Why Does Diversity of Experiences Improve Public Health?

Maybe you've been exhausted at work for the past few months, and now you're excited to take a break. With a few days left on vacation, instead of spending time at home as your initial plan, a friend recommends you plan a trip.

You're excited about the fun of traveling, exploring different sites, maybe new ones, eating different foods, and making new memories. This takes some planning, but imagine if you stayed home watching TV and lying on the couch all day.

In this article, we'll show you how to improve happiness using neuroscience.

Let's use a current scenario that is relevant to the continuing Corona outbreak and is somewhat more relatable. One of the hardest things about the Corona pandemic is that quarantine has greatly limited our ability to keep up with new experiences. Studies show that not being able to fit into our typical environments has undoubtedly put our mental health at risk. You may be able to relate, but if you are one of those people who typically find it challenging to try new things, you may have found comfort mostly in attempting to establish some harmony in the past year. Finding different ways to live day-to-day seems so beneficial and refreshing to many of us, whether you're taking up a new hobby, setting new goals, or walking to a part of the neighborhood you've never been to.

We hope that through these examples you can see how a variety of experiences, such as going to new or at least different places or participating in different experiences, can improve public health. This principle is very self-evident to us. This is because many would agree that going on vacation—or perhaps, for those who are not so extroverted, finding different activities to do each day—makes us happier. In more concrete terms, human experience suggests that diversity in experiences may be associated with increased positive affect, which makes sense since exploration is an innate human desire.

Interestingly, animal research has shown that new experiences are beneficial. Animals that can roam freely in environments that offer a variety of experiences show better cognitive health. In other words, they show increased social activity and a strong ability to respond to stressful or aversive situations. It is worth noting that these behavioral effects are accompanied by significant changes in the structure and function of the brain, particularly in neuronal regions responsible for memory and response to rewarding stimuli, such as the hippocampus and striatum.

On the other hand, there have been few studies that have looked at variability in experience diversity and its relationship to positive emotional states in humans. A recent study used a GPS-like tool to examine the relationship between diversity of real-world experience and positive affect in humans and the underlying neural mechanisms that might mediate this relationship. Let’s see what they have found out.

Tracking, measuring, and analyzing the diversity of human experiences:

The researchers tracked the locations of the participants in the experiment and quantified their GPS coordinates during the day. In previous studies, they verified that this pattern used in geographic location tracking is a successful tool for assessing the diversity of experiences in animals. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine whether daily movement—controlling for potential confounders such as the distance traveled and the participant's location; The city they are in, the days of the week, the temperature—can serve as an accurate assessment of the diversity of experiences and their association with positive effects on humans.

The researchers monitored a total of 132 participants for 3-4 months and asked them to rate positive and negative emotions at random times during the day via the smartphone system. Participants' geolocation score was higher on days when they visited more locations and spent equal time in these locations, where minimum points can be achieved by spending all the time in one place.

Finally, at the end of the geolocation-tracking period, a subgroup of these participants were screened for eligibility to undergo Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a scan of brain activity that is useful for gaining a better understanding of how different parts of the brain work together to explain a possible relationship between diversity of experiences. and health.

Diverse experiences improve health:

As expected, the researchers found that positive emotions were higher on days when the participant's geolocation score was greater, suggesting that having new experiences each day is associated with health. It should be noted that the researchers also sought to see if this relationship was reciprocal; in other words, people were also more willing to explore their environment on days when they were feeling better.

Interestingly, in this second set of experiments, they confirmed that experiential diversity is associated with increased positive emotions. They also found that these emotions, in turn, were associated with having new and more varied experiences the next day. This is consistent with speculation that behaviors that promote positive emotions can create a chain of positive feedback, or “upward spirals,” that promote the subsequent development of more positive feelings. This idea is self-evident for many of us. For example, we often want to celebrate after completing a major project or achieving a goal to extend the positive feelings we experience.

One question remains for researchers: How exactly does the human brain work in this way? What is the neural explanation for the increase in positive emotions in response to experimental diversity? To answer this, researchers performed an MRI scan on nearly half of the participants after the geolocation-tracking period and found that the degree to which neural regions essential for memory functioning and processing of rewards and new experiences—the hippocampus-striatum connection—correlated with the relationship between experiential diversity and positive emotions.

Results:

• An increase in the daily diversity of one's location was associated with an increase in positive emotions, which in turn promoted the subsequent development of more positive emotions.
• This effect was related to the coupling of neural regions involved in memory processing and the processing of rewarding stimuli; that is, the integration of the hippocampus and the striatum.

From the data the scientists have collected, we see that having new and varied daily experiences can have lasting effects on health. We encourage you to take some time today or in the next few days to find new and different activities to try, especially as the pandemic slowly recedes. As quarantine measures become less strict, invest that extra time to explore the city with your family or just wander around a new neighborhood. Even if it sometimes takes a lot of energy to do new things, who knows how many "upward spirals" you'll find yourself in during that?

Key points:

• Research suggests that a variety of experiences - going to new or different places and doing different things - can boost health.
• A study using geo-tracking of participants found that on days they went to a wide variety of places, their positive feelings were better.
• An increased range of activities or locations, especially as pandemic restrictions ease, can create an 'upward spiral' of positive emotions.