How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

NEUROSCIENCE: MORE SOPHISTICATED
MEASUREMENT OF BRAIN ACTIVITY
Finally, neuroscience has benefitted from dramatic advances in techniques for
observing ordinary brains in action. Neuroscientists have long had access to a
range of scanning techniques that helped reveal the structures and activities of
the brain. Those scanning technologies often came at a cost of exposing the
brain’s owner to a good deal of radiation—so they weren’t ideal for non-medical
research. Since the 1990s, though, steady improvements in less risky imaging
technologies (including the discovery of functional MRI scanning) have made it
easier for neuroscientists to watch what happens to 
healthy
people’s brains while
normal things are happening to them. That means researchers can see which
areas of the brain become active when a person is tickled by kindness or
energized by accomplishment. They can observe the neural activity associated
with someone feeling unhappy or stressed (for reasons beyond the fact that
they’re lying in a noisy metal tube or have electrodes strapped to their heads).
As a result, neuroscientists are gaining an increasingly refined understanding
of the biological mechanisms behind our everyday thoughts, feelings, and
actions. And that means they’re exploring the kind of behavioral topics that also
fascinate psychologists and economists—for example, questions about the way

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we solve challenging problems and handle complex social interactions. In fact,
many of the studies I cite in this book result from collaborations across the three
behavioral science disciplines; it feels as if we’re living in an era of “neuro-
psycho-economics.” (Or something like that.) And this multidisciplinary mash-
up is great news for us. It means we get to benefit from complementary
perspectives (biological, observational, and analytical) on topics that matter to us
in the workplace—which in turn results in richer guidance on ways for us to stay
in top form.
So all in all, it’s an excellent time to be thinking about the way that science
can help us flourish.