Working in Movement

What to stimulate production of dopamine in your brain? Find something that makes you laugh, that you think is funny. An article in Nature Science Update reports that a team at Stanford University used functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) to peer into the brains of people looking at funny newspaper cartoons. They observed the nucleus accumbens, the "reward area" of the brain, lighting up after looking at a funny cartoon, but quiet when peering at a dud. And that area has a high concentration of dopamine, according to the article.

Of course, this is a kind of blinding flash of the obvious; funny stuff makes you feel good. But coupling an observable effect in a specific area of the nervous system with an objective way of seeing it could make for a useful tool. Lead investigator Allan Reiss suggests that the technique could be helpful in diagnosing the very early stages of depression. I could also imagine desperate commercial television executives using it to test prospective shows.

And of course we know that learning makes more sense when you feel good than when you don't.