Think Quickly for a Natural High

Oct. 5, 2006 — -- With all the dreadful news these days, it's pretty easy to get depressed.

But researchers at Princeton and Harvard universities have discovered a way to make even depressing thoughts a little uplifting.

Think quickly, they say, and something happens in your brain that is akin to the euphoria after a five-mile run, or possibly even taking drugs to relieve depression.

They aren't sure why it works, and they don't know whether it will be effective in the long term, but they're convinced that making a brain work quickly is sort of like a mental elevator.

Psychologists Emily Pronin of Princeton and Daniel Wegner of Harvard were studying manic depression, a bipolar disorder that switches victims from being very excited and productive to being very depressed, when they hit upon an idea.

During the manic phase, patients generally feel very happy and creative, even as their brains experience the symptom of "racing thoughts."

It's a common experience even for people who aren't clinically ill. Most people at least occasionally feel uplifted when they think of a solution to a problem very quickly, or complete a test before the rest of the class.

So Pronin and Wegner set out to learn whether inducing subjects to think fast produced "manic" effects. In short, did it make them happy -- even if they were forced to think about something depressing?

The answer, according to their research, is yes. Their findings are published in the September issue of Psychological Science.

To do the experiment, participants were divided into two groups. One group read a series of statements at a fast clip, roughly twice as fast as the normal reading speed. The second group read at about half the normal reading speed.

The participants then completed a questionnaire in which they assessed their mood, energy level, self-esteem, and other factors using standard psychological measures.

But what makes the research particularly interesting is some of the participants read statements that could be very depressing, like "I want to go to sleep and never wake up," while others read happy statements like "Wow! I feel great."