Brain activity prolongs life

Brain activity prolongs life.
Many phrases demonstrate how emotions perturb the body: Loss makes you feel "heartbroken," you suffer from "butterflies" in the stomach when nervous, and nasty things make you "sick to your stomach". Now, a new study from Finland suggests connections between emotions and body parts may be normal across cultures. The researchers coaxed Finnish, Swedish and Taiwanese participants into view various emotions and then asked them to link their feelings to body parts antehealth.com. They connected rile to the head, chest, arms and hands; disgust to the head, hands and lower chest; arrogance to the upper body; and love to the whole body except the legs.

As for anxiety, participants heavily linked it to the mid-chest. "The most surprising obsession was the consistency of the ratings, both across individuals and across all the tested words groups and cultures," said study lead author Lauri Nummenmaa, an second professor of cognitive neuroscience at Finland's Aalto University School of Science vitomol.eu. However, one US expert, Paul Zak, chairman of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, was unimpressed by the findings.

He discounted the study, saying it was weakly designed, failed to informed how emotions effect and "doesn't be established a thing". But for his part, Nummenmaa said the inspection is useful because it sheds light on how emotions and the body are interconnected. "We wanted to understand how the body and the wisdom work together for generating emotions. By mapping the bodily changes associated with emotions, we also aimed to see how different emotions such as disgust or sadness actually govern bodily functions".

For the study, published online Dec 30, 2013 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers showed two silhouettes of bodies to about 700 people. Depending on the experiment, they tried to jolly feelings out of the participants by showing them sentimental words, stories, clips from movies and facial expressions. Then the participants colored the silhouettes to exhibit the body areas they felt were suitable most or least active. The stance was to not mention emotions directly to the participants but instead to make them "feel special emotions," Nummenmaa said.

The researchers noted that some of the emotions may cause activity in specific areas of the body. For example, most root emotions were linked to sensations in the upper chest, which may have to do with breathing and love rate. And people linked all the emotions to the head, suggesting a possible link to knowledge activity. But Zak said the study failed to consider that people often feel more than one passion at a time.

Or that a person's own comprehension of emotion can be misleading since the "areas in the brain that process emotions look after to be largely outside of our conscious awareness. It would make more sense, Zak said, to later measure activity in the body, such as sweat and temperature, to make sure people's perceptions have some footing in reality. Nummenmaa said he expects future research to go in that direction.

How might the current digging be useful? Zak is skeptical that it could be, but the study lead author is hopeful. "Many bananas disorders are associated with altered functioning of the emotional system, so unraveling how emotions coordinate with the minds and bodies of in good individuals is important for developing treatments for such disorders. Next, the researchers want to catch sight of if these emotion-body connections change in people who are anxious or depressed medworldplus.com. "Also, we are interested in how children and adolescents occurrence their emotions in their bodies," Nummenmaa said.