Happiness expands your brain!

Masti ki Paathshala !!!, originally uploaded by Dr Sanjay Dhawan.

Happiness expands your brain! Yes! It truly does.

An experiment was carried out with some simian creatures behind bars. To survive, these creatures from our evolutionary past were required to consume 240 pellets of food every hour. Unfortunately, these pellets are located outside the cage, in minute holes. In the beginning, it takes the monkey about thirty seconds to reach for the pellets through the bars and grab them, and another few seconds to actually bring the same pellets to your mouth. If the task cannot be completed faster, the monkeys would starve to death.

After about 500 tries, the monkeys actually became more expert at retrieving the pellets, and a much larger part of their brain lit up on scanning during the task. And this active part of the brain became progressively bigger, and bigger, and bigger!

And the study with the London cabbies proved beyond doubt that the spatial orientation areas opf the brain- the hippocampus- is much larger than an average hman's hippocampus.

It appears that practice does indeed ,ake you perfect! So if you practice being excellent, you expand the areas of ypour brain involved in being excellent and become more of it.

If you practice being happy, you expand the happiness areas of your brain, too!

Happiness seems to serve a bigger evolutionary purpose than just making it making it momentarily good, better best for us.

The negative emotions evoke a fight or flight response. Very limited options. And not very friendly for survival, let alone growth.

The positive emotions, on the other hand, expand our options, too. Happiness broadens our thinking and allows us to think more creatively, and build more intellectual, social and physical resources. These resources improve nopt only our chances of survival but actually help us thrive much better.

Happy people have a much bigger peripheral vision! So they are able to observe more in their surrounding. The visual cortex in the happy people is much bigger than normal people. A positive survival benefit.

And revisiting the Markonokoff''s rule- The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer still.

So happy becomes more happy.

And successful becomes more successful.

And...Happiness... makes... a lot of sense...

So- BE HAPPY!!!