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To like people, you need to train the brain

30.09.2016

Our perception of other people can change, and for this it is not at all necessary to communicate with a person for a long time, trying to get to know him better - it is enough to exercise the brain a little in a neurobiological laboratory.

Mitsuo Kawato and colleagues from the International Institute for Advanced Telecommunications Research in Kyoto and Brown University analyzed the activity of the cingulate cortex in people who were shown other people's photographs.

The participants in the experiment had to evaluate how much they like or dislike the face in the photo, and a special algorithm searched for characteristic features in brain activity that corresponded to just such an assessment. The cingulate cortex is associated with empathy, emotions, motivations, and social relationships, among other things.

Then came the second stage, when a person was shown someone's photo, which previously seemed neutral to him, and then a disk appeared on the monitor screen. This disk had to be enlarged by an effort of will. There was no specific way, but neuroscientists monitored the activity of the brain of the one who struggled with the disk, and they themselves enlarged the figure on the screen if the brain suddenly gave the right answer. In other words, the participants in the experiment blindly searched for the right solution, but the "neutral face" that they were shown was supposed to push their thoughts in the right direction.

In some cases, the researchers enlarged the disk when the subject's brain gave a signal of sympathy, as if the person saw in front of him not a disk, but a face that he likes. In other cases, the same was done in response to a signal of antipathy, and finally, there were those who were simply asked to look at the disk without doing anything with it. Such training lasted an hour a day for three days and, in the end, brought results: those who "increased" the disk with feelings of sympathy began to like the appearance of people to whom they had previously been indifferent.

With antipathy there was the same picture, only in the other direction: initially neutral faces became slightly unpleasant. The effect was small (that is, no one developed deep sympathy and deep disgust for anyone), but it was quite reliable and, by the way, quite long-lasting: changes in emotional perception lasted at least three months.

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