Researchers in Denmark set out to find the location of the Christmas spirit in the human brain. They wanted to know how the Christmas spirit worked from the standpoint of a neurological network. Their research was published in the British Medical Journal holiday edition.
They were thinking the answer could provide some insight into an important and intriguing area of human neuropsychology, and maybe even provide the tools necessary to “treat ailments such as the bah humbug syndrome,” the authors wrote.
Anyone who has read Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” knows about the bah humbug syndrome. And during the Christmas season, There is no bigger way to ruin a holiday gathering or office party than to have someone show up acting like a “Mr. Scrooge.” So the burning question on researchers minds was if this attitude had anything to do with a malfunction in a specific part of the brain, a place where the Christmas spirit should be located.
Researchers recruited “10 healthy people from the Copenhagen area who routinely celebrate Christmas and 10 healthy people living in the same area who have no Christmas traditions.” All the participants filled out questionnaires about their feelings about Christmas.
While undergoing an MRI scan, all the participants were shown a series of 84 pictures, some with traditional holiday scenes, like Santa Claus, Christmas trees and the like, and scenes that showed streets, parks, lakes and grocery stores, or in other words, nothing holiday themed. The scientists said that no gingerbread or eggnog was consumed prior to or during the scanning so as not to influence the results.
The first group of participants was made up of people who celebrated the Christmas holidays. The second group consisted of people who did not celebrate Christmas, mainly consisting of Pakistanis, Turks, and other non-Christians. The researchers were interested in seeing if there were differences in the brain activity between the two groups.
Compared to the 10 non-Christmas celebrators, the 10 participants who did celebrate Christmas showed “higher activity in response to Christmas images in the left primary motor and premotor cortex, as well as in the parietal lobules, which have been linked to a predisposition to spirituality,” says the study.
While the authors said the results of the study were interesting, they also said more study was needed to determine if the increase in neural activity was also found in a larger group and if the response (or activation) was indeed caused by the Christmas spirit or perhaps for another reason.
The BMJ noted that neuroimaging often gave some very spurious findings, like when scientists found some interesting patterns of brain activity in a dead salmon. Some scientists took to calling it blobology or neuro-bollocks said the BMJ. The Copenhagen research team attributed the remarks to “personal communication [from] Grinch.”
“Although merry and intriguing, these findings should be interpreted with caution,” the scientists acknowledged. “Something as magical and complex as the Christmas spirit cannot be fully explained by, or limited to, the mapped brain activity alone.”
Co-author Bryan Haddock, a medical physicist at the University of Copenhagen, said, “You can build a whole theory of what’s going on in the brain, as neuroimagers tend to do, and that’s what we play with in this paper.”
This merry and interesting study, “Evidence of a Christmas spirit network in the brain: functional MRI study,” was published in the BMJ Christmas issue on December 16, 2015.
