Brain activity is 30 times more active when emotional

[rookie37]

I have a few emotion questions and how it effect the brain

I'm know little of physics or medicine

I'm doing research on affirmations.


John does positive affirmations
john reads a self help book and visualises and repeats;
I'm rich and successful many times. He does this for 30 minutes each day

However when he does this he is passive

Then he spends most of his day thinking about how much the world sucks. He has insomnia and spends hours awake thinking how somebody screwed him over.

In other words, He is doing affirmations about the negative. He is very emotional and thinks how the world sucks 7 hour each day, 7 days a week and has done this for years.

Obviously this overrides his positive affirmations.


I'm looking for numbers and scientific proof supporting this such as case studies or cat scans
I.E. the brain activity is 30 times more active when emotional than when passive

 

[Moonbear]

I'm looking for numbers and scientific proof supporting this such as case studies or cat scans
I.E. the brain activity is 30 times more active when emotional than when passive

I don't know of any studies that would address the specific question you're asking, though will point out that I would doubt you'd see a difference overall in activity of the brain. What you're instead likely to see is that when someone is saying something they don't really believe, the activity will be increased in places like language centers of the brain. When they are feeling very negative the rest of the time, the activity would then likely be increased in the emotional centers of the brain and not so much in language centers (unless they really are muttering this out loud all day).

Just because we focus on discussions of science here, I'm going to be a bit picky about your terminology though, just for the sake of learning. You may find scientific evidence to support your argument, but proof is not something science provides because what we are always doing is attempting to falsify hypotheses...trying to disprove things, not prove them.

As you're looking or waiting for other responses here, I will also point out that the types of studies you're looking for should be MRI studies, not CT scans. CT scans will identify gross abnormalities, restrictions of blood flow, strokes, tumors, that sort of thing. They really don't identify functional differences in the brain activity. MRIs can do that.

Also, be careful not to bias your search expecting that increases in brain activity must be associated with more efficacy. You need to consider what each part of the brain does. An area that is inhibitory being less active could be more important than a stimulatory area being more active, for example.