What Gets Measured Gets Acted On
Knowing what to do and doing it are different animals. The doing becomes easier when there is a way to measure the impact of what is being done.
While there are a variety of scientifically proven interventions in positive psychology, the benefits of these approaches can seem vague. For example, how much happier are you when you keep a gratitude journal? A meta-analysis by Bolier and colleagues showed the impact of most positive psychology approaches to improve one’s happiness and life satisfaction, such as a focus on gratitude, kindness, or empathy, are generally small but not insignificant. Yet, most people stop doing them after short periods. While there are validated surveys in which people report their happiness and satisfaction with life (SWL), these often provide few insights that can be used by individuals because of affective reporting biases and the lack of a comparable anchor across individuals (your “3” might be my “5” on some rating scale).
Understanding How the Brain Values Social-Emotional Experiences
My research over the past two decades has sought to identify how the brain values social-emotional experiences in order to develop an objective way to measure happiness. Such a neural measure would be interpersonally comparable since, after removing baseline brain activity, the change in neural firing rates are similar across individuals. The crux of the problem is that the neurologic measurement of value occurs in areas of the brain outside of conscious awareness so we cannot exclusively depend on self-reported measures.
My group started with behavior. We did this because we wanted to understand the varieties of experiences that people choose to engage in, especially prosocial behaviors that have been linked with high satisfaction with life. Using neural measures to predict behavior is how we obtained funding as well. For more, see our 2022 paper on oxytocin release.
Using Words, not Weapons: Getting Past the Lazy Brain
Immediately after terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the US Department of Defense
budget skyrocketed in order to forestall another attack on US citizens. Within 10 days of these
horrific attacks, I rode in a nearly empty aircraft to Washington, DC, and was asked to help build
mathematical models to predict the next wave of Al Qaeda activity. This pulled me into the US defense and intelligence funding systems. After doing intelligence work for several years, my lab obtained a
contract to identify combinations of brain signals that would accurately and consistently predict what
a person would do after a message or experience. The idea was to build a neurologic prediction engine so that analysts would have a testbed to create communications that would use words rather than weapons to persuade US allies and maybe even enemies to cooperate with our objectives. My lab spent several million dollars of US taxpayer money to do this over the better part of a decade.
A hurdle we faced is that the brain is lazy. By that I mean that neural activity is typically quite low in most circumstances in order to save scarce metabolic resources. As a result, communications typically fail to influence people’s behaviors because the information is filtered out as unimportant. But, when an experience produces a measurably high metabolic investment in the social-emotional valuation network, it is as if the brain says, “Gee, this is super interesting, let’s do it!” This research showed that what is valued is what is done.
Immersion: A Name for the Brain’s Valuation Network
I have named the brain’s social-emotional valuation network Immersion because people get lost in peak Immersion experiences and report them as enjoyable. We traced Immersion to the action of two neurochemicals: dopamine binding to the brain’s prefrontal cortex and oxytocin binding primarily in the subgenual cortex and brainstem. Dopamine and oxytocin interact with each other in a fairly complex way that induces neuroelectrical signals that are measurable up to 1,000 times a second using neuroscience apparatus.
Our research also found that stable signals from the Immersion network could be measured from the cranial nerves rather than from the brain itself. The cranial nerves are the brain’s “output file” and integrate the multiple signals we identified from the brain into electrical activity sent to the body. We know this because we measured central and peripheral neural activity simultaneously as we manipulated neurochemicals pharmacologically to prove what we measured in the cranial nerves was reflected in brain activity. Using this approach, our published research showed that neurologic Immersion consistently predicted what individuals as well as populations of people would do with 85%-98% accuracy. See the paper I published in 2023 with Merritt and Gafurri for an example.
Taking Immersion Beyond the Lab
After we identified the brain’s social-emotional valuation network, I wanted to make the discovery of Immersion useful outside the lab. That’s when I wrote my book, Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness. Knowing that what is valued is what gets done, our group wanted to create a technology that could measure the most valuable experiences people have in order to guide them towards activities that would make them happier.
Measuring Brain Activity Continuously
Now we faced a technological hurdle: how could we measure neurophysiologic activity continuously as people went through their daily lives?
For a nearly a decade, we had been testing off-the-shelf wearable technologies. Most of them were so imprecise that behavioral predictions using their data were inaccurate. But, technology improved. By 2015, measurements of neural activity using a $100,000 piece of laboratory equipment and computed from data from smartwatches were nearly identical to each other.
Wearable device
My group wrote algorithms that let us capture Immersion using cranial nerve activity captured from nearly all smartwatch or fitness wearable devices that about one-half of the people in the US and Europe use every day.
The “magic” in creating a scalable neuroscience platform was knowing that two of the cranial nerves innervate the heart. We traced subtle accelerations and decelerations of cardiac activity due to cranial nerve action to Immersion in the brain and ensured that these accurately predicted people’s behaviors. To be clear, neither heart rate nor heart rate variability predict the behaviors; Immersion’s signature in the cranial nerves involves higher-order and nonlinear changes in cardiac signals.
A Scalable System
Once we had built a scalable system, we ran experiments to see if neurologic Immersion would predict happiness and/or depressive symptoms. In a recent publication, we collected one-second frequency data all day for a month for a couple dozen people and showed that these data identify if someone is happy or sad, and have high energy or low energy with 98% accuracy using sophisticated analytical techniques. People who were happy were expending metabolic resources on activities that sustained their mood and gave them energy. When neurologic Immersion was low, people had low energy and low moods, the hallmarks of depression, as described in my paper with Merritt and other colleagues in 2022.
Make It Simple
We had to do one more thing so that our findings were useful: make it simple. Subsequent research identified how many peak Immersion key moments one needs to be happy. The answer was six per day, as described in my 2024 paper with Merritt. People who regularly have four key moments a day maintain their moods and energy levels, while those getting six or more build up emotional fitness. Those only getting three or fewer key moments have depressive symptoms.
Free App Available
My team built a free app, of course called SIX, so that everyone could objectively measure the experiences that build their emotional fitness. The data are private for each user and the app links to users’ calendars so it is easy to see which experiences create the most value in one’s life. This enables users to curate their lives for greater happiness. We even built an artificial intelligence assistant that offers users advice on what to do to be happier. Lastly, we built in an option to share a simple indicator if one is flourishing or languishing with family and friends so that people support each other on the journey to thrive.
Importance of Social Relationships
Recent research from Helliwell and colleagues at Oxford University has shown that about 50% of our happiness is due to the quality of our social relationships. Happy people build stronger attachments to others that buffer their resilience to unforeseen circumstances. Happy people also tend to eat better, sleep better, and exercise more, as Diener and Chan pointed out in 2011. If we want a world where people live longer, happier, and healthier, measuring and improving our social connections is the most important place to start.
Goal: In Three Years, 1 Billion People Use SIX to Improve Happiness
It took me 15 years of research to identify how the brain values social-emotional experiences and another five years to build technology so everyone can benefit from this work. My goal is that in three years one billion people around the world use SIX to improve their happiness. This might seem ambitious, but I believe the best use of my time and energy is to help as many people as possible to truly flourish.
References
Bolier, L., Haverman, M., Westerhof, G. J., Riper, H., Smit, F., & Bohlmeijer, E. (2013). Positive psychology interventions: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled studies. BMC Public Health, 13, 1-20.
Diener, E., & Chan, M. Y. (2011). Happy people live longer: Subjective well?being contributes to health and longevity. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 3(1), 1-43. Abstract.
Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2024). World Happiness Report 2024. University of Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre.
Merritt, S. H., Krouse, M., Alogaily, R. S., & Zak, P. J. (2022). Continuous neurophysiologic data accurately predict mood and energy in the elderly. Brain Sciences, 12(9), 1240.
Merritt, S. H., Gaffuri, K., & Zak, P. J. (2023). Accurately predicting hit songs using neurophysiology and machine learning. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 6, 1154663.
Merritt, S. H., & Zak, P. J. (2024). Continuous remote monitoring of neurophysiologic Immersion accurately predicts mood. Frontiers in Digital Health, 6.
Zak, P. J., Curry, B., Owen, T., & Barraza, J. A. (2022). Oxytocin release increases with age and is associated with life satisfaction and prosocial behaviors. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 16, 846234.
Zak, P. J. (2022). Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness. Lioncrest.
Image Credits
Smart Watch Photo by Lloyd Dirks on Unsplash