Brain science that could help you ace your New Year's resolutions

Before buying Nicorette or joining Weight Watchers, you might want to consider new findings in brain science that could help you ace your New Year's resolutions. 

By charting activity in the area of the brain that helps to decide what is important and relevant to us, researchers found they could predict what types of health messages will move people to adopt better health behaviors.

Some people might be more interested in quitting smoking if they are reminded that they want to be around to see their grandchildren grow up. Others might love their kids dearly, but what really motivates them to drop the cigarettes are graphic photos of diseased lungs.

And reactions we may think of as entirely emotional actually do show up in physical form on brain scans, said University of Pennsylvania professor Emily Falk.

"We found that increased brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex [mPFC] predicts when health material is relevant to an individual," Falk said. "More activity in this area is associated with a better health outcome." 

So, short of signing up for brain scans, how can you increase this kind of positive brain activity and get better results? 

"We know that people get defensive when we tell them what they're doing is wrong. It makes sense; no one wants to be told they're screwing up," Falk said. "When faced with information which could be helpful for us, we tend to counter-argue, to come up with reasons why this applies to other people, but not to us."

The trick is to fashion messages that get past the initial negative feelings that go with giving up our beloved bad habits and remind us of more positive priorities.

"By their nature, messages about the risks we take with our health - whether it be by smoking, eating poorly, or not exercising - cause people to become defensive," Falk said. "If you can get around that defensiveness by helping people see why advice might be relevant or valuable to them, your messaging will have a more powerful effect."

In a study designed to increase participants' physical activity, Falk used functional magnetic imaging to examine activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) while participants listened to health advice they might get from a physician ("People who sit less are at lower risk for certain diseases"). 

Over a month, half of the participants were guided through an exercise that asked them to specifically consider values important to them, such as family ties, good friends, jobs they loved, or hobbies they particularly enjoyed. 

These "self-affirmation" messages were designed to lower defensiveness and make people realize their "self-worth has nothing to do with quitting smoking or losing weight," Falk said. 

The result? Participants who practiced self-affirmation showed greater levels of activity in the key brain area and increased their physical activity a month after the study.

By contrast, subjects who were instructed to think about values that weren't as important to them exhibited lower levels of activity in this region of the prefrontal cortex and stuck with their sedentary behavior. 

"Friends or family might be able to replicate these results by having a meaningful interaction about their future health goals and then sending simple texts to one another every day about things they care deeply about," Falk said. 

Messages might remind people to think about their children, their jobs, their faith, or their friends. So rather than nagging a loved one about poor health habits, it could be more effective both for their health and your relationship to focus on something positive they care about. 

By monitoring brain activity in small groups, Falk has also been able to predict how larger groups of people will respond to specific health messages.

In Falk's most recent paper, she tracked functional MRIs of 50 Michigan smokers to see which negative antismoking health images elicited the greatest activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. Using that information, she was able to predict the response of 800,000 New York smokers to an antismoking campaign using the same images. (Research shows that visits to a quitting-smoking site correlate with the likelihood that someone will actually break the habit.)

"Basically, if we look at brain activity in a small group of smokers and you look at what happens to their brains when they're exposed to messaging, that can give you information on how messaging will be responded to by a much larger group of smokers," Falk said.

You might think it would be easier just to ask people which messages resonate most deeply. But researchers discovered that brain activity could predict behavioral change and outcomes that "weren't explained by what people told us about their intentions, their confidence, or their ability to change," Falk said.

Combining self-reported survey data - what smokers said they found effective - with the brain responses from the functional MRIs, researchers could more accurately predict which messages would work.

"The brain helps us understand which public health messages are effective," Falk said. "We can use this information to design a better campaign for the average person or for the individual. We can know which interventions are effective and for whom and more directly help people live longer and healthier lives."

Falk is designing an app in collaboration with Hope Labs in the San Francisco Bay area that draws on her findings.

"What's innovative about what we're doing is understanding the pathways that get us to change behavior," she said. "We're trying to take some of what we're learning and make interventions that will try to help a great number of people."

mice30@comcast.net