Encourage Your Brain: I Am Contagious

Hey everyone, it's Susan, and I just watched a fun TED Talk by Vanessa Van Edwards called "You Are Contagious," and she's got some fascinating research that talks about emotional contagion. One of the pieces was the study of fMRI scanners where people were asked to smell something. They didn't know what they were smelling, but they're measuring the brain activity in the region as they smelled these things. So they smelled two different things. One was the underarm sweat pads from somebody who'd been walking on a treadmill. And then they were asked to smell another set, and these people had jumped out of airplanes. So obviously very fearful as they're getting ready, cortisol's way up high as they're gonna jump out of this airplane. So the interesting piece that they learned in that study was that the brain region that activates, is activated for fear, fear actually lit up when the people smelled the skydiver underarm pads. So interesting to realize that after the fact, and you're smelling something, these secretions, you can actually feel fear yourself. So that old saying that I smell fear, it's a real thing. So that was one. The second piece of research that was kind of fascinating was took a bunch of students and they asked them to sing a song, and they sang it into one of those vocal accuracy software and 3 different groups of students were measured. The first group went into the room, simply sang the song. The second group went into the room and had to say in advance of singing, "I'm afraid." And then the third group went in and in advance of singing had to say, "I'm excited." So the statistics that they found in terms of accuracy on those 3 different groups, the control group that did nothing in advance, their accuracy was 69%, if I'm not mistaken. The group that had to say "I'm afraid" actually had in the 50 percentile for accuracy, but the group that said "I'm excited" before they sang had 80% accuracy. So the message in all that: if you're excited about something, it's going to improve your performance. It's going to spread that emotional contagion. So the next time you meet somebody, see somebody, talk to a colleague or a friend, ask them, "You working on anything exciting?" You can actually spread emotional contagion as a result of that question. So I hope that each one of you is working on fun, exciting things and spreading positive emotional contagion.