Researchers find talking about ourselves triggers sensation of pleasure

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDMay 8 2012

According to researchers, talking about ourselves - whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter - can trigger the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food, money or sex.

Researchers found, not surprisingly, that about 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. The neuroscientists at Harvard University conducted five brain imaging and behavioural experiments and found that this feels rewarding at the brain level.

“Self-disclosure is extra rewarding,” said Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves,” Ms. Tamir said.

In one of the experiments the team tried to see whether people placed an unusually high value on the opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings. They also monitored brain activity among some volunteers to see what parts of the brain were most excited when people talked about themselves as opposed to other people.

In one experiment, 78 participants alternately disclosed their own opinions (about things like whether they preferred coffee or tea) and judged the opinions of others whose photographs they looked at. In another experiment, 117 people alternately talked about their personality traits (among other things, declaring whether they're “curious” or “ambitious”) and those of the U.S. president at the time, either George W. Bush or Barack Obama. They offered the volunteers money if they chose to answer questions about other people, such as President Obama, rather than about themselves, paying out on a sliding scale of up to four cents.

Despite the financial incentive, people often preferred to talk about themselves and willingly gave up between 17% and 25% of their potential earnings so they could reveal personal information. “We joked that this was the penny for your thoughts study,” Ms. Tamir said.

The scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which tracks changes in blood flow between neurons associated with mental activity, to see what parts of the brain responded most strongly when people talked about their own beliefs and options, rather than speculating about other people.

They noted that acts of self disclosure were accompanied by spurts of heightened activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction from food, money or sex.

“It rings true to me,” said psychologist James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin who studies how people handle secrets and self-disclosure, but was not involved in the project. “We love it if other people listen to us. Why else would you tweet?”

“We're doing some tests to see what larger role this behavior may play, whether people's motivation to self-disclose changes depending on their motivations to bond with someone,” Tamir said. “Some studies show that the more you self-disclose to someone, the more you like them, the more they like you. It may have something to do with forming social bonds.”

Paul Zak, a brain researcher and founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, said the findings are “very convincing” and offer insight into human evolution. “If a social creature did not disclose information, then other creatures might stop interacting with it,” he said. “Animals do this with smells and movements, and humans do this with language. This study reveals how our brain evolved to motivate sociality, which is pretty cool.”