Part of Brain Fitness is being able to read the emotions of other people. The better you are at this, the better you will be at interacting with people, either socially or in business. Like any skill, you can improve this social aspect of your emotional intelligence.

Most of the time we don’t even think about interpreting the intentions of others. We just do it naturally by reading their facial expressions and gestures to know when they are happy, angry or troubled. There’s actually a test you can take called, Reading the Mind in the Eye, to see how skillful you are at reading other’s emotions. Can you tell what emotion is behind this set of eyes?

You can access the entire test through the link below.

http://glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/Faces/EyesTest.aspx

A new paper revisits the role of a specific hormone in improving your ability to ‘read minds’ of other people – to understand their feelings and intentions without them needing to speak. The hormone, called oxytocin, has a well-established role in love and bonding. For example, oxytocin increases in both the baby and the mother during breastfeeding and contributes to the emotional bond between mother and child.

The new research study gave volunteers a squirt of oxytocin or a placebo, through a nasal spray and then asked them to take a test the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eye’ test, that measures social intelligence. The test uses images like the one above to determine how well participants gage the emotions by only looking at eyes.

It turned out that oxytocin significantly improved people’s performance on the test. This is fascinating because it means that a hormone is partially responsible for our social skills and our ability to naturally produce this hormone influences our skill at any moment.

So the big question is, are there things that you can do to boost your levels of oxytocin and improve your ability to read other peoples emotions? I tried to find scientific articles that addressed this but could not find studies that asked this question directly. Still, it is known that oxytocin is associated with love and caring behavior so it’s feasible that deliberately trying to feel that emotion might boost your oxytocin levels and improve your skills.

If you’re a fan of the movie ‘the Secret’, which I partially am (although I think it’s a bit over-the top) – you know that many proponents of the self-development world tout the need to feel grateful for what you have. I speculate that purposefully reflecting on what you are grateful for may actually increase oxytocin in your brain. This in turn would improve your social skills and improve your odds of creating beneficial relationships that could help you reach your goals in life.

This actually goes back to the concept of EPIQ performance that I introduced earlier (standing for Emotional, Physical and Intellectual Quotient). The more you can control your own emotions and place yourself into specific emotional states on demand, the more you actually control the manufacturing of specific hormones in your brain and the more you can influence skills that those hormones control. It all comes back to working on your Brain Fitness in the end.

An interesting paper came out recently in Nature talking about a newly discovered link between the brain and metabolism in type II diabetes. I thought the paper was interesting, not just for the new data, but because it supports the underlying concept of Brain Fitness – and more specifically, in this case, physical intelligence, which I have defined before as your brains ability to control your body.

Type II Diabetes in the Body

Type II diabetes is a condition where your body is unable to regulate blood sugar appropriately. Typically, when you eat and your blood sugar goes up from the sugars in the food, your pancreas senses a rise in blood sugar and releases insulin into your bloodstream. The insulin then goes around knocking on the doors of all your cells and tells them to take their share of sugar out of the blood and use it to make energy.

In type II diabetes, both of these things go wrong. First, your pancreas loses its ability to sense blood sugar and release insulin appropriately. Second, the insulin that is released (or injected) doesn’t work as well because the cells in your body begin to ignore it – or become insulin resistant.

Type II Diabetes in the Brain?

We also know that there are cells in the brain that sense blood sugar levels (called glucose-sensing neurons). Their job is to instruct different parts of your metabolism to respond appropriately – for example, make energy with the sugar, convert some of it to fat for later use, burn some for heat, and a bunch of other things. A fit brain that is working properly will keep a close watch on the nutrients floating around in the bloodstream and send out the appropriate instructions to the body.

The new research shows that in type II diabetics, at least some of the neurons that are supposed to sense rises in blood sugar aren’t doing their job and that this may be a part of the disease that we didn’t previously appreciate. Many physicians think of type II diabetes as solely a disease of the body, but we may need to start thinking about it as a disease of the brain as well. In fact, it may be that the brain loses its ability to monitor blood sugar first, and contributes to the progression of the disease – that is yet to be determined.

This all plays back to the general concept of Brain Fitness and that the choices you make on a daily basis affect how well your brain works and how well it is able to control everything, including your metabolism. Choosing to eat high sugar foods on a regular basis will eventually cause cells in your body and your brain to lose their sensitivity to blood sugar and wreak havoc on your metabolism.

Fight Back

The good news is that you can improve your sensitivity to blood sugar (glucose) through eating well and exercising. Both of these things contribute to bringing your brain and your body back in tune so that everything will operate more smoothly. Unfortunately, many people don’t make this a priority until their brains and bodies are so far out of tune that recovery is extremely difficult.

The body is an amazing thing and has an incredible tolerance for us mistreating it. This was great for our survival over hundreds of thousands of years of lack of food and shelter and a constant threat from out environment – but today it almost works against us. Because our metabolism is so good at tolerating us mistreating ourselves, we often don’t know we have a problem until the problem is out of control. This is why people wait so long before they become proactive in controlling their own health.

I encourage everyone to give your brain and your body the best chance to serve you well. Don’t wait until you or your kids need the medication to try to fix the problem.