Is Twitter the key to happiness?

Is Twitter the key to happiness?

by Amy Remelkis – Brisbane Times

Forget laughter. It turns out that tweeting is the best medicine.

A Harvard University study has found talking about yourself, whether in person or on social media sites, lights up the same areas of the brain which react to rewards, like chocolate or money.

Previous studies had found that people devoted 30 to 40 per cent of their speech “solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences”.

Researchers from the university's psychology department, Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, wanted to find out why.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, they discovered that when the study participants spoke about themselves, there was greater activation in the regions of the brain that process rewards, such as food, money and sex, than when they spoke about someone else.

Participants were even willing “to forgo money to disclose about the self”, which led the study's authors to conclude that sharing your thoughts had “intrinsic value”, or, more simply, telling people why you prefer Indian over Thai food, makes you feel good.

Which may go some way to explaining the popularity of social media sites like Twitter, where “upwards of 80 per cent of posts…consist simply of announcements about one's own immediate experiences”…

…keep reading the full and original article HERE