14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past few years, brain experts have come to realize that the thing most praised by poets and songwriters, namely the voicing of feelings, actually does have proven benefits on the human cortex, as a new research shows. Scientists at the University of California, in Los Angeles, have learned that when a man or a woman expresses his or her feelings, he or she activates exactly the same portion of the brain involved in emotional self-control. Basically, the more it's activated, the more individuals have control over the way they feel. And this creates a sense of comfort and security.
“It is a pretty well-established finding that this occurs, but we don't know why. When you put feelings into words, you are turning on the same regions in the brain that are involved in emotional self-control,” UCLA scientist Matthew Lieberman, who was a participant at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Chicago on Saturday, explains.
The team has come to these conclusions after analyzing the brains of volunteers via a complicated technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is used to highlight various portions of the brain that are associated with a specific stimulus. For example, hearing a song will prompt the activation of the part of the brain associated with processing sound, while being exposed to abuse from others can cause instability.
According to the study, putting your feelings into words regulates distress, and therefore it becomes a lot easier for an individual to gain control over his or her emotions. For the current experiment, the participants were placed inside the fMRI machine, and then shown various pictures, including photos of scared or angry faces. For each of the images, they were asked to press a button near them, describing the emotion they were viewing.
Every time they would press the button and speak out their emotions, the fMRI machine would register an increased level of activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a part of the brain that has been scientifically proven to be involved in dampening negative emotions. At the same time, the research team has noted that the activity in the amygdala, a region in the brain that deals with processing feelings in relationships and emotions including fear, rage and aggression, has decreased drastically.
Lieberman argues that this may be an explanation why teenagers take up writing a journal in adolescence, and could also explain why some individuals have a natural tendency to turn to writing throughout their lives. It may all be connected to the way each of our brains is wired to process information.