Get Lost, Grim Reaper

When psychologists Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University ran three experiments of this type recently, they got unambiguous and intriguing results. As reported in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers who were preoccupied with thoughts of death were not at all morose if you tapped into their emotional brains. Indeed, the opposite: they were much more likely than control subjects to summon up positive emotional associations rather than neutral or negative ones. What this suggests, the psychologists say, is that the brain is involuntarily searching out and activating pleasant, positive information from the memory banks in order to help the workaday brain cope with an incomprehensible threat.

So that's good news. And there's more, because these findings jibe with a separate line of research on aging. Studies show that as we get older and approach death, our brains somehow shift gears, craving more upbeat stimulation. We find ourselves averting our eyes from grisly auto accidents and gradually losing our interest in slasher movies. It's not a planned, deliberate change; it's more like an effortless retuning of the neurons, and psychologists believe it has everything to do with the keener sense of mortality that comes with aging.

So not only is the human brain deep-wired to cope with the terrifying idea of death on a daily basis, it seems to know when it's time to make a permanent shift toward positive emotions. The brain is in effect changing to allow us to approach the end of life with some grace and serenity. Now that's an idea even Woody Allen's most neurotic alter ego could find comforting.

Wray Herbert writes the “We’re Only Human…” blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

© 2007