“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:” some people might argue that the U.S. Constitution endorses hedonism, and indeed many politicians want to ignore or get rid of the Constitution, but not necessarily because of hedonism. We should not be dismissive about encouraging people to pursue happiness. Happiness can be good for your brain. Depression is surely bad for your brain.

Positive mood states promote more effective thinking and problem solving. A recent scholarly report[1] reviews the literature demonstrating that positive mood broadens the scope of attentiveness, enhances semantic associations over a wider range, improves task shifting, and improves problem-solving capability. The review also documents the changes in brain activation patterns induced by positive mood in subjects while solving problems. Especially important is the dopamine signaling in the prefrontal cortex.

Published studies reveal that a variety of techniques are used to momentarily manipulate mood. These have included making subjects temporarily happy or sad by asking subjects to recall emotionally corresponding past experiences or to view film clips or hear words that trigger happy or sad feelings,

The effect of happiness on broadened attentiveness arises because the brain has better cognitive flexibility and executive control, which in turn makes it easier to be more flexible and creative. Happy problem solvers are better able to select and act upon useful solutions that otherwise never consciously surface. Happiness reduces perseverative tendencies for errant problem-solving strategies. The broadened attentiveness, for example, allows people to attend to more stimuli, both in external visual space and in internal semantic space, which in turn enables more holistic processing. For example, in one cited study, experimenters manipulated subjects’ momentary mood and then measured performance on a task involving matching of visual objects based on their global versus local shapes. Happy moods yielded better global matching.

Other experiments report broader word association performance when subjects are manipulated to be happier. For example, subjects in a neutral mood would typically associate the word “pen” as a writing tool and would associate it with words like pencil or paper. But positive mood subjects would think also of pen as an enclosure and associate it with words like barn or pigs. This effect has been demonstrated with practical effect in physicians, who, when in a happy mood, thought of more disease possibilities in making a differential diagnosis.
The review authors reported their own experiment on beneficial happy mood effects on insightfulness, using a task in which subjects were given three words and asked to think of a fourth word that could be combined into a compound word or phrase. For example, an insightful response to “tooth, potato, and heart” might be “sweet tooth, sweet potato, and sweetheart.” Generating such insight typically requires one to suppress dominant “knee jerk” responses such as associating tooth with pain and recognize that pain does not fit potato while at the same time becoming capable of switching to non-dominant alternatives.

Other cited experiments showed that happy mood improved performance on “Duncker’s candle task.”  Here, subjects are given a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches, and are asked to attach a candle to the wall in a way that will burn without dripping wax on the floor. Subjects in a happy mood were more able to realize that the box could be a platform for the candle when the box is tacked to the wall.  

Such effects of happy moods seem to arise from increased neural activity in the prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, areas that numerous prior studies have demonstrated as crucial parts of the brain’s executive control network. Similar effects have been observed in EEG studies. Other research suggests that the happiness effect is mediated by increased release of dopamine in the cortex that serves to up-regulate executive control.
The review authors described a meta-analysis of 49 positive-psychology manipulation studies showing that momentary happiness is readily manipulated by such strategies as deliberate optimistic thinking, increased attention to and memory of happy experiences, practicing mindfulness and acceptance, and increasing socialization. The effect occurs in most normal people and even in people with depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Biofeedback training, where subjects monitor their own fMRI scans or EEGs, might be an even more effective way for people to train themselves to be happier.

The main point is that people can be as happy as they choose to be.

For more on how positive mood influences memory ability, see my new book, Memory Power 101 (http://skyhorsepublishing.com ). Memory Medic's latest book explores the biology of mind. See "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus).

[1] Subramaniam, K. and Vinogradov, S. (2013). Improving the neural mechanisms of cognition through the pursuit of happiness. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 7 August. Doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00452

It’s that time of year for making New Year’s resolutions, and I am inspired to write this on January 1 because good resolutions can result. I never thought about the pain of broken relationships much in the context of learning experience and memory until I ran across a LinkedIn post from writer and speaker Carl Prude Jr. Here is what he posted:

“Resentment and unforgiveness are two of the wardens of relational pain. Whenever we employ them they only make sure that we are constantly reminded of the hurt and smallness we felt from hearing someone's negative remarks. They also make sure that we never see the incident in a forward-moving context - instead, keeping us chained to a low moment in our past. I try to look beyond the circumstances of their comment and evaluate the comment independently - to see if it has any constructive merit. If it was mean-spirited or intentional, I immediately dismiss it and forgive the person who said it.”

Usually when we think about memory we focus on how to strengthen it. But there are times when it is best to forget – as in the case of hurtful things we have endured from other people. Here is a case where nursing the hurt leads it to fester, not heal.

So, how do you teach yourself to forget things you should? This maybe especially hard if your focus has always been to enhance memory.

I have discussed some related ideas for erasing memories in earlier posts on new treatments for post-traumatic stress syndrome. In the next post, I will discuss some recent research on advertising where marketers work hard to erase the memories of counter-productive ads.

But here, I want to focus on erasing memories involving relational pain, like the kind you find among spouses in unhappy marriages, siblings clinging to memories of childhood conflicts, employees who are underappreciated or employers who resent lack of support and loyalty. Of course there are many kinds of broken relationships, but all have one thing in common:

The slights and insults are remembered

and etched in a heart of stone from frequent recall.

The pain will never go away as long as the memory is strengthened by recalling it. Typically, one has to learn to forget the pain, not necessarily what caused it. But how does one learn to forget pain?

In many cases, it is a matter of breaking the bad habit of rehearsing the memory and thus strengthening it. Humans react the same way as Pavlov’s dogs, in that repeating a stimulus, in this case the relational affront, conditions memory of it. Like Pavlov’s dogs, if you could repeat the stimulus without the associated pain, the affront would lose its association with the painful memory. Though our natural instinct is to disengage with people who have hurt us, the cure may require us to find ways to continue engagement under non-threatening circumstances. This is equivalent to repeating the conditioning harmful stimulus without the associated punishment – thus extinguishing memory of the original bad learning experience. This is not easy to do, and is sometimes unwise to attempt.

Nonetheless, the principle is sound. People can use the extra brain power that dogs do not have to review the memory more dispassionately. This demands a more objective analysis of the original painful events. It should begin by examining your own contribution to the event, as I explain in my book, “Blame Game, How To Win It.” People don’t usually say and do hurtful things without some kind of provocation, and it may have come from you. More objective analysis also usually reveals that the affront is not nearly as important as you have made it in order to nurture memory of the affront. Humans have a perverse need to remember and magnify affronts, for it validates their vanity. Saying to oneself, “I did not deserve this affront, my hands are clean” is salve to a wounded psyche. We feel better about ourselves, and superior to the perpetrator. Thus, we make sure we remember the events that bolster our vanity.

Also basic to rational analysis is the recognition that all people make mistakes. We have to put ourselves in this category too, but focusing on the misdeeds of others reduces the perceived need to admit our own flaws. Learning to accept and live with human nature is a hallmark of maturity, and it is no wonder that many of our remembered grievances occurred in childhood when we had not yet learned to understand and accept the weaknesses of others.

Nursing grudges creates the habit of nursing grudges. The cure is to have more self-discipline in breaking of bad habits. I explore this in the above-referenced book. But one example comes from a racial bias experiment I described in which racially biased people were trained to be more accepting by having more emotionally neutral social interactions with members of the opposite race. Humans are hard-wired to be more comfortable in a like social group. That’s why tribalism persists even in most cultures even today.

How does one acquire more self-discipline, which of course is needed to break habits? Well, we could join the military and go to boot camp.  In boot camp, you learn to do things you don’t really want to do. In everyday life, forcing yourself to do what is needed and though not appealing, creates character and self-control. Self-induced practice can include making yourself do such things as:

·         Self-train in small steps. “Life by the inch is a cinch. Life by the yard is hard.”

·         Act as if you already are as you wish to be.

·         Get your act together (pay attention, get off your butt, organize your life, dress and groom well).

·         Always be on time.

·         Do things you know you should, even though you don’t want to.

·         Do the hard things first.

·         Increase, rather than decrease, dealing with people you don’t like.

Finally, it is essential to be more introspective about one’s self-esteem. As I explain in the book, self-esteem has two components, self-confidence and self-worth. The fully actualized person has both. Neither component alone is sufficient to neutralize the false gratification we feel from perverse remembering and magnification of affronts. Generating self-confidence is relatively easy, because it can be earned. So get out and earn it, emphasizing things that seem to work for you and learn what you have to do to build small successes into big ones.

Sense of self-worth is harder to have. At one time or another, all of us have endured neglect, slights, and insults. We may have been used, perhaps even abused. How does one cure a broken spirit? First, I recommended believing in a God who created you, loves you, and values you. Accept that love, pray intently with thanks for it, and ask that it give you strength to be a better person. Second, be more socially active and engage with more different kinds of people one on one. Seek friendship, remembering the axiom that to have a friend one needs to be a friend.

Actualization begins with realizing the importance of caring for yourself. The commandment, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” needs to be thought of more in terms of the italicized words. Ability to love others or forgive affronts depends on one’s self-esteem. Each of us should examine our every thought and action with the question, “Is this really helping me, or is it good for me?”

As I said at the outset, nursing the hurt makes it fester, not heal.

Blame Game, How To Win It is endorsed by media celebrities Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Reverend Robert Schuller. The book is available through Amazon.