While the topic of gratitude might seem more suited for an Oprah episode – not that there’s anything wrong with that – it plays a major role in many religions.
Take Buddhism: the following is from the 10,000-plus teachings found in the Sutta Pitaka of the Tripitaka, which was compiled shortly after the Buddha’s death:
The Blessed One said, “Now what is the level of a person of no integrity? A person of no integrity is ungrateful and unthankful. This ingratitude, this lack of thankfulness, is advocated by rude people. It is entirely on the level of people of no integrity. A person of integrity is grateful and thankful. This gratitude, this thankfulness, is advocated by civil people. It is entirely on the level of people of integrity.”
Given that Witness Space readers are clearly civil to a fault and bursting with integrity, what’s happening when gratitude is practised beyond a bunch of self-help cliches? (I hope Oprah’s not reading this.)
But first, how do you practise gratitude? You can journal. I started doing so after seeing a couple of young Australian cricketers talking on the TV a year ago about the changes it had made in their lives. (The Witness Space is based in Sydney.)
I started writing something down on a daily basis - big or small - from the sun coming out (it’s been a very wet year) to a stranger smiling at me to taking an orange foam ear plug from a determined seagull which appeared to have mistaken it for a snack.
But what’s that focusing on the positives doing on a physical level?
A team at the University of Southern California’s department of psychology provided what the authors of a 2015 paper in Frontiers in Psychology called “a window into the brain circuitry” triggered by the goodwill of others.
There’s recognition of the ground they’re breaking – the cognitive and neural mechanisms behind gratitude “have rarely been studied”, and such investigations are “just beginning”.
The researchers defined gratitude more narrowly for the purposes of the experiment in the context of being the recipient of a gift – both material and non-material – meaning that seagulls were out.
They used material drawn from testimonies stored at the university from Holocaust survivors, and the moments their lives were saved or helped through food, shelter or clothing. The 23 participants were asked to put themselves in the same circumstances and rate how much gratitude they felt, while an fMRI machine whirred away taking these irresistible recordings of brain activity.
While they confirmed their hypotheses – ratings of gratitude would correlate with brain regions associated with moral cognition, reward and theory of mind – a look at their reasoning shows again how hard it is to draw anything too concrete from neuroscience apart from these amazing pics.
For example, the authors write, “It has been said that it is the thought behind a gift that drives gratitude, so it is reasonable that gratitude in the context of gift-giving will rely on brain circuits associated with theory of mind and emotion perception.”
“It is reasonable” seems to be doing some heavy lifting. It suggests that a lot of neuroscience depends on looking for activity in places you expect to find something, which can often have multiple, uncertain correlations.
For example, the medial prefrontal cortex is linked in the paper, either wholly or in part, to (deep breath) social reward, interpersonal bonding, social interactions, social support and pain relief associated with viewing a loved one, the reward of affective processing, binding affective stimuli with related perceptual cues, emotion perception, theory of mind, self-processes, connection to parasympathetic function, and critical for generating “meaning” in a stimulus. Oh, and perspective-taking.
The results did gel with prior experiments reflecting recognition of help from others, rather than gratitude specifically. So could that also be an explanation?
But the authors do admit that “interpreting the results presents a challenge”.
The intriguing finding, for me, was of what they called some overlap between the “self” and the “other” regions. As A Course in Miracles puts it: “To give and to receive are one in truth.”
Next week: more research examining what gratitude journalling changes in the brain.