Smile, and the sun will come shining through.

• Author: Castellano, Rich
• Position: Psychology

"Are you going to ... live in the captivity of an autopilot mind? Break through the bars; take the smile challenge to heart; find your smile buddies; and claim the freedom, happiness, and smiling in your life now."

DID YOU KNOW that smiling and laughing are programmed into our brain? Itzahk Fried is a neurosurgery professor at UCLA. What he found literally is shocking in every sense of the word. Fried's team delivered electricity to a woman's brain to stimulate smiling and laughing. It sounds like a taser that makes you laugh.

As the story goes, the test subject was instructed to perform unrelated tasks, such as reading, counting, or moving her hands and feet. When they delivered very small amounts of electricity to the front of her brain, she consistently demonstrated a smile. At higher currents, a "robust and contagious laughter" was induced, and the higher the current, the longer the duration and intensity of the laughter. This laughter was accompanied by a sensation of mirth and merriment, and when the current got high enough, she would stop performing all other activities while laughing. When the laughter was stimulated with electric shocks, she associated whatever she was doing at the time with being "funny." Stand-up comics around the world are dying to learn about this technology.

If you let this sink in, the implications are astonishing. Our brain is like a computer, and brain cells (neurons) work using electricity and chemicals (neurotransmitters is the fancy word for these chemicals in our brain). This electrical and chemical stimulation creates "shocks" in our brain all the time, and we use these shocks to control our body to move, sing, read, laugh, eat, play, or sleep. In other words, we can give ourselves "smile shocks" and stimulate our own brain to feel however we want to feel. We can choose what we find to be funny--or not, and we can rehearse and strengthen the behavior patterns and neural networks that we choose with these brain shocks. The good news is that you do not need to hook batteries up to your head to make this happen--just practice your smile and give your brain a smiling power surge.

Basic neurophysiology tells us that stimulating (or shocking) the brain is how we get better at a musical instrument, sport, language, or any discipline for that matter. By constantly stimulating a specific area of our brain, we consistently improve that behavior. It is like building a muscle. The more you stimulate it, the more...