Queen Amygdala and the war of stars

   Today we will explore a bio-hack opportunity to improve our nervous system response to the negative and positive things. We will go through some of the recent researches related to amygdala - a small almond-shaped region of the brain. Until recently, the scientists were seeing amygdala as the fear center of the brain, always on lookout for potential threats. Increased activity of this region was linked to depression and anxiety, however, less was known about how amygdala is responding to positive stimuli, and how this activity is relating to feeling positive emotions. 

   William Cuningham (University of Toronto) and Alexander Todorov (Princeton University) explored these new hypotheses. They've discovered that amygdala is implicated in human connection, compassion and happiness. According to their research, the happiest people do not ignore threats. They just might be better at seeing the good. In a fMRI study done last year, Cunningham and his colleagues found that negative images provoke amygdala activity, as expected. But  positive images did as well - but only when the participants were explicitly told to focus on them. This research suggest that people may be able to compensate for their tendency to focus on threats, on negativity, by consciously trying to focus more on the positive ("given the proper ability and motivation, they can show the same sensitivity to positive stimuli", as they automatically do to negative stimuli). Another study that included Cunningham and Todorov, to be published this year, found that amygdala may also be the "heart of compassion", as activity spiked when participants perceived people in need. This was especially true for participants who scored high on empathy. Added to other research that linked the ability to connect with and help others to personal wellbeing, all these studies suggest that humans posses a compassionate instinct that exists even in parts of the brain that are referred as primitive or reptilian. 

   Cuningham and Kirkland sought to determine whether the amygdala of happier people respond differently to positive and negative stimuli when compared with less-happy people. The researchers found that happier people have greater amygdala activation in response to positive stimuli, but they did not have a decreased response to negative ones, as would be predicted by the "rose-colored glasses" theory. 

   It seems that even at a very deep, instinctive level, we are wired to see people in need and help each other out, and that doing so might help us to be happy.