Welcome innovative viewers to today’s episode of Science and Spirituality. Does mood or state of mind affect how our brain perceives the world? Does having a constructive or negative attitude really make a difference and what do scientists have to say about this?

A research team from the department of psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada recently published their findings in the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience on how our emotional states affect our brain’s ability, specifically the visual cortex or the part of the brain responsible for detecting simple visual stimuli, to perceive the world.

The principal investigator of the study is Adam K. Anderson, Professor of Psychology and the Canada Research Chair in Affective Neuroscience at the university. The lead author of the study is Taylor Schmitz, a PhD student at the university and our guest on today’s program. He will be discussing the study’s fascinating conclusions.

The idea for the study came from prior experiments where it was shown that one’s state of mind has an influence on the level of one’s cognition or creativity, such as the ability to use abstract thinking to analogize between two words. It was found that those with a constructive attitude had a much easier time accomplishing these types of tasks.

So we did these studies using behavioral tasks and what we are interested in, in this current study, is to see if we can extend our behavioral observations to the level of neural activity and actually observe changes in patterns of neuron activity in the brain, while people were engaged in positive and negative moods.

Taylor now provides details on how the experiment was conducted.

What we did is we had a series of undergraduate students that were recruited from the university. These are healthy, roughly early twenties. It involved basically doing a task where they saw a series of positive, negative and neutral images and also a visual spatial task, which I will get to in a moment.

They just did this task while they were lying in the bore of the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner and while they did the task, we measured their brain activity. That was how we did the study.

The emotional reaction the students to the images shown was also quantified by way of a numerical scale.

We didn’t only measure positive effect in terms of neural activity; we also asked the subjects to self-report how they felt while they were in the scanner. So we would show them images and we would give them a rating scale during which they would rate the positivity of their emotional state on a scale of 1 to 9, with 5 being kind of neutral and 9 being the most positive state that they could be in, and 1 being the most negative state they could be in.

After viewing a series of positive, neutral or negative images, a test was given.

We had images of a face stimulus that was presented in the center of the screen in a very centrally located area, and the subject had to look at the face and just simply determine whether the face was a male or a female. Surrounding the image of the face was an image of a house or a building that was in the periphery and so the face was sort of superimposed on this.

Taylor explains the significance of the images featuring a face together with a house.

Now, why did we do these sorts of random stimulus categories? The reason is because there are areas in the visual cortex of the brain that process these two types of information and they are sort of anatomically dissociable. So there is an area in the brain that processes specifically face information that is known as the fusiform face area.

There is also another area of the visual cortex, in higher levels of the visual cortex, that seems to be predisposed to processing place information. This is known as the perihippocampal place area. This is in an anatomical distinct location in the visual cortex. So when you show a person an image of a face and a place at the same time, these areas of the brain will both light up, as it were.

However, when you actually focus your attention onto the face stimulus, this causes your brain to actually enhance that information in the visual cortex. You can consider attention as almost like a spotlight.

By examining the activation in these two areas of the visual cortex, it was found that that those with negative feelings were less able to fully process the picture, particularly the information beyond the gender of the face, namely the house or place information. In other words having constructive or positive feelings allowed the brain to grasp the entire image –both the face and house - more easily.

When they were in a negative state, they processed the place information even less, compared again to the neutral state. So, the intentional spotlight seems to be kind of constraining with the search area in negative states of what they are processing. So they are only really processing the faces. By contrast, when they are in a positive state, their attention seems to be somewhat relaxed, as kind of a way of putting it, so they actually encode more of that place information unintentionally.

When we return, we will discuss with Taylor Schmitz what these findings mean in practical terms. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to today’s episode of Science and Spirituality, as we continue our conversation with Taylor Schmitz, a University of Toronto, Canada PhD student in the department of psychology who is the lead author of a recently published study in the respected Journal of Neuroscience.

He and his team members examined how our emotional states (specifically positive, neutral, and negative states) impact the brain’s visual cortex’s ability to perceive the world.

The scientists concluded that having a constructive frame of mind allows one to take in more information when one views the world around them, whereas those in a negative state have “tunnel vision” or a lesser ability to do the same. How do these findings apply in the real world?

In a negative state where you are more fixated on a narrow area of your visual field, it leaves you less able to integrate other pieces of information in your visual world. This is something that can also have negative effects. For instance, if you were navigating through a crowd, looking for somebody, that could be an example of where you would want to have more access to the full extent of your visual field.

The results indicate that it is advantageous for us to have a constructive mindset whenever possible as then we are able to visually take in more of our world. But what if we have a negative mindset? Is it possible to change our thinking and then experience a positive state of mind? Taylor says a method called “re-appraisal” may be the way for us to get back on the positive side.

What we are showing is that the brain facilitates this narrowness and that is something that really requires a reappraisal of the negative state itself to get out of. So, if you are in the negative state, sometimes you just need to force yourself to get into a slightly more positive mode of thinking so that you can access other pieces of information that may contextualize that negative event; whether it’s the loss of a loved one or just spilling coffee on yourself.

Something that could be negative, you could just quickly try to get into a slightly more positive mood and think, “Well, hey, I have spilled coffee on myself before and it’s no big deal” or “I have lost a loved one but I have this entire family network that I can rely on for support.” Using bits of information like this are things that require flexible thinking, that require different perspective taking and unfortunately negative moods are not conducive to that mode of information processing.

Taylor Schmitz is now repeating the experiment with an older population, namely with those who are 70 to 75 years of age.

We are in the midst of collecting data to do this and one of the interesting findings that has come out of research on older individuals and emotion across the age spectrum is that older individuals consistently rate themselves as having more positive effect than younger adults. So in terms of their subjective ratings of self-satisfaction, they seem to be consistently higher than young adults.

Initially, I think we are hypothesizing that because older adults seem to have this positivity bias, they seem to be just generally more positive. They actually might be slightly more impervious to the influences of negative emotion.

So it could either mean (a) they are just happier, but negative emotions influence them just as much as they do young adults or it could mean that (b) they are just as happy as young adults, but they are more impervious to the influences of negative information.

Maybe that is just because of the age they have more experience with positive and negative experiences in their life and so they know how to deal with negative.

We asked Taylor how the research findings can be applied on a global level.

Again, if you were at the geopolitical scale, I think the bias in terms of media for sure is on negative portrayals because they attract audiences and I think that it is easier to portray negative information than it is to portray positive information. It is easier to criticize than it is to applaud somebody and so this negativity bias in the media leads to very narrow and circumscribed perspectives on entire societies and cultures.

The conflict in the Middle East is portrayed as very one-sided perspectives on either side of the conflict. Each side has this very narrow perception of the other, even though they are these incredibly rich cultures that have inhabited this area for thousands of years and they have both contributed so much to science and technology. They are these rich cultures and none of that is appreciated.

This is something that I think, if the more appreciation we could have for these cultures as beautiful cultures in and of themselves that we could probably start influencing the way we make some political decisions about how to interact with one another.

We appreciate Taylor Schmitz and colleagues for sharing this important research which demonstrates the power of our thoughts to influence how we see the world around us. Our gratitude goes to Taylor Schmitz in particular for introducing us to this study. Thank you, esteemed viewers, for joining us for today’s episode of Science and Spirituality. Coming up next is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May we all live in peace and happiness together.

Come along on a visit to the ancient city of Hebron in the West Bank of Palestine.

Hebron is also well known for the traditional industries, part of it is the textile, and part of it is blowing glass. And in the religious aspect, we have the fourth holiest site for Muslims.

Supreme Master Television’s exclusive tour begins this Wednesday, August 5, on Enlightening Entertainment.