There, Kathy Sierra writes in reaction to the response to Robert Scoble's announcement that he was looking to change his own ways, and start hanging out with a less negative crowd -- for his own sanity's sake. Of course, there were those who took Scoble's statement to mean he was going to take a vacation from thinking, and go into Insipidland and live among the vacuous, but Kathy Sierra's analysis is a little more useful:
The notion of "Happy People" was tossed around in the Robert-Lost-His-Mind posts as something ridiculous at best, dangerous at worst. One blogger equated "happy people" with "vacuous". The idea seems to be that "happy people" implies those who are oblivious to the realities of life, in a fantasy of their own creation, and without the ability to think critically. The science, however, suggests just the opposite.
She then went on(after a brief digression):
Happines is associated most heavily with the left (i.e. logical) side of the brain, while anger is associated with the right (emotional, non-logical) side of the brain. From a Society for Neuroscience article on Bliss and the Brain:
"Furthermore, studies suggest that certain people's ability to see life through rose-colored glasses links to a heightened left-sided brain function. A scrutiny of brain activity indicates that individuals with natural positive dispositions have trumped up activity in the left prefrontal cortex compared with their more negative counterparts."
In other words, happy people are better able to think logically.
This I like.
I should probably share this with my angry leftist friends. After all, isn't Spring a season of happiness and rebirth?
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