Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain (46 page)
Read Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain Online
Authors: Tom Stafford,Matt Webb
Tags: #COMPUTERS / Social Aspects / Human-Computer Interaction
Turn on your affective system by tweaking your face muscles — or getting an
eyeful of someone else doing the same.
Find yourself a pen, preferably a nontoxic, nonleaky one. We’re going to use this little
item to improve your quality of life and give you a little pleasure.
Put the pen between your teeth, in far enough so that it’s stretching the edges of
your mouth back without being uncomfortable. Feeling weird? Just hold it there for a
little, and appraise your level of mood. You should find that you end up feeling just a
little happier.
If you want to go for the reverse effect, remove the pen (maybe give it a wipe), then
trap it between your upper lip and nose like a mustache. If you’re feeling anything, it’s
likely to be a touch of gloom, particularly in contrast to when you had the pen in your
mouth.
Alternatively, if you’re pen-averse, refer to the pictures in
Signal Emotion
and scrutinize the smiling face for a while. You should find
yourself perked up — while the unhappy photo will likely send you downhill if you stare at
it a little.
Emotional expressions are much more than just by-products of our
affective
system
, the system that deals with emotions. Expressions serve as agents that
transmit emotions to other individuals and are crucial in creating and maintaining our own
emotional experience. And while aspects of this may be conscious and deliberate — my
girlfriend may throw me a grin to let me know she’s not mad that I’ve been glued to the
computer all evening, and that reassurance will make me happy — there is a deeply automatic
component. This is termed
primitive contagion
and is characterized as
a three-stage process: it begins with perception, which triggers mimicry, which itself
produces emotion.
Signal Emotion
deals with how we perceive emotions, so
here we‘ll unpack the other two stages: mimicry and resulting emotion.
An array of experiments shows that, when emotional faces are presented, subjects
produce corresponding facial expressions. For example, subjects can tell from recordings
of their faces which emotions they must have been looking at originally. Additionally,
facial EMG changes occur after only a few hundred milliseconds: the
zygomatic
muscles
(in the cheeks)
used for smiling show more activity after seeing a happy face, while the
corrugator
muscles (between the eyes, at the top of the nose)
used for frowning are more active after viewing anger.
Electromyogram
(EMG) is a measure of small electrical
currents muscles produce when they’re active. Thus, EMG changes in a particular place
indicate that a muscle there is being used.
It seems this is something we just can’t help. Show emotional faces (photographs in
newspapers usually fit the bill) to a friend and look for the flicker of mimicry his
face invariably betrays. The stronger the expression portrayed in the picture, the
stronger your subject’s emotional response. The phenomenon can even be found when a face
is shown subliminally
[
Subliminal Messages Are Weak and Simple
and
Spread a Bad Mood Around
]
and the viewer is unaware of seeing
any kind of expressive face; the facial muscles betray the effect.
The act of making an emotional expression has an effect on our emotional state. This
has been shown experimentally, most convincingly when the experience is divorced as much
as possible from labels like “smiling” (as in the case of pushing back on your lip):
simply activating critical muscles produces the effect. This deep coupling to the motor
system (a fundamental and ancient function of the brain) underlines the primitive nature
of emotions. Direct and automatic feedback means muscular changes make you happier in
general without having to invoke concepts of “happy” or a “smile”: a joke really is
funnier with the pen in your mouth.
These steps — observation, facial mimicry, and finally acquisition of the observed
emotion — are an effective way of unifying a group of people under one emotion and
therefore of marshaling social units to act together. You can see the benefits of having
a whole group being scared — aroused and ready for rapid action — if the situation warrants
it, rather than some of the group not taking the threat seriously and everyone else
trying to convince them. Lengthy persuasion can be avoided given that emotional
communication is often automatic. Emotions act as orienting systems, and the adaptive
benefit is clear when you consider the importance of rapid mobilization of individuals
in a group under certain circumstances: confrontation, escape, or rejection of poisonous
food.
Stand-up comics could learn a thing or two from our example — perhaps comedy clubs
should have a pen-in-mouth policy. The broader point is that, for any communicator, direct
visual or aural contact is extremely useful as a
means of emotionally orienting an audience. If you want them to be angry, CAPS
LOCK WON’T CUT IT relative to a tremor in the voice or a scowl. Similarly, smiles and
laughter are contagious. Remote communication can reduce the availability of these cues,
although the advent of videoconferencing and other technologies is changing this.
Emoticons are a simple attempt to hack into this system, although it remains for the
cunning designer to find ever more effective ways of simulating truly contagious emotions.
We may also note that women are more facially expressive in response to emotional stimuli,
although it is uncertain whether they are also more emotionally affected; one could
consider how gender differences could affect social dynamics.
- “Left Brain Right Brain” (
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1139554.htm
) includes a further experiment you can perform, exploring the relationship
between mouth muscles and emotion. - Ulf Dimberg, U., Thunberg, M., & Elmehed, K. (2000). Unconscious facial
reactions to emotional facial expressions.
Psychological Science
11
(1), 86–89. - Wild, B., Erb, M., & Bartels, M. (2001). Are emotions contagious? Evoked
emotions while viewing emotionally expressive faces: Quality, quantity, time course
and gender differences.
Psychiatry Research, 102
, 109–124. - Levenson, R. W., Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1990). Voluntary facial
action generates emotion-specific autonomic nervous system activity.
Psychophysiology, 27
(4), 363–384.
— Alex Fradera & Disa Sauter
Find the fire that’s cooking your memory systems.
Our emotional system contributes not just to how we respond to the world at a given
moment, but how we store representations of what has happened in the past. The makeup of our
memories is not decided dispassionately by an impartial documentary reel in our brain, but
by passionate, loaded mechanisms that draw out the aspects with the most juice.
Read the following two tales.
1
There will be a quiz at the end of class.
“A mother and her son are leaving home in the morning. She is taking him to
visit his father’s workplace. The father is a laboratory technician at Victory Memorial
Hospital. While walking along, the boy sees some wrecked cars in a junkyard, which he
finds interesting.
“At the hospital, the staff are preparing for a practice disaster drill, which the
boy will watch. Makeup artists were able to create realistic-looking injuries on actors
for the drill.
“After the drill, while the father watched the boy, the mother left to phone her
other child’s preschool. Running a little late, she phones the preschool to tell them
she will soon pick up her child. Heading to pick up her child, she hails a taxi at the
number 9 bus stop.”
“A mother and her son are leaving home in the morning. She is taking him to visit
his father’s workplace. The father is a laboratory technician at Victory Memorial
Hospital.
“While crossing the road, the boy is caught in a terrible accident, which critically
injures him. At the hospital, the staff prepares the emergency room, to which the boy is
rushed. Specialized surgeons were able to reattach the boy’s severed feet.
“After the surgery, while the father stayed with the boy, the mother left to phone
her other child’s preschool. Feeling distraught, she phones the preschool to tell them
she will soon pick up her child. Heading to pick up her child, she hails a taxi at the
number 9 bus stop.”
OK, it’s a very easy quiz: which tale stands out more for you? It’s likely to be
Tale 2.
Cahill and McGaugh’s study
1
used extended versions of these tales, in order to investigate our
current hack: the special status of emotional events in memory. It’s generally the
second story that is more memorable, particularly the central section — this is peculiar
because other memory studies indicate that we’re typically better at remember events at
the beginning and at the end of a story like this. This, along with evidence coming from
similar studies, suggests that we have a specialized memory response to emotional
stimuli.
The central section of the story isn’t more memorable because it contains an unusual
emotional event (we remember unusual events better), it’s more memorable because of the
physical effect emotion has on you. If you did this test while on propranolol, a drug
that prevents physiological arousal by blocking beta-adrenergic receptors (preventing
increase in heart rate and release of adrenaline), you would find the emotional parts of
the story no
more memorable than the dull parts. On the flip side, if you were given
yohimbine, a drug that increases arousal by stimulating the activity of the adrenaline
product norepireprine and so causing a more rapid heart rate, the memory for these
sections would be even greater. We don’t find it emotional because it is objectively
memorable, but it becomes memorable because we are allowed (in the absence of drugs like
propanonol) to find it emotional.
It’s indisputably very useful for the memory system to give special status to events
that set off our affective, emotional system. Fearful stimuli, disgusting food sources,
kith who have angered you — all are elements worth remembering. However, a memory system
totally preoccupied with emotional content would constantly disregard the worthy in favor
of the frivolous, never retaining any information about currently neutral stimuli (such as
food when one is not hungry) when there are more emotional stimuli present. The current
best guess is that we resolve this by possessing two memory systems — a “hot” system for
dealing with emotional information and a “cool” one for handling neutral content.
Increasingly, the evidence suggests that this is instantiated in the brain through a
primary memory system built around the hippocampus
[
Navigate Your Way Through Memory
]
for cool content, while hot
content is handled in the amygdala, the limbic structure involved in various aspects of
emotion processing.
There is evidence to implicate the amygdala in memory.
2
Lesions in the amygdala disrupt learning — a type of memory that has a
motivational, and hence emotional, component — and imaging studies show that greater
amygdala activation during the study of emotional information (but not neutral
information) is associated with better memory for it. (Interestingly, the lateralization
seems to be gender-determined, with different parts of the amygdala — left and right — being
used by women and men, respectively.) Epinephrine (adrenaline) enhances memory
performance, but only if the amygdala is intact. Finally, patients with amygdalic lesions
(the amygdala is damaged) are more poorly conditioned to aversive stimuli; that is, they
don’t learn to cease behavior that causes them pain.
As the names imply, the hot system is impulsive and quick, producing rapid physical
responses (such as a flush of shame) in comparison to the more reflective, contemplative
cool system. Current models suggest that that information flows through the hot system in
order to reach the cool system, and as a consequence, all input gets cooked: emotional
components are amplified and accentuated, potentially at the expense of other
details.
The idea that the amygdala is involved in hot, emotional memory is supported
by the discovery that the memory boost associated with emotional words doesn’t occur if
the
stria terminalis
— this is the connective junction that links the
amygdala to the rest of the brain — is no longer intact. For example, if this junction is
removed, norepinephrine (which is associated with arousal) ceases to produce memory
benefits. Similarly, glucocorticoid, a stress hormone, enhances learning if it is plugged
into the hippocampus, unless the amygdala is damaged or chemically blocked. So it is clear
the amygdala and hippocampus memory systems are not working in isolation.
The evidence that there are two systems at all comes from the differential effects of
stress on the two types of memory: increasing arousal always enhances memory for emotional
features, but memory for the neutral features (such as context and detail) starts to
suffer under high conditions. Seeing one change (an increase of arousal) have two
different effects is good evidence for multiple systems.
Apart from our own observations that emotionally charged events will be memorable (to
the point where it is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise), the most powerful
example of the preoccupation with emotion designed into our memory systems is
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
3
Individuals suffering from PTSD experience flashbacks, the intrusion of
imagery and memories from or related to the traumatic events that typically produced the
condition. The worse the trauma, the more likely that PTSD will result, and sufferers have
consistently higher resting heart rate and blood pressure, relative to a comparable
group.
It is established that PTSD patients have smaller hippocampal volumes, although it is
not clear whether the traumatic stress reduces the hippocampus or whether smaller
hippocampi are a risk factor for PTSD. These individuals show poorer general memory
performance, and while the flashbacks themselves are full of vivid detail, they are often
gappy and the patients show inability to actively recall any other details besides those
that impose themselves upon them. This would fit with the two-systems theory: the
flashbacks themselves have well-coded (or “hyperencoded”) emotional content, but the
stress precluded the recording of further detail. While the emotional content comes easily
to mind, their general high level of stress, possibly coupled with suboptimal transfer
from the hot to cool systems, produces poorer memory for the cold, neutral
information.
- Reprinted and abridged from
Consciousness and
Cognition
, Vol 4, No 4, Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J., “A Novel
Demonstration of Enhanced Memory Associated with Emotional Arousal,” pages 410–421,
Copyright (1995), with permission from Elsevier. - A good book to get a full picture of amygdala, learning, and memory:
LeDoux, J. (1996)
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of
Emotional Life.
New York: Simon & Schuster. - The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Alliance (
http://www.ptsdalliance.org/home2.html
) hosts educational resources on this condition.
- “How Brain Gives Special Resonance to Emotional Memories” (
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040610081107.htm
).
— Alex Fradera & Disa Sauter