Cultivating Trust - One Breath at a Time

According to an article in this month's Nature magazine (as reported by the Chicago Tribune) people who inhaled a brain compound called oxytocin became more trusting.

Imagine the implications - think used car salesmen, politicians, courtroom lawyers, for instance. Even your boss! What would it be like if anyone - as in ANYONE - could immediately improve your trust in them, without your knowledge or say so, just by spraying something in the air around you?

"When you see your friend walking down the hall towards you, oxytocin is probably released that signals to you that it is OK to approach this person," said Paul Zak, a co-author of the research report. [Our] study shows that sniffing oxytocin instantly produced the sort of trust that would normally build through a history of reliable dealings, he said.

In response to things getting carried away, Zak said, "Sprinkling this [oxytocin] in the air is not going to do anything - it has to be sprayed into your nostrils." But other experts, including Zak's co-author, Ernst Fehr, aren't so sure. "Our results have implications for the idea of free will," he said.

We've known, intuitively or otherwise, that our brains don't function on logic alone. Researchers, believing that humans are hard-wired to seek out trust and strive to be trustworthy, have even developed a new specialty in recent years - neuroeconomics, to study the effect that such biological effects have on economic decisions. Of course advertisers have long tried to manipulate our emotional brains. It's suspected that all those wonderfully heart-warming images and soundtracks actually cause a reflexive release of oxytocin inside our brains.

The implications are plentiful - good and bad. And all the more reason to get conscious and clear about who you are and what you really what so that you're the one who gets to decide about that, instead of someone else!