A Crazy, Lovely Hiatus

Hola. I’m taking a temporary break from Crazy Love (the blog, not the activity) to build a beat covering Latino issues.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to spend four months living in Mexico, getting to know the culture in all its captivating complexity and gaining fluent Spanish. Now I’m inspired by how being bilingual allows me to cross the borders that exist within our own country; in those cultural borderlands live dynamic, ever-evolving questions that touch the core of the U.S., its Latin American neighbors, our histories and our future.

That, and I’m a tamale addict.

Meanwhile, enjoy the archives, and remember that while we’re all a little bit crazy, we are constantly learning more about how to make our lives and our loves sail more smoothly. Buena suerte…

Americans: Optimistically Hypocritical About Marriage

I’m a sucker for any new study about marriage. Maybe it’s because I’ve witnessed three divorces among my parents (their first marriage to each other and each of their second marriages). Maybe it’s because when the time comes, I desperately want to get it right myself. Marriage is both a romantic dream and a daunting enigma to me — an emotionally-loaded puzzle that I simultaneously fear and want to solve.

That means I want every piece of information and insight I can get my hands on. So last week’s TIME magazine — headline: “Who Needs Marriage?” — virtually flew off the shelf and into my lap of its own accord.

TIME teamed up with the Pew Research Center to conduct a nationwide poll about marriage and compare it to polls past. There are lots of interesting statistics in there about socioeconomic trends in who gets married these days and why. But this unlikely truth is what jumped out at me: We Americans are increasingly pessimistic about marriage, but we want to do it anyway.

A 1978 TIME poll asked if people thought marriage was becoming obsolete; 28 percent did. This year it’s 39 percent, and an even higher 44 percent for those under 30 — yet only 5 percent of people in that age group don’t want to get married.

So, we’re stubbornly hopeful about our own prospects for marriage even as we grow skeptical of the institution as a whole. Frankly, I find that endearing. Despite the battlefield of broken relationships around us and the modern feasibility of soldiering on alone, our human spirits still long for love, companionship and family. We still hope. We still strive.

“What we found is that marriage, whatever its social, spiritual or symbolic appeal, is in purely practical terms just not as necessary as it used to be,” wrote Belinda Luscombe for TIME. “Neither men nor women need to be married to have sex or companionship or professional success or respect or even children — yet marriage remains revered and desired.”

In fact, while marriage rates have declined (about 50 percent of American adults are married now, compared to 70 percent in 1960), nearly six times more people in the TIME/Pew poll thought it was easier for marrieds than singles to find happiness. We may or may not be empirically right about that, but it’s significant that we perceive it to be so.

Of course, marriage is what society expects of us — and society tells us that in myriad ways practically from birth. “Getting married is a way to show family and friends that you have a successful personal life,” Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, author of a book on marriage, told TIME. “It’s like the ultimate merit badge.”

That take smacks a little too much of keeping up with the Joneses for my taste, but this much is true: Marriage is an essential part of the life dream that most of us share. It goes hand in hand (no pun intended) with our other shared dreams: a good home, a family, stability, comfort, meaning. Cold, hard facts like the divorce rate — which actually has dropped over the past 30 years, hurrah! — are no match for those human desires.

Maybe getting married is a little bit crazy. We can’t possibly know how our lives, our relationships, our partners or even our selves may change. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, our good reasons for pessimism — and I have plenty — I believe marriage is one of the most honorable endeavors we make in our lives. It may not always work out, but there is love and honor in the trying. And that’s what living is for.

With the Turkey, a Side of Birth Order

As we gather with family this Thanksgiving weekend — and reacquaint ourselves with old family dynamics, good and bad — here’s an intriguing thought to ponder. Research suggests that the order in which we were born shapes our personalities throughout life.

Birth order isn’t a new topic, but NPR’s Allison Aubrey revisited it earlier this week and pointed out some striking findings that I’d not heard before. It turns out the popular image of firstborn children as responsible, overachieving and bossy is not just a stereotype.

Back in 1972 Psychologist Richard Zweigenhaft of Guilford College looked at a sample of 121 U.S. Senators and congresspeople and determined their birth order, Aubrey reported. He found that 51 of them — or 42 percent — were firstborns, a significantly higher proportion than in the general population. Subsequent studies have shown that oldest siblings are overrepresented in a number of so-called “high achieving” professions, such as corporate CEOs, college professors, U.S. presidents and Supreme Court justices.

It so happens that I, being a psychology nerd and an oldest sibling myself, got interested in this and did my own little study in college. I wondered if there were a disproportionate number of oldests at my highly-competitive New England college, Williams. For a project in my statistics class, I did the research and found out. The answer: yes. There were more firstborns among Williams students than there should have been, statistically speaking — too many for it to be random.

This was nice for my oldest-sibling ego, of course. Sure, we have to look after our whiny little brothers and sisters, tolerate tedious children’s music on family road trips, and fall under the heavy hands of rookie parents. But at least we get ambition and success in the bargain!

As a kid, I instinctively took on the duties of the eldest. Parts of that, like reading stories to my siblings and becoming a friend and guide they could look up to, were delightful. Parts were not. Without even thinking about it, I subsumed my needs to the greater cause of family harmony. Whatever I wanted — to listen to a particular song, to eat a favorite dish — was less important than keeping two squirrelly siblings and two stressed parents calm and happy. Sometimes, enacting a real-life metaphor, I physically placed myself between my brother and sister to prevent them from fighting.

Monica Hanson, an oldest child interviewed by NPR’s Aubrey, said of her parents, “I don’t think they did it on purpose — but I was expected to do a lot of things, to be unselfish, to get it done.” Aubrey added that “to this day, Hanson is still seen by family and friends as the doer — the boss, the person who can hold everybody together.” That sounds familiar.

Naturally, the effects of birth order are far more nuanced than all this would make them appear. The theory goes that, besides the responsibilities foisted upon them, firstborns also benefit from their parents’ undivided attention before the second child is born — attention that could accelerate their cognitive development.

But these are theories and generalizations; there are plenty of oldest-child dreamers and youngest-child overachievers out there. As Zweigenhaft emphasized to NPR, birth order is just one in a kaleidoscope of influences that shape who we become.

And while I’m being an unselfish eldest child (wink), I also wonder this. If we looked at other professions — creative ones that require just as much talent as lawmaking or business managing, talent of a different sort — would we find that a disproportionate number of middle and youngest children become artists, musicians, or teachers? With the older sibling already hogging the role of overachiever, maybe the drive to forge their own, unique identity gives younger children the freedom to explore.

When Your Mind Drifts, Your Happiness Drops

To be happy, be here now. It’s not just for Sanskrit-chanting hippies anymore — science says so.

I love this new finding from Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness and deliverer of a really fun TED talk), published in Science magazine. It’s simple, powerful, and immediately useful in everyday life. And it affirms something that I deeply believe to be true (isn’t it nice when science has your back?).

Plus, Killingsworth and Gilbert get points for writing one of the shortest, clearest scientific abstracts I’ve ever seen:

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

John Tierney describes the study in detail in the New York Times. The researchers got more than 2,200 people around the world to download an iPhone app, trackyourhappiness. Then they pinged them at random intervals to ask what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how they were feeling.

A quarter-million responses later, Tierney writes, they crunched the numbers and determined that “whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.” Especially if their minds were wandering to unpleasant places. The kicker: even those daydreaming about pleasant topics were not quite as happy as those whose minds were in the moment.

This rings incredibly true to me. I can over-think, over-analyze and worry with the best of ‘em. My mind is constantly moving. Yet in the past few years as I’ve learned the practices of meditation and yoga, I’ve found what peace can come with quieting what yogis call “the monkey mind.”

Of course, my mind is still scratching fleas, swinging from branches and throwing bananas most of the time. I have a long way to go. But the more I practice, the more often I can catch the monkey in the act and calm him down.

(Musical interlude: check out this clip from Willy Porter’s song Be Here Now. Then you can contemplate the present to a nice little bass groove.)

Just how often do our minds wander? It depends what we’re doing. We’re at our most focused when having sex. (Good sex, I would add. Ahem.) Here’s Tierney’s summary of what Killingsworth and Gilbert found:

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

When asked their thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of concentration: only 10 percent of the time did their thoughts stray from their endeavors. But when people were doing anything else, their minds wandered at least 30 percent of the time, and as much as 65 percent of the time (recorded during moments of personal grooming, clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).

Across all the responses, minds were wandering 47 percent of the time.

“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize that half the people aren’t really there,” Gilbert told Tierney.

To totally sink their shot, the researchers even found evidence that drifting thoughts cause unhappiness, not just accompany it. Mind-wandering generally preceded unhappiness for their study participants — but not the other way around. Over several months, more-frequent mind wanderers were less happy than others.

Gilbert summed it up elegantly. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, he said, “The heart goes where the head takes it.”

Meditation Tips From One Beginner to Another

I’m taking this moment to share a little tip sheet that I wrote on meditation last year that was only partially published. Here you go — I hope it’s useful.

Like many of you probably are, I’m a thinker. My mind normally runs around like a rambunctious puppy at a dog park, chasing after every ball that sails through the air. A thought (“I wonder if I said the right thing in that staff meeting.”) pops into my head, and I scamper after it, pursue it to the far end of the field, until another thought (“What am I going to have for dinner?”) pops up and instantly has me bounding off in another direction.

Because of this, I’ve always assumed I’d be no good at meditation. But over the past few years, I’ve learned that it’s totally feasible and helpful, even for thinkers like me. Through mediation, I teach my mind to calmly sit, stay, and let each of those balls bounce away.

After meditating, my mind moves more slowly, yet purposefully. My thoughts linger longer wherever they happen to land. I’m acutely aware of my surroundings. I notice posters I’ve walked by dozens of times and never really seen. I hear the sound of my feet meeting the ground and notice the change when I step from pavement onto wood. I can focus on my writing with little effort.

The feeling might last 30 minutes or two hours, depending on the demands of the day. I hope that, the more I do it, the more I’ll be able to carry that serenity into other hours.

I’m not an expert, just a student. But I can share what I’ve learned. Take
15 minutes and try this:

1. Sit comfortably in a quiet place. You can sit cross-legged on the floor, sit on a pillow, kneel, or sit on a chair — whatever you prefer, as long as the position allows you to keep your back, neck and head straight and tall.

2. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Notice the faint breeze in your nostrils as you inhale, the warm air across your lips as you exhale. If you like, pick a spot in your chest, neck, back or belly, and pay attention to how it moves with each breath.

3. Focus on your breathing. When you find your mind chasing a thought, gently nudge it back to your breathing. Again. And again. You can try labeling your thoughts as you let them go: past, future, worry, planning. It’s interesting to see which themes arise most often.

4. Forgive your mind for struggling. This kind of concentration is hard. The idea is not to do it perfectly, but to keep trying and training yourself to do it better. Remember: meditation is called a practice for a reason.

This Is Your Brain on Love

Young MC, illustrious hip-hop artist of my middle-school generation, described it like this: “Reception’s jumpin’, bass is pumpin’, look at the girl and your heart starts thumpin’.”

When we feel that coursing rush of love, we say we’ve got “chemistry.” It should come as no surprise that inside the brain, that chemistry is quite literal. And now we can see what it looks like.

Researchers at Syracuse University, led by Stephanie Ortigue, recently published an article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine summarizing all the studies looking at fMRI brain scans of love over the past decade.

Their essential conclusion: different parts of the brain are involved in different kinds of love. There’s a consistent pattern of activity in our brains when we think about someone we love passionately, Young MC-style, and it’s distinct from the pattern that arises when we, say, gaze into the face of our child.

The studies generally looked at the difference between how we react to a photo or the name of our lover vs. someone else. So, they used a formula approximately like this:

(brain response to your lover’s face) – (brain response to a stranger’s face) = (brain response caused just by love)

All kinds of love, from passionate to maternal, sparked activity in the so-called “reward pathway,” the system of neurons that gets flooded with the chemical dopamine to make us feel pleasure and want more of whatever we’re doing — the same mechanisms triggered by cocaine.

These dopamine areas are known to be involved in creating states of motivational drive (think: “I MUST get that chick’s phone number!”), as well as pair-bonding. Some of these regions are also implicated in sexual response. Surprise.

Romantic love lit up a diverse array of brain regions, including the emotional center and areas that mediate certain kinds of complex thought, such as body image and social interaction. Interestingly, when the study participants thought about their lover, it quieted activity in brain areas involved in anxiety, fear and grief.

“These fMRI results suggest that passionate love is more than a basic emotion,” Ortigue and colleagues wrote. “Passionate love is a complex positive emotion and also a reward-based goal-directed motivation toward a specific partner. … Love also involves cognition.”

The neuroimaging of maternal love showed some overlap with the truly-madly-deeply variety. But it turns out maternal love also comes with a surge of activity in the periaqueductal gray matter, or PAG, which has direct connections to the brain’s emotional system and has a lot of receptors for vasopressin, a natural chemical involved in maternal bonding.

Interlude: This song by one of my favorite musicians, Willy Porter, is a beautiful tribute to the forms of unconditional love that we humans get to experience.

So… what do we do with this information?

Someday there could be implications for healing. “It’s another probe into the brain and into the mind of a patient,” Ortigue said in Syracuse’s announcement. “By understanding why they fall in love and why they are so heartbroken, they can use new therapies.”

The article’s authors argued that the better we understand love, the more we respect its power in shaping mental and physical health.

Dissecting love into its cellular, biochemical parts might seem to suck the romance out of it. But it doesn’t for me. The washes of chemicals and tiny electrical signals in our brains are inseparable from our experience. To examine the complex orchestra of biological signals in love doesn’t diminish the elation, the yearning, the closeness, or the reception’s jumpin’-bass is pumpin’ that we feel — they are one and the same, physical and spiritual forms of the same force.

I’ll leave you with this song from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s underappreciated musical Aspects of Love (yes, it’s a little maudlin, so sue me). The company sings:

Off into the world we go, planning futures, shaping years
Love bursts in and suddenly all our wisdom disappears
Love makes fools of everyone, all the rules we make are broken

You can fMRI that all you want. We’ll still be helplessly, hopelessly living it.

Gracias for a Lighter, Lovelier Way to Live with Death

In between wild rallies for my San Francisco Giants this week, I attended an entirely different kind of celebration that opened my eyes to the limitations of how we in mainstream American culture deal with death. (Have I mentioned that I love this town?)

Dia de los Muertos is the traditional Mexican observance for honoring the dead. In San Francisco’s Mission district on Tuesday night, thousands of people — gringos and Latinos alike — processed through the streets garbed as skeletons. They wore elegant dresses and suits, elaborate hats and clusters of bright orange marigolds. They had painted their faces like black and white skulls, some with intricate black swirls and floral designs adorning their cheeks and foreheads. They made our dead loved ones — and death itself — beautiful.

(I was absorbing it all, not photographing, but I snapped this shot on my phone. You can find more and better photos on SFGate and Flickr.)

In nearby Garfield Square, people had created dozens of altars, or ofrendas, to their departed loved ones. Some were simple collections of photos, mementos and candles. Others were vivid works of art. There was a flower-laden viking ship, probably 10 feet long. A young woman played a mournful accordion next to a web of yarn strung between two trees, where people hung slips of paper scribbled with names and messages. My favorite: a sculpture made from thin, twisting tree branches mottled with woolly lichen, the limbs pointing toward the sky and hung with little glowing skull-lanterns.

Periodically, the gentle murmur of the crowd was pierced by an exuberant chorus of drums and dancing. Now and then, my nose would be filled with the spicy smoke of burning sage.

I loved it all. This was no somber, constricted memorial where people try to stay silent and stifle their tears. It was a celebration — soulful and reverent, but not sad.

It made me think about how we process death and honor our dead in this country. Usually, we avoid discussions of death. If we’re chatting with a new friend and they mention a loved one who is gone, we give an “I’m sorry” and quickly move on. We don’t even like to say “dead” — it’s “passed away” or “departed.” We skirt the matter with children. Death is dark, threatening, taboo — a force to be banished from our daily lives.

Dia de los Muertos did the opposite. It felt like a celebration of our place in the natural cycle, where we, the living, are just one part. The observers gathered up all kinds of feelings — grieving and missing, sweetly remembering lives past, and rejoicing in our presence here now among the living — and blended them. The living, breathing dead parading in their face paint even included children, as young as toddlers. The night made death a part of life.

Carlos, my cousin’s husband, told me that’s the view of death he learned growing up in Mexico City. It’s not that Mexicans are on “good terms” with death, he said, “but it’s part of being alive that you’re going to die, so they have fun with death.”

This attitude even allows for humor. Carlos remembers receiving the traditional Dia de los Muertos gift as a child: a colorfully decorated skull made of sugar, with his name scribbled across the top. One ofrenda at Garfield Square this week was a miniature stage on which a rowdy-looking band of model skeletons played, with hard rock music pumping in the background. “It’s all very playful,” Carlos explained.

When a loved one dies here in our culture, we hold a memorial service, and that’s about it. In subsequent years we might observe the anniversary of their death with a few family members and friends. Mourning and remembering are a private matter, more and more so as time goes on. To me, Dia de los Muertos had a healing power that’s missing from our traditions.

The classic belief is that on Dia de los Muertos the dead come back and spend some time with the living. Carlos said the educated elite in Mexico (and probably the U.S. too) tend to dismiss this idea as ignorant, pagan or superstitious.

But whether or not you believe it literally, Carlos said, “Something interesting happens when you start getting into it. … When you spend the amount of time it takes thinking about your dead, putting out their objects, preparing your altar — which in some cases takes months — at the end of the night, people say, ‘You know what? I really feel like I haven’t remembered my grandmother in so much detail as I did while doing this ritual.’ So you end up with the feeling that you actually spent some time with them.”

That’s just what struck me on Tuesday night. The celebration seemed to merge the worlds of the living and the dead into one, without fear or darkness. For a time, a beautiful time, we all danced in the same space.

To Defuse Conflict, Speak the Heart of the Matter

I’m stepping away from strict science to share a nugget of wisdom that can probably help you more, right now, than any piece of sparkling new insight yielded by a brain-scanning machine. Some truths we find through formal study, and some we find through living.

This one comes from a book called “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most,” by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen, a trio of Harvard Law School instructors and consultants who specialize in negotiation (a new, expanded edition comes out this week). Their guidance is based on years of work with clients, collaboration with experts in cognitive science and family therapy, extensive reading in various related fields, and careful observation of their own relationships and those close to them.

It’s not a lyrical page-turner — as a rule, personal psychology books are not — but it’s clearly written and loaded with useful wisdom on a subject that probably every human being on the planet could use a hand with. Anyone who feels like they’ve got difficult conversations licked, raise your hand…

Among the many astute suggestions in “Difficult Conversations,” here’s the one that struck the strongest chord with me: when raising a beef with someone, speak what’s truly at the heart of the matter for you.

It sounds obvious, pointlessly so. But in the jumble of emotions and habits and social norms that hijack us in conflict, it’s a powerful thing that we usually overlook.

In an email to me, Doug Stone explained it this way:

Time after time in working with people, we’d have someone say, “I’ve tried everything in trying to deal with this person, and nothing helps.” I’d say, “What’s at the heart of this for you?” They’d tell me, and I’d ask if they’d said that to the other person, and they’d always say no, they hadn’t. Simple things, like “This is important to me,” or “It’s very hard for me when you do that,” or “I love you,” or “I care about you so much.” This never gets said. And of course, it changes everything when it does.

Is this sounding familiar? It does to me. How many times have I tried to tell one of my beloved little siblings that I’m concerned about their financial situation or someone they’re dating just by making a worried face, or maybe by timidly asking, “How much is that going to cost? Can you afford it?”

We’re afraid to be too direct, so we bury our meaning in “jokes, questions, offhand comments or body language,” Stone and his co-authors write. “We say the least important things, sometimes over and over again, and wonder why the other person doesn’t realize what we really think and how we really feel.”

But crinkling up my nose and asking wussy questions feels so much safer!, I protest. To which the authors reply: “Bringing it up by not quite bringing it up seems a happy medium between avoiding and engaging. It is a way of doing neither and doing both. The problem is, to the extent you are doing both, you’re doing both badly.”

Their example is a woman who used to spend Saturday mornings hanging out and doing errands with her husband — until he took up golf. He probably doesn’t realize those mornings were special to her, but she’s frustrated. What’s she likely to say as he heads out the door, clubs slung over his shoulder? Probably something like, “Honey, there’s really a lot to be done around the house this weekend,” or, “Is golf so important that you need to play it this often?”

I can see him now, griping to his golfing buddies about his nagging wife. And there it is: an opportunity for mutual understanding and problem solving, missed. Like so many such opportunities in our lives.

What if instead she said, “I really miss the time we used to spend together on Saturdays”? Imagine being on the receiving end of something like that. Just as your defensive hackles are poised to spring up, you learn that the other person loves you, misses you, worries about you, or wishes for a stronger relationship with you. It’s totally disarming. And it initiates a totally different kind of conversation.

As a recovering conflict-phobe, I have lots of experience with avoiding the essential point. It reminds me of a time when a good friend of mine told me she’d gone to a party across the bay and gotten drunk. Fearing I already knew the answer, I asked, “How’d you get home?” Yep, she drove.

The details are fuzzy in my memory now, but knowing myself, the conversation probably went something like this.

Grace: grimacing.

Friend: “Well, I just took it slow and careful.”

Grace: “Yeah, though probably everyone who drives drunk thinks they’re being careful about it.”

Friend, shrugging: “I dunno.”

Awkwardness ensues.

I don’t want to sound judging, and she doesn’t want to feel judged, so we sidestep around the meat of the matter. I get all the discomfort of a difficult conversation and none of the benefit of really expressing what I feel.

If I were speaking the heart of the matter, I would have said, “I love you, you are one of my most precious friends, and I feel really worried when you do that. However careful you are, I don’t think it’s really possible to be safe when you’re driving drunk. What can I do to help you not do that again?”

Threat of judgment: defused.

Taking this approach requires some honest reflection beforehand: Why does this matter to me so much? What’s at stake here for me?

It also demands that you be willing to feel a little vulnerable by saying what’s really in your heart. In my case, how often do I say to a good friend, “I love you”? Rarely. It’s hard.

But if it means you and the other person both stand a better chance of leaving the conversation feeling loved and heard, and of finding a solution to the problem, then it’s worth the effort. Every ounce.

Have a Nice Chat, Get Smarter

One of my dad’s qualities that I most admired as a kid was his habit of having friendly chats with just about anyone. He knew the grocery-store clerk, Esther, and the toll-takers on the Golden Gate Bridge. He would strike up conversations with people standing in line. In fact, he still does.

New research shows that he’s not only spreading good cheer to strangers, which was what I loved about it as a girl — he’s probably giving himself a measurable boost in brainpower.

University of Michigan researcher Oscar Ybarra has done a series of studies in recent years showing that social interactions boost what’s called “executive function” — the ability to concentrate, plan, organize, prioritize, use your working memory to hold relevant information to the task at hand, and regulate your own behavior. Essentially, good executive function enables you to think well.

In a past study, Ybarra and colleagues showed a connection between how much social interaction people have and their cognitive functioning. He has even found that the short-term boost in thinking power from a social chat works as well as playing brain-teaser games, like crossword puzzles.

Now it turns out that not just any social interaction will do. The conversation has to involve empathy.

Testing 192 undergraduates, Ybarra and colleagues found that a 10-minute conversation in which the students were asked to get to know each other immediately upped their performance on an array of common cognitive tasks. Having a conversation with a competitive edge did not.

(The University of Michigan News Service calls this phenomenon “friends with cognitive benefits.” Yuk yuk. And now I will have that Alanis Morissette song stuck in my head all day.)

So what’s the difference, psychologically, between competitive and friendly conversation? Ybarra believes it’s empathy.

“We believe that performance boosts come about because some social interactions induce people to try to read others’ minds and take their perspectives on things,” he said in the announcement. When he has designed conversations that are competitive yet nonetheless prompt people to put themselves in the other’s shoes, voila: they get the brain boost.

Back in our caveman days, we depended on each other for survival, literally. Nowadays we can earn a paycheck and go to the grocery store, whether or not we belong to a clan. But we still need each other for another kind of survival — we give each other purpose, passion, belonging, a reason to live — and that shows in the effects of relationships on our physical and mental well being. Lots of studies have demonstrated that.

The Michigan researchers suggest you could use this new bit of insight to get ahead. Shoot the breeze with someone before a big test or presentation, and be mindful that creating a competitive work environment may make your team a little less sharp.

I also think there’s a lesson in here about how we solve problems together. If we approach a tricky issue as adversaries — stirring up feelings of us vs. them, closing our minds to how they may be feeling — we’ll probably think more poorly than if we went into it as collaborators. Muddy thinking: probably not ideal for solving problems.

Anyway, executive function aside, I find that having a nice chat with a friendly stranger just puts a spring in my step. It’s worth it for that alone. Right, dad?

Can Genetic Evidence Get Depression a Little Respect?

If anyone doubted that depression is a serious illness that grips you from the inside, and not just a rough period or something to buck up and get over, here is some evidence for the defense.

Researchers at Yale have just published a study showing that people with depression have a particular gene that’s way overactive.

I’ll break it down: The MKP-1 gene is like the blueprint for building a certain protein, and everybody has one. “Gene expression,” however, is how much of the stuff actually gets built. In this study, the depressed patients’ biological machinery was cranking out the MKP-1 product on overdrive. Not just a little overproduction; the levels were more than twice as high in the depressed patients’ brains. In the world of medical science, that’s a huge difference.

My first thought reading this news was: As we find more and more such evidence that depression involves real physiological changes — spikes and drops in real chemicals and electrical signals in the brain that can be measured and plotted on graphs — will this finally get mental illness some respect?

Yale professor Ronald Duman was kind enough to indulge my interest and chat with me yesterday while waiting for his daughter’s cross-country race. “The population is becoming more aware and understanding that these are biological [conditions], not some sort of personal weakness that underlies the illness,” he said.

As a college friend and I used to say: I’ll drink to that!

The work by Duman and his colleagues is also helping us as we slowly untangle the dizzyingly complex puzzle of what causes depression, which brings suffering to so many people — not to mention their loved ones (yes, I’ve been one). This is neither the first nor nearly the last piece of evidence to emerge.

“We’re just hitting the tip of the understanding of the complexity of this illness,” Duman said.

This fact doesn’t get much popular discussion (OK, so perhaps not everyone is a psychology nerd like me), but depression doesn’t even look the same in different people. Not all antidepressant drugs work for all patients, and some people don’t get better despite trying every treatment in the book.

Case in point: When I worked in the Massachusetts General Hospital depression research clinic, I helped run a study of a new drug for what’s called “atypical” depression. I would screen patients over the phone and ask them about their symptoms.

To be considered depressed, they all had to be experiencing general sadness, low motivation or joylessness in things they once liked to do. But if they were having trouble sleeping and eating enough, they’d be in the larger group of patients who have “typical” depression. If they were oversleeping and overeating — as in, the exact opposite symptoms! — that was still depression. It was just “atypical.”

Lesson: Our brains and bodies can probably take a variety of biological routes to depression.

It’s interesting how Duman’s newly-discovered route looks like the body’s normal workings gone awry — like in cancer. He described to me how most of our systems for passing signals from one nerve cell to another have checks and balances. You need some ways to ramp up activity and some ways to tamp it down. MKP-1 is a check. So when it runs wild, it squashes the signals that travel in certain parts of the brain.

Here’s a metaphor that’s probably all too familiar to most of us: stress. A quick jolt of stress can be a good thing, because it shoots us up with chemicals that enable us to jump into action. “What happens in our culture and lives is you have sustained stress,” said Duman — and that leads to physical problems like high blood pressure. “It’s probably something like that that’s happening in the brain.”

The more closer we come to untangling the causes of depression, the better we can understand, sympathize with, and support people and families who are struggling through it. And, of course, the better we can treat it.

It remains a horrible, sometimes even deadly burden right now. But we’re standing on the edge of learning so much more.

Try a Little Tylenol for That Heartache

A quick addendum to my last post about how feeling swept up in romance can ease physical pain… It turns out the reverse is also true: taking an over-the-counter painkiller can soften the hurt feelings of social rejection.

Researchers at the University of Kentucky released findings in June showing that — compared to people taking a placebo pill — people taking a daily dose of acetaminophen (better known as Tylenol) reported feeling less social pain day to day.

It suggests a twist on the idea of self-medicating our emotional pain with drugs. Only Tylenol probably packs a little less punch than, say, a stiff martini.

This part fascinates me, too. The researchers then did a second study in which they had participants play a computer game designed to spur feelings of social rejection (let’s hope the participants got some kind of pick-me-up after that).

Using fMRI — a kind of imaging that shows the extent of brain activity over time — they looked at parts of the brain known to be involved in both physical and social pain. Which participants’ brains were mellower in those areas? The ones who had taken a three-week course of acetaminophen.

These findings add to evidence that we process physical and emotional pain in some of the same parts of the brain. So, the way that love hurts, physically hurts, sometimes — maybe that’s not just in our heads. Or rather, it is in our heads, deep inside them, and that’s what makes it feel real.