third out of the four competencies in the test scores.

The worst news, though, has to do with the overall scores. On a 100-point scale, people scored 55.3 on average on a test of simple, basic stress-management techniques. If you think of that as a score on an exam at school, that means that on average, people only just scrape a pass when it comes to managing the inevitable stress they face in their lives.

The Importance of Stress Management

The physiological mechanisms by which stress damages health have now been well established., and yet the inability (or unwillingness) to manage stress can have a devastating effect on people’s lives. One of the most dramatic results of the new study was a high positive correlation between test scores and the overall level of happiness people reported. To put this another way, the study suggests that nearly 25 percent of the happiness we experience in life is related to—and perhaps even the result of—our ability to manage stress.

The bottom line is that stress management is both trainable and beneficial, and individuals reap the greatest benefits by fighting stress before it starts. That insight leaves us with a great challenge: to teach techniques for managing stress to a public that knows little about them and, especially, to educate our children before the big stressors hit.

Test Your Stress-Management Competence

Here is a selection of items from the Epstein Stress-Management Inventory (ESMI-i).

To get a rough measure of your competence in the four areas measured by the test, tick off items that apply to you. If you are able to tick off three or four items in a category, you are probably reasonably competent in that category.

To compute your overall score, add up the number of ticks you made. If you scored under 12, you might want to consider taking a stress-management course.

To take the full version of the test, visit http://MyStressManagementSkills.com.

COMPETENCY I

Manages Sources of Stress

I have adequate shelf, file and drawer space to serve my needs.

I consistently put important tasks ahead of unimportant tasks.

I try to schedule appointments and meetings so that they won’t overlap.

I have no trouble keeping my work area organized.

COMPETENCY II

Practices Relaxation Techniques

I schedule some relaxation time every day.

I sometimes visualize soothing scenes to relax.

I sometimes use special breathing techniques to help me relax.

I sometimes tense and relax my muscles as a way of fighting stress.

COMPETENCY III

Manages Thoughts

I regularly examine and try to correct any irrational beliefs I might have.

I’m aware that my thinking is sometimes unclear or irrational.

I keep myself calm by being selective about what I pay attention to in my environment.

I often reinterpret events to reduce the stress I’m feeling.

COMPETENCY IV

Prevents Stress from Occurring

I try to fight stress before it starts.

I keep an up-to-date list of things I’m supposed to do.

I spend a few minutes each morning planning my day.

I have a clear picture of how I’d like my life to proceed over the next few years.

GRAND TOTAL _____________________

An Ounce of Prevention

Here are six strategies for fighting stress before it starts, which are suggested by the new study:

1. Seek and kill. Take a few minutes every day to identify stressors in your life and find ways to reduce or eliminate them. Do you always find yourself running for the train on a morning? Make yourself be ready 5 minutes earlier so that you are not starting your day in such a stressful rish!

2. Commit to the positive. In our culture, people often try to cope with stress in self-destructive ways, mainly by drinking, taking drugs or overeating. Commit to avoiding the self-destructive solutions—for a day, a week or whatever you can handle—and replacing them with positive, healthful ways of managing stress. Yoga class, anyone?

3. Be your own personal secretary. People who keep lists of things to do really do more things. Use a pen and paper (or your smartphone) to keep a list of things you need to do. You’ll never walk out of a supermarket again having purchased everything except what you went there to buy.

4. Immunise yourself. Through exercise, thought management and the daily practice of relaxation techniques, you will be in a better position to face stressors without feeling stress. Lion tamers manage to remain calm when working with lions, after all. With the right preparation, you can face almost any situation calmly.

5. Make a little plan. Spend a few minutes every morning planning your day. You will waste less time, get more done and feel less stressed.

6. And make a big plan. The famous behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner not only planned his day and year, he even maintained a 10-year planner. You don’t need to go that far, but planning your future is a great way of exercising more control over your life. The more control you have, the less stressed you will feel.

References

◆ The Big Book of Stress Relief Games. Robert Epstein. McGraw-Hill, 2000.

◆ Principles and Practice of Stress Management. Edited by Paul H. Lehrer, Robert L. Woolfolk and Wesley E. Sime. Third edition. Guilford Press, 2007.

◆ The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook. Sixth edi- tion. Martha Davis et al. New Harbinger, 2008.

Many of you have (or are still) spending your Summer holidays outside your own country. This probably means that you have been trying to speak a few words of the local lingo….probably with mixed reactions, but probably lots of memorable fun too. Speaking different languages has always been something I’ve enjoyed, and the motivation (plus an abillity) to do so has been invaluable when working and living around the world. I used to dread family beach holidays – with my fair skin and freckles I burned as soon as the sun even looked at me. But trying out my school-French as a teenager on (another beach) holiday in Southern France, opened up a whole new world to me by being able to chat to locals (I wrote about my langauge adventures in a Dutch article entitled ‘Tien voor Taal’). Thankfully, trying to talk to locals is something I’ve not stopped doing :=)

In recent years, scientists have found that being able to speak different languages may actually facilitate the development of certain language and cognitive skills. These aptitudes include mental flexibility, abstract thinking and working memory, a type of short-term memory essential for learning and problem solving.

It is quite funny to realise that until the mid-1800s, bilingualism was common in the United States But in the 1880s popular sentiment began to turn against immigrants, and psychologists proclaimed that exposure to more than one language made children intellectually inferior. Although researchers began to discredit these early studies in the 1960s, the idea that children needed to choose a dominant language persisted. The hypothesis was that the brain is preset for only one language.

According to this hypothesis, a bilingual child’s mind is engaged in a constant tug-of-war, which leads to verbal delays and confusion over which language to use. But in a series of studies begun in 2001, it was found that children exposed to two languages before the age of 10 reached key language milestones, such as saying their first words and learning to read, at the same time as their monolingual peers Children seem to understand that they have two different languages right from the start, and are not confused.

Recent research suggests that not only can children differentiate between two languages at any early age, the cognitive benefits from being exposed to a second language start as early as infancy. In a study in 2009 of “crib bilinguals,” a visual test was used to measure what neuroscientists call cognitive flexibility in preverbal seven-month-olds. Scientists wanted to see how quickly the infants could adapt to changing rules. They taught the infants a pattern consisting of speechlike sounds. At the end of the sequence, a visual reward in the form of a puppet would appear in one part of a computer screen. The infants were expected to learn that a given sound pattern predicted the appearance of the puppet in that location. Both bilingual and monolingual infants showed that they associated the sound sequence with the puppet’s location equally well by looking in the right place for the puppet to appear. But when the sequence was modified—and the puppet was moved—the bilingual infants adjusted, switching their gaze to the new location. The monolingual infants, however, continued to look for the puppet in the original location.

Shaping the Cerebrum

Other research suggests that being raised bilingual improves other cognitive skills once a child becomes verbal. In a study published in 2010, researchers found that four- to five- year-old bilingual children showed more creativity than did their monolingual peers when asked to draw a fantastical house or flower. The monolingual children tended to draw flowers with missing petals or leaves, whereas the bilingual children drew imaginary hybrids, such as a “kite-flower” and a “robot-house,” indicating a superior ability to grasp abstract concepts [see illustration]. Meanwhile data from a 2008 study suggested that children from English-speaking homes who attended half-Spanish, half-English schools perform better on reading tests than those in English-only programs.

Several studies have also linked bilingualism to improved working memory, which is associated with both reading and math skills. Bilingual seven-year-old children outperformed their monolingual peers on two working memory tests—one requiring them to recall and rearrange a series of numbers and the other to retrace a pattern of hops made by an animated frog on a computer screen.

All these cognitive differences imply that learning a second language tweaks the structure of the developing brain. Although standard brain-scanning technology, functional MRI, is not generally recommended for young children, a relatively new noninvasive neuroimaging technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy now enables scientists to compare the brains of bilingual children with their monolingual peers. So far studies indicate that the language areas of monolingual and bilingual brains develop similarly, but certain regions, such as the inferior frontal cortex, which is involved with both language and thinking skills, appear to be more active in bilingual children, particularly when they are reading.

Researchers say the best way to become proficient in a second language is to start young and practice often. Daily exposure to the second language is ideal, experts note. Children growing up in multilingual environments can reach this level of exposure naturally, but those from monolingual backgrounds may need more intensive instruction.

Words of Wisdom

Becoming fluent, or even just reasonably competent, in more than one language not only advances a child’s thinking skills, it also confers cognitive gains in adulthood. In particular, something about being bilingual seems to bolster the brain against mental decline. In 2010 psychologists reviewed the mental health and education records, including language training, of 211 patients diagnosed with dementia. They found that as a group, the 102 patients classified as bilingual had been diagnosed 4.3 years later (and reported the onset of symptoms 5.1 years later) than had the 109 monolinguals, despite all of them having roughly equivalent cognitive function and similar occupational demands while they were all healthy. These data, which confirm those from an earlier study, indicate that bilingualism may help delay the onset of dementia.

Knowing a second language somehow seems to moderate the effects of encroaching pathology in the brain. The brains of 450 monolingual and bilingual patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s­like dementia were scanned for lesions and structural changes. The subjects all displayed a similar degree of cognitive function, but the bilingual subjects’ brains showed more atrophy and damage in regions involved in long­term memory, language recognition and auditory perception. Scientists hypothesize that by virtue of being bilingual, the patients can somehow compensate for the greater structural damage.

Speaking more than two languages may offer an even better defense. Also in 2011 researchers reported evaluating the neuropsychological health of 230 elderly men and women who spoke two to seven languages. They found that the people who spoke three or more languages were one quarter as likely to be mentally impaired than those who spoke just two. That greater amounts of language learning seem to offer stronger protection buttresses the contention that this training is constructing some kind of cognitive shield.

Such findings fit with the more established idea that learning and education thwart intellectual decline by building up the brain’s overall capacity for thought—its so­called cognitive reserve. Bilingual adults are apparently quicker and more efficient at certain tasks involving the use of skills known as executive functions, such as planning and problem solving. Of course, a person’s mental capacity can influence his or her ability to learn a new language, raising the possibility that the bilingual speakers had better cognition to begin with. But other work has indicated that learning a second language can promote beneficial brain changes. For example, it can boost the neuronal cell density in certain areas important for cognitive functioning. And research underscoring the cognitive advantages of growing up bilingual reinforces the notion that something about learning to say oui, sí or hai helps to shore up the thinking parts of your brain.

Tot de volgende keer, until next time et à la prochaine!

References

◆ New Discoveries from the Bilingual Brain and Mind across the Life Span: Implications for Education. Laura-Ann Petitto, Mind, Brain, and Education, vol. 3, no. 4, pages 185–197; 2009.

◆ The Benefits of Multilingualism. Jared Diamond. Science, vol. 330, pages 332–333; 2010.

◆ The Bilingual Advantage Learning: a second language can give kids’ brains a boost. Erica Westly. Scientific American Mind, vol. 22, no. 3, pages 38-41; 2011.

Science and the Arts are full of highly creative people whose personal behaviour sometimes strikes others as odd. Albert Einstein picked up cigarette ends off the street to get tobacco for his pipe; Howard Hughes spent entire days on a chair in the middle of the supposedly germ-free zone of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite; the composer Robert Schumann believed that his musical compositions were dictated to him by Beethoven and other dead composers from their tombs; and Charles Dickens is said to have fended off imaginary urchins with his umbrella as he walked the streets of London. More recently, we have seen Michael Jackson’s preoccupation with nose surgery, Salvador Dalí’s affection for dangerous pets and the Icelandic singer Björk dressed for the Oscars as a swan.

It isn’t just the average person-on-the-street who perceives highly creative individuals as eccentric. These individuals often see themselves as different and unable to fit in. The latest findings in brain imaging, creativity research and molecular biology suggest that these perceptions are not just based on a few anecdotal accounts of “weird” scientists and artists. In fact, creativity and eccentricity often go hand in hand, and researchers now believe that both traits may be a result of how the brain filters incoming information. Even in the business world, there is a growing appreciation of the link between creative thinking and unconventional behaviour, with increased acceptance of the latter.

Making the Connection

The incidence of strange behaviour by highly creative individuals seems too extensive to be the result of mere coincidence. As far back as ancient Greece, both Plato and Aristotle made comments about the peculiar behaviour of poets and playwrights. (Aristotle was also the first to note the relation between creativity and depression, an association that has been substantiated by modern research.) More than a century ago Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso catalogued the bizarre behaviour of creative luminaries in his book The Man of Genius and attributed this behaviour to the same hereditary “degeneration” that marked violent criminals.

In the past few decades psychologists and other scientists have explored the connection using empirically validated measures of both creativity and eccentricity. To measure creativity, researchers may look at an individual’s record of creative achievements, his or her involvement in creative activities or ability to think creatively (for example, to come up with new uses for ordinary household items). To measure eccentricity, researchers often use scales that assess schizotypal personality.

Schizotypal personality can appear in a variety of forms, including magical thinking (fanciful ideas or paranormal beliefs, such as Schumann’s belief that Beethoven channeled music to him from the grave), unusual perceptual experiences (distortions in perception, such as Dickens’s belief that he was being followed by characters from his novels), social anhedonia (a preference for solitary activities—Emily Dickinson, Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton, for example, favoured work over socializing), and mild paranoia (unfounded feelings that people or objects in the environment may pose a threat, such as Hughes’s legendary distrust of others).

Schizotypal personality is a milder version of the clinical psychiatric condition called schizotypal personality disorder, which is among a cluster of personality disorders labeled “odd or eccentric” in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). The schizotypal diagnosis grew out of large epidemiological studies in which researchers noticed that the relatives of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia were more likely to exhibit odd behaviours and beliefs than relatives of those not afflicted with schizophrenia. Schizotypal people, for instance, may dress in an idiosyncratic style; their speech patterns may be somewhat out of the ordinary; they may respond ineptly in social situations; their emotional responses may be inappropriate; they may believe in supernatural phenomena such as telepathy and omens; and they may be hard to get close to—both physically and emotionally. In short, schizotypal individuals are eccentric. But not all schizotypal people have a personality disorder, however. They are often very high functioning, talented and intelligent.

Nature or Nurture?

The first scientific evidence of a connection between schizotypal personality and creativity came from a 1966 study by American behavioural geneticist Leonard Heston. In this classic study, Heston reported that children adopted away from their schizophrenic biological mothers at birth were more likely to pursue creative careers and interests than children adopted away from non-afflicted mothers (thus lending support for Lombroso’s theory that the bizarre behaviours that often accompany creativity are inherited).

Harvard researcher Dennis Kinney and his team replicated Heston’s study 40 years later and suggested that schizotypal individuals may inherit the unconventional modes of thinking and perceiving associated with schizophrenia without inheriting the disease itself. In this study, Kinney and his colleagues rated 36 adopted offspring of schizophrenic parents and 36 matched control subjects adopted from nonschizophrenic parents using the Lifetime Creativity Scales. They found that the adopted off-spring of schizophrenic individuals who themselves displayed signs of schizotypal personality had higher scores for creativity than the control subjects. The Kinney group also made a new discovery: some of their control subjects who did not have a family history of schizophrenia met the profile for schizotypal personality—and they too scored higher for creativity than other control subjects.

Taking the reverse approach, recent studies by British investigator Daniel Nettle and Australian researchers David Rawlings and Ann Locarnini have confirmed that creative individuals tend to score higher on scales of schizotypal personality than less creative individuals. Research at Harvard, has found that study participants who score high in a measure of creative achievement in the arts are more likely to endorse magical thinking—such as belief in telepathic communication, dreams that predict the future, and memories of past lives (does this mean that healer are magicians?!). These participants are also more likely to attest to unusual perceptual experiences, such as having frequent déjà vu and hearing voices whispering in the wind.

In two reviews of schizotypy and creativity— published in 1989 and 1997, respectively—concluded that not only do highly creative people display more of the traits associated with schizotypy but that the combination of creativity and schizotypy tends to run in families, again pointing toward a genetic component. But how could weird thoughts and behaviours enhance a person’s ability to think creatively? Research suggests that these manifestations of schizo-typal personality in and of themselves do not promote creativity; certain cognitive mechanisms that may underlie eccentricity could also promote creative thinking, however.

Too Much Information

Cognitive disinhibition is the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival. We are all equipped with mental filters that hide most of the processing that goes on in our brains behind the scenes. So many signals come in through our sensory organs, for example, that if we paid attention to all of them we would be overwhelmed. Furthermore, our brains are constantly accessing imagery and memories stored in our mental files to process and decode incoming information. Thanks to cognitive filters, most of this input never reaches conscious awareness.

There are individual differences in how much information we block out, however; both schizotypal and schizophrenic individuals have been shown to have reduced functioning of one of these cognitive filters, called latent inhibition. Reduced latent inhibition appears to increase the amount of unfiltered stimuli reaching our conscious awareness and is associated with offbeat thoughts and hallucinations. It is easy to see that allowing unfiltered information into consciousness could lead to strange perceptual experiences, such as hearing voices or seeing imaginary people For healers, this is often our normal daily experience!

Cognitive disinhibition is also likely at the heart of what we think of as the aha! experience. During moments of insight, cognitive filters relax momentarily and allow ideas that are on the brain’s back burners to leap forward into conscious awareness, in the same manner that bizarre thoughts surface in the mind of the psychotic individual. Consider the example from Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 book A Beautiful Mind, about Nobel Prize winner (and diagnosed with schizophrenia) John Forbes Nash. When asked why he believed that aliens from outer space were contacting him, he responded: “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.” (Nash’s case illustrates how the cognitive mechanism of the eureka moment is similar to the delusional experience called thought insertion, in which individuals suffering from psychosis believe that outside forces have placed thoughts in their brains. Most people suffering from psychosis or schizophrenia do not produce ideas that are considered creative, however. The ability to use cognitive disinhibition in a creative way depends on the presence of additional cognitive abilities associated with a high level of functioning.)

Reduced cognitive filtering could explain the tendency of highly creative people to focus intensely on the content of their inner world at the expense of social or even self-care needs. (Beethoven, for example, had difficulty tending to his own cleanliness.) When conscious awareness is overpopulated with unusual and unfiltered stimuli, it is difficult not to focus attention on that inner universe.

In 2003 scientists found that highly creative individuals are more likely to display cognitive disinhibition when compared with those who are less creative. In a series of studies, several hundred subjects were tested on a latent inhibition task (a measure of how easily subjects ignore stimuli to which they have already been exposed). Creativity was also measured in several different ways, including divergent thinking tasks (which require a large number of responses or solutions to a problem), openness to experience (the personality trait most highly predictive of creativity), the Creative Personality Scale, and the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (a measure of lifetime creative achievement). High scorers on each of these creative measures were more likely to have lower scores on the latent inhibition task (indicating cognitive disinhibition) than were the less creative subjects. It would therefore seem that the reduction in cognitive inhibition allows more material into conscious awareness that can then be reprocessed and recombined in novel and original ways, resulting in creative ideas.

Brain-imaging and electroencephalography (EEG) studies support the theory that highly creative individuals tend to experience more cognitive disinhibition than do less-creative control groups. Beginning in the late 1970s, researcher Colin Martindale of the University of Maine initiated a series of EEG studies related to creativity. He and his colleagues found that highly creative people tend to produce more brain waves in the alpha range (a frequency of eight to 12 hertz, or cycles per second) during creative tasks than do less creative people. Martindale and his group interpreted alpha power as a marker of decreased cortical arousal and defocused attention and suggested that creative people were allowing more information into their conscious awareness during creative work.

Andreas Fink and his group at the University of Graz in Austria, who replicated Martindale’s findings in a set of studies over the past five years, have a different interpretation of the increased alpha waves associated with creativity. They say increased alpha activity indicates that the brain is focusing on internally generated stimuli rather than on the outside world. This interpretation explains the tendency of creative people to focus on their inner lives, which is also a sign of schizotypal personality.

Other brain research, published in 2009 by John Kounios of Drexel University and Mark Beeman of Northwestern University, has examined the aha! moment in greater detail. Kounios and Beeman had subjects solve word-association problems while their brain patterns were recorded using either functional magnetic resonance imaging or EEG. (For example, think of a word that can form a compound word with all three of the following words: crab, pine, sauce. The answer is “apple.”) Subjects signaled the exact moment the answer came to them, and whether they had come to the solution through trial and error or in a sudden rush of insight. The results indicate that a period of alpha activity precedes a burst of gamma activity (characterised by brain waves in the bandwidth above 40 Hz) at the moment of insight. Kounios and Beeman surmise that alpha activity focuses attention inward, whereas the gamma burst coincides with the arrival of the solution into conscious awareness.

Another brain-imaging study, done in 2010 by investigators at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, suggests the propensity for both creative insights and schizotypal experiences may result from a specific configuration of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. Using positron-emission tomography, the density of dopamine D2 receptors in the sub-cortical region of the thalamus was examined in 14 subjects who were tested for divergent-thinking skills. The results indicate that thalamic D2 receptor densities are diminished in subjects with high divergent-thinking abilities, similar to patterns found in schizophrenic subjects in previous studies. The researchers believe that reduced dopamine binding in the thalamus, found in both creative and schizophrenic subjects, may decrease cognitive filtering and allow more information into conscious awareness.

Several studies have linked gene variations that are associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine to both creativity and eccentricity. Hungarian researcher Szabolcs Kéri, who reported in 2009 that highly creative achievers were more likely to have a variant of the neuregulin 1 gene previously associated with schizophrenia, speculated that this gene variation facilitates cognitive disinhibition. These findings support the theory that cognitive disinhibition may be affected by genetic variations and that it may be one factor that predisposes an individual to both creative thought and eccentricity.

The Importance of Intelligence

Clearly, however, not all eccentric individuals are creative. Other cognitive factors, such as high IQ and high working-memory capacity, enable some people to process and mentally manipulate extra information without being overwhelmed by it. A series of studies has shown that a combination of lower cognitive inhibition and higher IQ is associated with higher scores on a variety of creativity measures.

This all suggests that at least a subgroup of highly creative individuals may share some (but not all) biological vulnerability factors with individuals who suffer from psychotic illnesses, such as schizophrenia. This vulnerability may allow the highly creative person access to ideas and thoughts that are inaccessible to those of us with less porous mental filters.

For several years a question has bene included in the creativity research questionnaires that asks “Do you often feel like a square peg in a round hole?” Participants who score high on the Creative Achievement Questionnaire have answered “yes” significantly more often than those who have low scores in creative achievement. In fact, one participant—a Hollywood screen-writer—answered “no” but then wrote below the question: “I don’t feel like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I feel like an octagonal peg with conical appendages.”

The good news is that the plight of square pegs may be improving. The increase of innovative technology as a key factor in economic growth has elevated creativity from merely a positive trait to a highly sought-after commodity in the global market. Many leading corporations—such as Coca Cola, DuPont, Citigroup and Humana—now have chief innovation officers on their leadership teams. Prestigious business schools—such as Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and Yale—have added courses on creativity to their curricula. And Fortune 500 companies, including PepsiCo, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Aetna and Marriott, now routinely put employees through creativity training programs. Trainers in these classes use a variety of tools and techniques to help noneccentrics open their minds to “out of the box” thoughts and stimuli that might otherwise be ignored or suppressed.

As the market value of creative thinking increases, the round-hole world may continue to make adjustments to accommodate and assimilate eccentrics. Such accommodations already exist in communities with high concentrations of artists, writers, scientists and computer geeks. Managers within these communities tolerate bizarre clothing choices, disregard of normal social protocols and non-traditional work schedules in the interest of promoting innovation.

Square pegs (and octagonal pegs with conical appendages) no longer have to work so hard at fitting in. It is high time. Indeed, we all owe a deep debt of gratitude to those whose creative work has been accomplished at the expense of square-peg feelings of alienation and ostracism. The creative efforts of eccentrics add richness, beauty and innovation to the lives of those of us who have fit some- what more comfortably into our round holes.

References

◆ Creativity in Offspring of Schizophrenic and Control Parents: An Adop- tion Study. D. K. Kinney, R. Richards, P. A. Lowing, D. LeBlanc, M. E. Zim- balist and P. Harlan in Creativity Research Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1, pages 17–25; January 2001.

◆ Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated with Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals. S. H. Carson, J. B. Peter- son and D. M. Higgins in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 85, No. 3, pages 499–506; September 2003.

◆ The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight. J. Kounios and M. Beeman in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 18, No. 4, pages 210–216; August 2009.

◆ Genes for Psychosis and Creativity: A Promoter Polymorphism of the Neuregulin 1 Gene Is Related to Creativity in People with High Intellec- tual Achievement. S. Kéri in Psychological Science, Vol. 20, No. 9, pages 1070–1073; 2009.

◆ Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box: Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals. Ö. de Manzano, S. Cervenka, A. Karabanov, L. Farde and F. Ullén in PLoS One, Vol. 5, No. 5, page e10670; 2010.

◆ Creativity and Psychopathology: A Shared-Vulnerability Model. S. H. Carson in Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 56, No. 3, pages 144–153; 2011.

◆ The Unleashed Mind. S. Carson. Scientific American Mind, vol. 22, no. 2, pages 22-29; 2011.

The recent discovery of a network in the brain dedicated to autobiographical mental imagery is helping researchers understand the many purposes that day-dreaming serves in our lives. They have called this web of neurons “the default network,” because when we are not absorbed in more focused tasks, the network fires up. The default network appears to be essential to generating our sense of self, suggesting that daydreaming plays a crucial role in who we are and how we integrate the outside world into our inner lives.

Videos in the Mind’s Eye

Most people spend about 30 percent of their waking hours spacing out, drift- ing off, lost in thought. Yale University emeritus psychology professor Jerome Singer defines daydreaming as “watching your own mental videos.” (He has a more complex definition too: “shifting attention away from some primary physical or mental task toward an unfolding sequence of private responses”). Singer divides daydreaming styles into two main categories: positive-constructive, which includes upbeat and imaginative thoughts, and dysphoric, which encompasses visions of failure or punishment. Most people experience both kinds to a small or large degree.

Other scientists distinguish between everyday musings and extravagant fan- tasies. Michael Kane, a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, considers “mind wandering” to be “any thoughts that are unrelated to one’s task at hand.” In his view, mind wandering is a broad category that may include everything from pondering ingredients for a dinner recipe to saving the planet from alien invasion. Most of the time when people fall into mind wandering, they are thinking about everyday concerns, such as recent encounters and items on their to-do list. More exotic daydreams in the style of James Thurber’s grandiose fictional fantasist Walter Mitty—such as Mitty’s dream of piloting an eight-engine hydroplane through a hurricane—are rare.

Daily routine concerns figured prominently in one study that rigorously mea- sured how much time we spend mind wandering in daily life. In a 2009 study Kane asked 72 students to carry PalmPilots that beeped at random intervals eight times a day for a week. The subjects then recorded their thoughts at that moment on a questionnaire. About 30 percent of the beeps coincided with thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. Mind wandering increased with stress, boredom, sleepiness, or being in chaotic environments. Mind wandering decreased with enjoyable tasks. Ths could be because enjoyable activities tend to grab our attention.

Intense focus on our problems may not always lead to immediate solutions. Instead, allowing the mind to float freely can enable us to access unconscious ideas hovering beneath the surface—a process that can lead to creative insight-as many of you will know. We may not even be aware that we are daydreaming. We have all had the experiencing of “reading” a book yet absorbing nothing—moving our eyes over the words on a page as our attention wanders and the text turns into gobbledigook. Aimless rambling across the moors of our imagination may allow us to stumble on ideas and associations that we may never find if we consciously strive to seek them.

A Key to Creativity

Artists and scientists are well acquainted with such playful fantasizing.” Albert Einstein pictured himself running along a light wave—a reverie that led to his theory of special relativity. Filmmaker Tim Burton daydreamed his way to Hollywood success, spending his childhood holed up in his bedroom, creating posters for an imaginary horror film series. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, imagined “another world,” to which he retreated as a child, where he was “someone else, somewhere else … in my grandmother’s sitting room, I’d pretend to be inside a submarine.

Why should daydreaming aid creativity? It may be in part because the waking brain is never really at rest. Floating in unfocused mental space serves an evolutionary purpose: when we are engaged with one task, mind wandering can trigger reminders of other, concurrent goals so that we do not lose sight of them. Some researchers believe that increasing the amount of imaginative daydreaming we do or replaying variants of the millions of events we store in our brains can be beneficial. A painful procedure in a doctor’s office, for example, can be made less distressing by visualisations of soothing scenes from childhood.

Yet to enhance creativity, it is important to pay attention to daydreams. This has been called “tuning out” or deliberate “off-task thinking.” In an as yet unpublished study, 122 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia were asked to read a children’s story and press a button each time they caught themselves tuning out. Researchers also periodically interrupted the students as they were reading and asked them if they were “zoning out” or drifting off without being aware of it. The study concluded that the people who regularly catch themselves—who notice when they’re doing it—seem to be the most creative.

The mind’s freedom to wander during a period of deliberate tuning out could also explain the flash of insight that may pop into a person’s head when he or she takes a break from an unsolved problem. It has been found that people who engaged in a mildly demanding task, such as reading, during a break from, say, a visual assignment, such as the hat-rack problem—in which participants have to construct a sturdy hat rack using two boards and a clamp—did better on that problem than those who did nothing at all. They also scored higher than those engaged in a highly demanding task—such as mentally rotating shapes—during the interval. Allowing our minds to ramble during a moderately challenging task, it seems, enables us to access ideas not easily available to our conscious minds or to combine these insights in original ways. Our ability to do so is now known to depend on the normal functioning of a dedicated day dreaming network deep in our brain.

The Mental Matrix of Fantasy

Like Facebook for the brain, the default network is a bustling web of mem- ories and streaming movies, starring ourselves. When we daydream, we’re at the centre of the universe. This network was first described in 2001 by neurologist Marcus Raichle of Washington University. It consists of three main regions: the medial pre-frontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and the parietal cortex. The medial prefrontal cortex helps us imagine ourselves and the thoughts and feelings of others; the posterior cingulate cortex draws personal memories from the brain; and the parietal cortex has major connections with the hippocampus, which stores episodic memories—what we ate for breakfast, say—but not impersonal facts, such as the capital of Kyr- gyzstan. The default mode network is critical to the establishment of a sense of self.

It was not until 2007, however, that cognitive psychologist Malia Fox Mason, discovered that the default network becomes more active when people engage in a boring verbal task, when they are more likely to mind wander. This default network lights up when people switch from an attention-demanding activity to drifting day-dreaming with no specific goal. In an experiment, participants were shown a string of four letters such as R H V X for one second, which was then replaced by an arrow pointing either left or right, to indicate whether the sequence should be read forwards or backwards. When one of the characters in the string appeared, subjects were asked to indicate its position (first, second, third or last, depending on the direction of the arrow). The more the participants practiced on each of the four original letter strings, the better they performed. They were then given a novel task, consisting of letter sequences they had not seen before. Activity in the default network went down during the novel version of the test. Subjects who day- dreamed more in everyday life—as determined by a questionnaire—also showed greater activity in the default network during the boring original task.

Mason did not directly measure mind wandering during the scans, however, so she could not determine exactly when subjects were “on task” and when they were daydreaming. But a subsequent study by a different research group in 2009 directly linked mind wandering with increased activity in the default network. These researchers scanned the brains of 15 students while they performed a simple task in which they were shown random numbers from zero to nine. Each was asked to push a button when he or she saw any number except three. In the seconds before making an error—a key sign that an individual’s attention had drifted—default network activity shot up. Periodically the investigators also interrupted the subjects and asked them if they had zoned out. Again, activity in the default network was higher in the seconds before the moment they were caught in the act. Notably, activity was strongest when people were unaware that they had lost their focus. The more complex your mind-wandering episode is, the more of your mind it will consume.

When the default is faulty

Defects in the default network may also impair our ability to daydream. A range of disorders—including schizophrenia and depression—have been linked to malfunctions in the default network in recent years. A 2007 study found that people with schizophrenia have deficits in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with self-reflection. In patients experiencing hallucinations, the medial prefrontal cortex dropped out of the network altogether. Although the patients were thinking, they could not be sure where the thoughts were coming from. People with schizophrenia daydream normally most of the time, but when they are ill they often complain that someone is reading their mind or that someone is putting thoughts in their head.

On the other hand, those who ruminate obsessively—rehashing past events, repetitively analysing their causes and consequences, or worrying about all the ways things could go wrong in the future—are well aware that their thoughts are their own, but they have intense difficulty turning them off. Scientists believe that rumination is not a form of day-dreaming, because it imagines situations in the future that are not largely positive in tone. Nevertheless, in obsessive ruminators, who are at greater risk of depression, the same default network circuitry turns on that is activated when we daydream.

These ruminators—who may repeatedly scrutinise mistakes made, family issues or lovers’ betrayals—have trouble switching off the default network when asked to focus mentally on a neutral image, such as a truckload of watermelons. They may spend hours going over some past incident, asking themselves how it could have happened and why they did not react differently and end up feeling overwhelmed instead of searching for solutions. Experimental studies have shown that positive distraction—for example, exercise and social activities—can help ruminators reappraise their situation, as can techniques for cultivating mindfulness that teach individuals to pay precise attention to activities such as breathing or walking, rather than to thoughts.

Is Your Mind Wandering Out of Control?

How do you know when you have tipped over from useful and creative day- dreaming into the netherworld of over-ruminating?

First, notice whether you are deriving any useful insights from your fantasies. Creative individuals report ideas that have occurred to them during daydreams.

Second, it is important to take stock of the content of your daydreams. To distinguish between beneficial and pathological imaginings, ask yourself if this is something useful, helpful, valuable, pleasant, or are you just rehashing the same old thoughts over and over again. And if daydreaming feels out of control, then even if it is pleasant it is probably not useful or valuable.

Whether or not mind wandering causes distress often depends on the context, Mind wandering is not inherently good or bad; it all depends on what the goals of the person are at the time. It may be perfectly reasonable for a scientist to mentally check out in the midst of a repetitive experiment. A novelist who can pour her day-dreams onto paper and publish them is clearly putting them to good use. And fortunately, a lot of what we do in life doesn’t require that much concentration!

References:

◆ The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. James Thurber in My World and Welcome to It. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1937.

◆ The Inner World of Daydreaming. Jerome L. Singer. Harper and Row, 1975. ◆ Mind-Play: The Creative Uses of Fantasy: Using Mind Imagery to Relax, Overcome Fears and Bad Habits, Cope with Pain, Improve Your Decision-Making and Planning, Perfect Your Skill at Sports, and Enhance Your Sex Life. Jerome L. Singer and Ellen Switzer. Prentice-Hall, 1980.

◆ The Daydreamer. Reprint edition. Ian McEwan. Anchor, 2000.

◆ Maladaptive Daydreaming: A Qualitative Inquiry. Eli Somer in Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Vol. 32, Nos. 2–3; Fall 2002.

◆ Rethinking Rumination. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Blair E. Wisco and Sonja Lyubomirsky in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 3, No. 5, pages 400–424; 2008.