Reading Minds with Fitter Brains

Reading Minds with Fitter Brains
Part of Brain Fitness is being able to read the emotions of
other people. The better you are at this, the better you
will be at interacting with people, either socially or in
business. Like any skill, you can improve this social
aspect of your emotional intelligence.

Most of the time we don't even think about interpreting the
intentions of others. We just do it naturally by reading
their facial expressions and gestures to know when they are
happy, angry or troubled. There's actually a test you can
take called, Reading the Mind in the Eye, to see how
skillful you are at reading other's emotions. You can
access the entire test on several websites by searching for
'Reading the Mind in the Eye'.

A new paper revisits the role of a specific hormone in
improving your ability to 'read minds' of other people - to
understand their feelings and intentions without them
needing to speak. The hormone, called oxytocin, has a
well-established role in love and bonding. For example,
oxytocin increases in both the baby and the mother during
breastfeeding and contributes to the emotional bond between
mother and child.

The new research study gave volunteers a squirt of oxytocin
or a placebo, through a nasal spray and then asked them to
take a test the 'Reading the Mind in the Eye' test, that
measures social intelligence. The test uses images of eyes
to determine how well participants gage the emotions by
only looking at eyes.

It turned out that oxytocin significantly improved people's
performance on the test. This is fascinating because it
means that a hormone is partially responsible for our
social skills and our ability to naturally produce this
hormone influences our skill at any moment.

So the big question is, are there things that you can do to
boost your levels of oxytocin and improve your ability to
read other peoples emotions? I tried to find scientific
articles that addressed this but could not find studies
that asked this question directly. Still, it is known that
oxytocin is associated with love and caring behavior so
it's feasible that deliberately trying to feel that emotion
might boost your oxytocin levels and improve your skills.

If you're a fan of the movie 'the Secret', which I
partially am (although I think it's a bit over-the top) -
you know that many proponents of the self-development world
tout the need to feel grateful for what you have. I
speculate that purposefully reflecting on what you are
grateful for may actually increase oxytocin in your brain.
This in turn would improve your social skills and improve
your odds of creating beneficial relationships that could
help you reach your goals in life.

This actually goes back to the concept of EPIQ performance
that I introduced earlier (standing for Emotional, Physical
and Intellectual Quotient). The more you can control your
own emotions and place yourself into specific emotional
states on demand, the more you actually control the
manufacturing of specific hormones in your brain and the
more you can influence skills that those hormones control.
It all comes back to working on your Brain Fitness in the
end.

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