Research on "mental gymnastics", or train yourself to be happy
There is a way to measure emotions by measuring the electrical activity in the frontal part of the brain cortex. Research has shown that, in people who are happy, relaxed, optimistic and experience positive emotion, the left side of the frontal cortex becomes more active. In people who are depressed, angry, stressed or scared, the right frontal cortex is more active than the left, and the amygdala, another part of the forebrain, is also more active.
Brains follow habits, and over time they develop what scientists call a "set point". The more a person's set point is tilted to the left the more that person tends to be happy, while a person whose set point is tilted to the right tends to be more unhappy.
The results suggest that the emotion set point can shift, given the proper training. In mindfulness, people learn to monitor their moods and thoughts and drop those that might spin them toward distress.
Professor Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, wanted to see whether this set point can be moved. In his study, workers in a high-pressure biotech business were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The experimental group, with 25 subjects, received training in mindfulness meditation, while the 16 members of the control group did not receive meditation training until after the study was completed. Both groups were tested before and after training by Dr. Davidson and his colleagues.
The findings confirmed the researchers' hypothesis. Before the training, the workers complained of feeling highly stressed, and were on average tipped toward the right in the ratio for the emotional set point. After the training, their emotions ratio on average shifted to the left region, toward the positive emotional region, and simultaneously, their moods improved.
In short, the results suggest that the emotion set point can shift, given the proper training. In mindfulness, people learn to monitor their moods and thoughts and drop those that might spin them toward distress. Dr. Davidson hypothesizes that it may strengthen an array of neurons in the left prefrontal cortex that inhibits the messages from the amygdala that drive disturbing emotions.
The research team also tested whether the meditation group had better immune function than the control group did. All the study participants got a flu vaccine at the end of the eight-week meditation group. Then, at four and eight weeks after vaccine administration, both groups had blood tests to measure the level of antibodies they had produced against the flu vaccine. While both groups (as expected) had developed increased antibodies, the meditation group had a significantly larger increase than the controls, at both four and eight weeks after receiving the vaccine.
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