7 Brilliant Brain & Body Hacks For Your Happiness

Today we’re going to hack your brain. We’re going to tinker with sensations and perceptions to actually improve your performance. Don’t worry, your brain will not be harmed by this tinkering…I think.
Music can boost your immune system? That’s what they say. Especially good music. Music can put one into a wistful mood, causing us to go back in time to that special place where we fell in love. Remember that? I once commented that a certain well known coffee shop played music with too many minor chords, eliciting a persistent state of morbid thoughtfulness. Be careful what you listen to.

You can trick your brain into thinking you’re happy? Smile! That’s what they tell us, anyway. Can’t smile? Just hold a pencil between your teeth. Your brain will love it, and after a while, so will your dentist.

Binoculars can reduce pain? The explanation is that if you look at the afflicted body part through binoculars held reversed, you also make the pain smaller. It is advisable not to walk around this way, though. Warning: Objects in binoculars may be closer than they appear!

As the marionette puppet in this video demonstrates, you can improve memory by moving your hands as you are discussing something. This memory enhancement relationship was found by psychologists at Manchester University, so, gesticulate!

Even though the “rational”, “creative” brain hemisphere dichotomy has long since been debunked (that was the theory that held the two different sides of the brain had equal but opposite characters; the left hemisphere being responsible for our creative, irrational self, while the right hemisphere was the more rational, mathematical side), there is still a valid working hypothesis for the right and left ears hearing sounds differently. The right ear, so it is proposed, hears speech sounds better, while the left ear is better at perceiving music and voice tones. Who knew?

Do you need to remember a place? Your brain is better at remembering an image you make in your brain than it does remembering a word associated with that place. There may be nothing left to the theory of hemispheres, but brain scientists think we are better at looking at pictures than we are at reading words.

What is this Ganzeld Effect being spoken of? It is an effect that single, solid colors have on the brain. The science of the Ganzfeld Effect has it that the longer you look at a single color, the more your brain starts to ignore it. Huh, well, that actually kind of makes sense.

That’s it for now. Go on now, make yourself better!