My most recent page-turner is The Naked Brain, by Richard Restak, where I’ve been learning about the malleability of emotions. Did you know that when we look at another person’s face, we tend to unconsciously adopt the same expression? Not always, of course, but often enough to have a name: emotional contagion.

Haven’t we all experienced it? You’re having a moderate to not-so-hot day and you pass someone on the sidewalk who gives you one of those crinkly-eye smiles and all of a sudden you feel better inside. There’s a reason for that: Perceiving an emotion in someone else, like happiness, actually activates the same brain circuits used to generate those emotions. So if I perceive you being happy, my happiness circuits also start to fire.

Same with crankiness. If a person is particularly highly expressive, they can pass along their negative emotions to others without even saying a word! You know the people, and you try to avoid them—always with the bleak outlook, the seething anger, the angst, the stress, the despair. If you spend enough time with them, you start sharing those emotions.

All of us resonate to the emotions of others—some more so, some less so, but we all do it. Even infants: An experiment found that when a mother deliberately stops facially responding to her baby by showing a neutral face during feeding, immediately the baby turns fussy and looks away. Researchers speculate that we are hardwired from birth to resonate to other brains.

In view of all this research (and I have barely grazed the surface here), Restak suggests a code of conduct: It’s good mental hygiene for ourselves as well as a service to others to try to keep our thoughts and emotions as positive as we can, given the circumstances of the moment.

I couldn’t agree more. Next time you walk into a meeting when you’re having a rough day, try to do the Brownie thing and turn that frown upside down. Can’t do it on your own? Maybe this will help:

Artist Stuart Semple released 2,000 pink smiley faced clouds near the Tate Museum in London. Clouds were made of helium, biodegradable soap and vegetable dye. After 30 min. they dissolved in the air.

I’ve recently started Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf (professor of child development at Tufts University). To understand the history and development of the reading brain, Wolf interweaves ancient and modern linguistics, archaeology, education, literature, history, psychology and neuroscience—a heady brew. 

It’s a little dense, so I’ll probably be reading it at least through the end of August. I only mention this because I have a feeling I’ll be blogging about this book a bit in the coming weeks. Dr. Wolf has an engaging writing style for an academic (I feel like I can say that having spent so many years in those hallowed halls), and with all those different disciplines—well, there’s something new to learn on practically every page.

First really interesting thing (p. 9): Did you know that when you read, and you read the word “bug,” for example, your brain activates not only the most common meaning for the word (crawly insect-type thing), but also the less common associations (Volkswagen, computer glitch, viral infection, annoy, listening device, etc.). I had no idea. Even when we’re reading a word in a context.  In fact, the brain “stimulates a veritable treasure trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it.”

That’s really important. The richness, the depth, the scope of this treasure trove—it depends on what you bring to the reading table.

“Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts.”

What IS poverty, anyway? Well that’s a stupid question, isn’t it? Everybody knows what poverty is—if you’re at or below poverty, you have a tough time making ends meet. It’s a government-defined threshold of income; if you’re below the poverty level, you can’t really meet all your basic needs.

If you’re a single person, that level in 2009 is $10,830. For a family of four it’s $22,050. Doesn’t seem like much, does it? According to the Cost of Living in Minnesota budget calculator, a no-frills basic needs budget for a single person in Minnesota is more like $25,000. For a family of four, $55,788. More than double the poverty level.

So who can live on $10,080 a year? Where did that magic figure come from? Well, the federal government sets the poverty level based on the costs of a no-frills food plan developed by the Dept. of Agriculture. One can quibble over whether the food plan is adequate. (Most, even the developer of the threshold, would quibble that it’s not. For those of you interested in the detail, here is a fascinating report.)

To calculate the poverty threshold, they take the cost of this basic food plan (updated every year to take inflation into account), and multiply it times three, and there’s your poverty threshold. It’s multiplied by three because food accounted for about one-third of the average budget of a household of three or more people when this formula was developed (1963-1964).

Fast forward to 2009. Consumption patterns have changed. Housing and healthcare costs have grown substantially and take up a much larger portion of the average household budget than they did 40 years ago. Transportation costs have grown with commutes, and two-wage-earner households require childcare.

As a result of these kinds of changes, today food is more like 15% of the basic household budget. So what does that mean?

Let’s take the single person. One-third of $10,830 is $3,610. If we take that as our food need (based on the economic USDA plan) and apply the updated pattern (food as 15% of budget), the “poverty threshold” goes up to $24,066 a year. For a family of four, it goes up to $49,000.

There are a lot of debates about the poverty threshold and how it’s measured, but pretty much everyone agrees that it vastly underestimates how much is required for a minimally adequate standard of living.