This piece of news might just hold your attention as it seems to provide vital insights about the workings of the brain. A study author from the University of Texas at Austin claims that if people use their brain’s frontal lobes less, the more they appear to view themselves via rose-colored glasses.
The study was performed at the university’s Imaging Research Center. It seems to provide novel insights into the affiliation between brain functions and human emotion and perceptions. The normal human propensity to perceive themselves in a positive light may be supportive and inspiring in a few circumstances but harmful in others.
“In healthy people, the more you activate a portion of your frontal lobes, the more accurate your view of yourself is,” commented, Jennifer Beer, an assistant professor of psychology, who conducted the study with graduate student Brent L. Hughes. “And the more you view yourself as desirable as or better than your peers, the less you use those lobes.”
It could assist authors to comprehend brain functions in a better way among seniors or people who experience depression or other mental illnesses. It may also possibly have insinuations for recuperating methamphetamine addicts whose frontal lobes seemed to be frequently impaired by drug use and who could misjudge their capability to remain clean.
The study included around 20 people who were compared to their peers on positive characteristics like tact, modesty, likeability and maturity and negative qualities such as materialism, messiness, untrustworthiness and narrow-mindedness. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine scanned their brains, as the participants replied to those questions.
The participants who perceived themselves in an extremely positive light across those dissimilar regions apparently applied their orbitofrontal cortex less as compared to the other subjects. This area of the frontal lobe seemed to be usually linked to reasoning, planning, decision-making and problem-solving. A few participants who had precise views of themselves supposedly exhibited four times more frontal lobe activation as opposed to the most intense ‘rose-colored glasses’ wearer in the study.
Among a different group of participants who were asked the same questions, those who were needed to respond swiftly apparently viewed themselves in a far more positive light as compared to those who had indefinite time to reply.
Those results propose that processing information in a more premeditated way may be the technique in which frontal lobe activation allows people to come to more pragmatic conclusions.
The findings of the study will be published in the Journal NeuroImage.