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May 8th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda MONDAY, May 7 (HealthDay News) — Got something to report about
yourself? An opinion, perhaps, or a status update? Nobody may care except
you, but new brain research suggests you can make yourself feel good
simply by sharing.
Participants who talked about themselves showed signs of activity in
the areas of the brain that are linked to value and motivation, said Diana
Tamir, lead author of a study published in this week’s issue of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This helps to explain why people so obsessively engage in this
behavior. It’s because it provides them with some sort of subjective
value: It feels good, basically,” said Tamir, a graduate student in the
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University.
Indeed, the researchers found that the regions of the brain that are
activated by talking about oneself are also responsible for the thrills of
food, sex, money and drug addiction, Tamir said.
The findings are more than a scientific curiosity, Tamir said,
considering how much time people spend discussing themselves. By one
estimate, 30 percent to 40 percent of your speech has to do with you.
“Self-disclosure is a behavior that we do all of the time, day in and
day out: When you talk to people, they’ll often talk about themselves,”
Tamir said. “On Twitter and Facebook, people are primarily posting about
what they’re thinking and feeling in the moment. This is one piece of
evidence about why we may do that.”
In the study, Tamir and a colleague conducted several experiments on
subjects whose brains were scanned as they were told to do various
things.
In one experiment, 78 participants alternately disclosed their own
opinions — about things like whether they preferred coffee or tea — and
judged the opinions of others whose photographs they looked at.
In another experiment, 117 people alternately talked about their
personality traits (among other things, declaring whether they’re
“curious” or “ambitious”) and those of the U.S. president at the time,
either George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
The researchers found that certain parts of the brain were more active
when people talked about themselves. In terms of monetary value,
participants valued being able to share a thought as being worth about a
penny, Tamir said: “We like to call it a penny for your thoughts.”
So, why did evolution encourage humans to feel good when they talk
about themselves? “We’re doing some tests to see what larger role this
behavior may play, whether people’s motivation to self-disclose changes
depending on their motivations to bond with someone,” Tamir said. “Some
studies show that the more you self-disclose to someone, the more you like
them, the more they like you. It may have something to do with forming
social bonds.”
Paul Zak, a brain researcher and founding director of the Center for
Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, said the findings
are “very convincing” and offer insight into human evolution.
“If a social creature did not disclose information, then other
creatures might stop interacting with it,” he said. “Animals do this with
smells and movements, and humans do this with language. This study reveals
how our brain evolved to motivate sociality, which is pretty cool.”
More information
To learn more about the brain, try Harvard’s brain
atlas.
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