When I read a good book, especially a good non-fiction book, I like to highlight notable comments, facts and incidents on my iPad in the Kindle app. I use the device to send the highlight to Twitter. The other day, I started reading "The Emotional Life of the Your Brain" by Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley. Prof. Davidson is a world-renown researcher who persuaded the Dalai Lama to loan some monks who are advanced and experienced meditators to his lab at the Univ. of Wisconsin to study what happens in their brains when they meditate. Sharon Begley is an experienced technical writer who has collaborated on several books and written for Reuters and Newsweek. She has written and co-written other books about the brain.
The book starts off explaining the weight of opinion at the time Davidson began graduate school against the subject of emotion as a suitable focus for scientific study. I quickly found parts that I wanted to highlight and send to Twitter.
Here are some of those Tweets:
Real smiling makes you happy. "Only when both muscle groups participated did we see a shift toward greater left-s... http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7177753-only-when-both-muscle-groups-participated-did-we-see-a …
Feelings go along with rational conscious thought "Yet we had fingered the prefrontal cortex. This region was co... http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7177756-yet-we-had-fingered-the-prefrontal-cortex-this-region-was …
Actresses are important in scientific research "I didn't trust the film clips we'd been using to induce the emot... http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7177758-i-didn-t-trust-the-film-clips-we-d-been-using-to …
Babies are good participants in brain research "First, babies are very expressive emotionally, giggling or cryin... http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7177763-first-babies-are-very-expressive-emotionally-giggling-or-crying-or …
Because I am a male and have been all my life, I try to stay conscious of what I see and learn about the life I haven't lived, that of a female. Stories like "Excellent Women" by Barbara Pym help me notice the quiet female presence in our lives, from the months before birth on.
Davidson gathered evidence that positive emotions tend to be on one side of the brain and negative on the other. He found that this was true across cultures and nationalities. Then, he wanted to study young brains to see if they did the same thing. He was able to get 10-month old babies but to elicit positive and negative emotions in them, he recruited some actresses to make positive and negative faces and voice sounds. The babies' brains reacted the same way his adult subjects' brains had.
I think it is notable that we are all born from women and both sexes tend to hear their first human sounds from women. I have repeatedly seen that women can jump from one sort of emotional expression to another quite different one and back to the first quickly, smoothly and convincingly. It is impressive that women's emotional, intellectual and vocal abilities can be an important scientific tool.
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