(upbeat techno music)
(bright music)
- [Albert] Who doesn't dream about being a movie star?
(bright music)
They're confident, sexy, happy, and brave,
but it's all pure illusion.
Or is it?
It's evening in London.
Socialite Rita Simons is parking her car,
(suspenseful music)
when suddenly...
(suspenseful music)
(screaming)
- [Man] Honey! (suspenseful music)
- [Albert] This was not a movie.
There weren't any cameras,
but Rita Simons would be rescued by action movie star-
- Tom Cruise?
- [Albert] But that's not the only time
Tom Cruise would rescue someone in real life.
He's done it on at least five different occasions.
And he's not the only one.
(dramatic music)
While you were just watching,
Tom Cruise acted his way
to being a real-life hero,
happier, (laughs)
more in love,
and more confident.
(energetic music)
What if I told you
there is new emerging science that says...
- Hello?
- [Man On Phone] You could do the same thing.
- [Albert] We've been told
that positive thinking can change us.
But you could probably change your life far more
by simply acting,
acting happier,
acting more confident,
acting brave,
and even acting in-love, just like a movie star,
because it might not be what you think.
It's how you act.
My name is Albert Nerenberg and I work as a laughologist.
My job is to get groups of people to laugh,
but I don't do it the conventional way.
I just use laughter.
(laughing)
But one day, this happened.
- Hey!
This is all fake.
- [Albert] Actually, that guy was right.
This form of laughter exercise works
by initially acting the behavior (laughing),
which then triggers something real.
(laughing)
But that incident caused me to make a strange connection.
Could we act our way to other things?
Case in point: it would appear that actor Tom Cruise
has become the very thing he plays in movies,
a valiant action-based hero arriving in the nick of time,
as in the scene from "Mission Impossible 3".
Is it simply coincidence?
Or is it possible that like Tom Cruise,
if you act something enough, you become it?
This has been famously observed by poets.
"Act the way you'd like to be,
and soon you'll be the way you act,"
said Leonard Cohen and by actors.
- When you play a part,
do you then take on that part
when you're no longer playing?
So, if you're no longer in the play or in the movie,
or you've taken off that guise in your home,
and you're not standing like Wonder Woman or whomever,
does it, in a sense, infuse who you become?
- [Albert] Does this apply to the rest of us?
It's been said that we are what we eat,
but are we what we act?
(mellow tinkling music)
There's finally emerging science in many domains
that says it's extremely possible.
This is professor Laurence Stains.
He was stunned by the range of research
showing that personal changes are possible
by faking or acting your way to be something else.
He added them all up in a groundbreaking article
for Men's Health magazine.
- There is power in fakery, yes.
It's not all powerful, but I think
that fake the idea of faking it till you make it
has some power.
- Stains was amazed by the broad range
of human endeavors where faking it
changes people for the better:
faking confidence, happiness, extroversion,
youthfulness, and even laughter, has its advantages.
Generally speaking, we don't like fake things.
That's why it's hard to see
that a certain side of fakery
might have tremendous power.
Here's the idea.
If you want to change your life,
just act the way you want to become,
as crazy as that sounds.
Famously, there are books and theories,
all kinds of new ideas devoted to making us happier,
but the results are usually inconclusive.
Are we happier?
Who knows?
What if a certain answer was hiding in plain sight?
What if you just acted happy so that you triggered
the biological basis of joy?
If anyone is acting happy, it's this guy.
Madan Kataria was an overly serious doctor
until he became the laughter guru of the world.
- Every other day, people tell me
that this is all bullshit (laughs).
- [Albert] Dr. Kataria said that
at first, people didn't believe him
when he said that you could make yourself laugh
just by laughing.
But now, he's got a whole international movement
to prove it.
- This is the main difference between
the Eastern culture and the Western culture.
In the Western culture,
people are very logical, very analytical,
and when I introduced laughter yoga in the West,
everybody asking me how this, why this?
So before they can take laughter yoga,
I had to answer some questions.
But in India, nobody asked me.
They just laughed and they felt better.
(laughing)
- [Albert] Kataria's burgeoning movement
has faced opposition due to its emphasis
on faking your way to authentic laughter.
(laughing)
- The easiest way to be happy is to act like a happy person.
What I believe, that if you feel better,
there is a biology behind it.
It's possible, by changing your body behavior,
you can change the release
of certain neurotransmitters from the brain.
So, you can start from the mind, gets into the body.
You can start from the body, gets into the mind.
Your mind is not under your control.
Your body's 100% in your control.
Fake it until you make it.
This rule is (indistinct), I love this.
- [Albert] Research has shown that laughter
may open the door to a broad range of positive expressions,
including smiling, cheering,
and a sense of well-being.
To prove that laughter can be triggered,
Kataria demonstrated the gradient laugh.
It starts with an active laugh where you laugh quietly,
gradually getting louder and louder,
until you trigger real laughter.
(laughing)
Arguably, laughter yoga, an international movement
which involves tens of thousands of people
in countries around the world,
is based entirely on acted behavior.
- [Albert] You have faked the entire movement.
- Yeah, yeah, of course.
Well, I'm the living example of (indistinct).
(laughing)
- If acting happy can make you happy,
can acting depressed make you depressed?
Depression is considered to be at epidemic levels
in modern society, according to widespread research.
But here's the really crazy part.
Could it be partially because of the way we act?
Are we depressed because we're acting depressed?
- When you look at how human beings evolved
and how they learned historically,
or even, I could say, prehistorically,
then for hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution,
we were a mobile species.
We actually moved on the land.
We were nomadic hunter-gatherers in small groups,
and all the learning happened in action.
(growling)
- [Albert] Dr. Gabor Mate is famous for his books
on addiction and disease.
Increasingly, he believes our central human dilemma
begins with a separation of our minds from our bodies.
Mate says that when we disconnect from our bodies,
we lose our physical potential for action.
- With civilization comes more and more separation
from the land, and more and more immobilization.
So, immobilization immediately separates
the mind from the body.
- [Albert] We're becoming lonelier,
more isolated, completely sedentary.
We live in our minds and we've abandoned our bodies.
(tense techno music)
- I have been depressed for a very long time.
I've suffered with this disease,
I think, for most of my life.
When people would come up to me
and say, "What's wrong," or "Cheer up," or "Smile,"
I didn't realize that I had this look on my face.
It wasn't something that I did deliberately.
- [Albert] Sarah had been frowning all her life,
but she thought nothing of it,
until she became part of a revolutionary experiment
where people wrestling with major clinical depression
had their frown muscles paralyzed with Botox.
- I don't tell a lot of people about it
because it sounds sort of crazy,
because of the seeming, you know, improbability,
the strangeness of using a cosmetic treatment
that people in Hollywood use to cure a mental illness,
or to help a mental illness.
So, I didn't expect it to work,
and I was surprised when it did.
- [Albert] When we think Botox, we often think fake,
but a personal experience by a plastic surgeon
has inspired what may be
a revolutionary treatment for depression.
- I can't overemphasize
the memories of being a little boy,
and seeing my mother just paralyzed from depression.
(tense music)
You just look, look at her face,
you're like, "Holy cow, something's not good."
As a doctor, couldn't help her,
I got her the best I could get her,
nothing helped.
- [Albert] Years later, Finzi's memories
of his mother's frowning face would cause him
to link facial expressions with depression.
- Maybe the expression is just not,
not just the manifestation of the disease,
but part and parcel of the disease.
- [Albert] Dr. Finzi believes that our cultural obsession
with frowning and being overly serious
may be driving us to depression.
- There's a lot of research
in the psychology literature showing
that if you frown
before you watch a cartoon,
that you're going to think their cartoon is not as funny,
as if you were smiling.
Your facial expressions are involved
with your decision-making in life.
Every time you frown, you take
a more negative evaluation of whatever it is.
- [Albert] Dr. Finzi is pointing out
a very strange aspect of reality.
Human reality is likely distorted
by the outward expression of our emotions.
There is research to suggest that when you smile,
you are more likely to notice more things to smile about.
When we express fear, we are likely to notice
things to be afraid of in our environment.
(ominous music) (growling)
Although it's subtle, when you frown,
you may make your world more gloomy.
- This is a way for us
to get into your brain without going there.
I mean, how else do I get
to this part of your brain called the amygdala,
which is the seat of a negative emotions?
There's no way to get in there,
but these muscles
are like hard-wired in,
calm down the muscle,
then talks to the deep part of your brain.
And that was it.
Nice and easy.
- I think that since starting Botox,
my depressive periods have been shorter
and less intense.
It has been years since someone has said to me,
"What's wrong?"
Or, "Smile."
- I had the ability to test the hypothesis,
'cause I already knew how to
modify a facial expression
by using Botox.
I had no data when I first started.
I just felt strongly that based on everything I had read,
it's going to work.
- [Albert] And what happened?
- It worked.
- If you can reverse-engineer happiness and depression,
is it possible you can reverse-engineer
confidence and pride?
But where would you start?
How about in a small village in Burkina Faso, Africa?
It was here that a group of Canadian researchers
first identified a human universal.
- We had this group of people.
I mean, it was an amazing research experience.
Felt like we'd gone back in time 200 years.
If you have any knowledge of Western culture,
you're going to know who Tom Cruise is.
He was the biggest movie star at the time.
And so we thought, well, if you don't know
who the biggest movie star in the world is,
if you can't recognize that person,
you really don't have any connection with Western culture.
And so we wanted to know people who've never seen
a Western movie or magazine,
where you see these displays all the time,
will they still see this display and say,
"Yeah, that's pride, that person's feeling pride,"
because if they do, that's really convincing evidence
that what we're talking about is universal.
- [Albert] What Tracy is describing is the victory pose,
an explosive, expansive posture that is so innate
that even blind athletes will make this pose
when they win races.
- I didn't sort of come up with this from thin air.
We see it every time we watch
any kind of athletic event, right?
And so, all I did was think,
"Okay, we know that people show us expression.
The question is, when other people see it,
do they recognize it as pride?"
And so, that's what we did.
We said, "Let's see if that's the case for pride."
- [Albert] And the answer was?
- The answer was yes, yeah.
The reason it matters is because,
I mean, it kind of goes back to Ekman, right?
So, Paul Ekman said, "These five or six,
depending how you count, facial expressions
that go with emotions are universal."
- The question was, are expressions and gestures innate?
The same for all human beings?
Or are they the product of the culture you live in?
We are a species where
the really central features of our lives
are similar across the world.
- We needed that.
That was kind of the first piece of evidence to say
that emotions are not just culturally derived.
They're not just something we learned
from other people in our culture
and then display and feel because we've been taught to.
They're actually part of how we evolved.
They're part of what makes us human.
That's huge, right, from a scientific perspective,
to know that these things that feel super subjective
and really are very culturally embedded,
that actually, the reason we feel sad or angry when we do
is because we evolved to do that,
that it's adaptive for humans to have these emotions.
They do things for us, they're functional,
they've helped us survive, they've helped us reproduce,
they've helped us become who we are, essentially.
- [Albert] Professor Tracy and her team proved
that pride expressions, sometimes called the victory pose,
are universal across all humankind.
It is so powerful as a pose that we get it
even when it's faked.
But something far more revolutionary was to come.
If we make the victory pose when we feel powerful,
does the opposite apply?
Do we become more powerful
when we deliberately make this pose?
(dramatic music)
This is arguably one of the most watched
academic speeches of all time.
In it, Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy proposes
a new kind of practice known as power posing.
"Just acting out these poses," she says,
"changes our body chemistry, so that we both
feel more powerful and are seen as more powerful."
(mellow music)
- When we feel powerful, we expand.
When we feel powerless, we shrink.
So, does that affect how we feel and behave?
Is it possible that our body language
is affecting how we feel?
It especially matters because we spend so much time
like this, and that posture maps
onto the posture of the depressed person.
And we're spending a lot of time sitting like that.
So, even something that small
could affect how we feel about ourselves.
It's a very important dimension
in sort of how we express power and status,
and dominance across the animal kingdom.
So we know that alphas expand and take up more space.
- [Albert] Nature shows typically portray animals
in violent confrontation.
However, the reality is,
animals do an enormous amount of posturing, posing,
to avoid the real implications of being injured.
The animal world has far more theater than meets the eye.
- The animal that has power or is trying to signal power
is going to take up space
because that hasn't bagged on the other animal, right?
The other animal perceives that,
and you are now seen as more dominant,
and more threatening, and stronger.
What we find is that power changes the way you feel.
So when you feel powerful, you also feel
generally more confident, more optimistic.
Your mood is better.
You see challenges, not as threats,
but as opportunities.
It changes the way you think.
So, you are better at abstract thinking.
Other kinds of executive functions improve.
You are more creative.
You basically think better when you feel powerful.
- [Albert] Cuddy's research, however,
has been embroiled in controversy
because other scientists have been unable to replicate it.
- Is there a controversy around power posing?
Yes.
Is there a controversy around the majority
of psychological studies?
Also, yes.
- [Albert] But Cuddy's power posing concept
built on work by Paul Ekman and Jessica Tracy
has caught on with the public.
Amy Cuddy even power-posed
all the way to the Late Show.
- A lot of people know you
from these things called power poses.
Okay, what's a power pose?
- Well, so, if you won first place in a race
and you cross the finish line,
what would you do with your body?
- Whoa!
(audience cheering)
- [Albert] Journalist Mikaela MacKenzie
tried power posing for an entire month.
- I learned to pay more attention to my body language,
and tweak it in situations where I needed
a confidence boost, or needed to appear more assertive.
Those poses are actually giving you
a very real confidence boost.
I think it's very helpful to get
the sense of confidence and authority
that you do when you feel like
you have physical dominance in a space,
whether that's walking into a room
and being your most aggressive physically,
or your most dominant physically.
That definitely is an interesting way to think about it.
(bright music)
- [Albert] We conducted our own test of power posing.
The effect was almost immediate.
- Happy holiday, how you doing?
- Very good.
I became a different person,
and I would soon be mistaken for the mayor of San Francisco.
- You're the mayor? - I'm the mayor.
- [Man] All right!
- Despite the scientific controversy,
on the street at least,
it appeared to me that power posing
certainly had power.
If power posing makes you more powerful,
then what happens if you do it day in, day out?
Will that change who you are?
If you think the Tom Cruise rescue
is a single freak occurrence, you would be wrong.
According to news reports,
Cruise has done this at least five times.
(dramatic music)
Cruise helped two young boys
from being narrowly crushed by his own fans.
He helped save a family on a burning boat
off the coast of France.
He came to the aid of a fallen photographer
who's been trampled while taking pictures of him.
And while bystanders looked on,
Cruise leapt to the aid of a woman
who had just been hit by a car.
Some of Tom Cruise's real-life rescues
are eerily similar to scenes from his movies.
And if that's a pattern, it would stand to reason
that other actors are doing the same thing.
- Come with me if you want to live.
- [Albert] It turns out, they are: Harrison Ford,
who often plays heroes in his movies,
rescued a gravely sick hiker by flying his own helicopter
and landing on top of a mountain;
just like the movie triple X, actor Vin Diesel
rode a motorcycle through the rescue.
In this case, he pulled two kids
out of a burning car on the California expressway;
Titanic star Kate Winslet was staying
at Richard Branson's house on an island in the Caribbean
when it was hit by lightning and set on fire.
News reports would credit Kate Winslet
for rescuing Richard Branson's mother.
- [Reporter] Among the 20 people staying in the main house,
actress Kate Winslet, who played a heroic role.
- [Albert] Actors playing heroes in movies,
becoming heroes in real life?
Is it a coincidence or a very strange pattern?
Look deeper and there's more.
Actors Brad Pitt, Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Jennifer Lawrence, Clint Eastwood,
Emily Blunt, and Matthew McConaughey
were all involved in spontaneous rescues.
This entertainment reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle
noticed the trend and thinks it's a bizarre byproduct
of Hollywood's action film culture.
- Tom Cruise is credited with coming to people's aids
after auto accidents twice,
and I believe it was both in 1996,
the year of the first Mission Impossible.
(dramatic music) (gasps)
- I'm just living my life, you know,
doing the best I can just like everybody else.
If someone needs help, I will definitely help.
No question.
- [Albert] Although Tom Cruise is a controversial figure,
likely because of his involvement in Scientology,
there is an undeniable pattern in the rescues
that begin when he becomes an action star
specializing in doing his own stunts.
The stunts have been so exceptional and public
that they've been the subject of international news.
By her own admission, Emily Blunt was not a physical actress
until working with Tom Cruise on "Edge of Tomorrow",
where suddenly, she started doing her own stunts.
In her next film, "Into the Woods",
Blunt rescued actress Meryl Streep
from a potentially damaging fall.
- One of the things that these celebrity, you know,
life-saving incidents kind of makes me wonder is,
would I be able to do what they do?
And I think that's what a lot of people wonder.
It's sort of like, how would I react
when I'm in that situation?
- [Albert] Harrison Ford is probably the embodiment
of the Hollywood action hero,
but he's had a number of public mishaps and rescues
that seem to closely resemble scenes from his movies.
Is it possible that roles such as
the cavalier Indiana Jones and the reckless Han Solo
have led to Ford's similar behavior in real life?
Ford disregarded protocol at John Wayne Airport
when he flew his plane only 87 feet
over a loaded passenger jet.
- [Harrison] Hi, I'm the schmuck that landed on the taxiway.
- [Albert] And perhaps like a scene from Indiana Jones,
he crash-landed a vintage plane on a golf course.
Media reports connected Ford
with the scenes from his movies.
- [Reporter] Not too far from the image
we have come to know of them in the movies,
the adventure-seeking, larger-than-life characters
who make a habit of death-defying feats of flight.
- Why, don't you?
- No, do you?
- Well, the other thing about it, too, is
it's a huge risk for them to save lives
in order to put themselves in dangerous situations.
I mean, if you're, you know,
crawling into a burning car to pull people out,
well, one, you may get killed,
but the other thing is, you may get disfigured.
Should pretty much end your movie career.
- [Albert] That exact factor was at play
after an incident that happened one night
on a road in Hidden Valley, California.
- That's Jamie Foxx's home, the actor.
He hears a crash, the noise, the sound of a crash,
looks out his window, realizes there's a vehicle
that he can see that is on fire.
There's no hesitation whatsoever.
He goes running right over.
Right about then is when this other fellow showed up,
happened to be an off-duty EMT.
He gets a pair of these like special scissors, okay,
that are designed to do multiple things,
hands it to Jamie, he breaks the window.
The fire is getting bigger.
They try to pull them out,
and they can't get them out.
- [Albert] So what did Jamie Foxx say to your son?
- He said, "You got to help me get you out,
or I'm going to have to leave you here."
He basically put his feet, planted his feet
against the whatever part of the truck
on the inside and pushed.
And when he did that,
part of his body came out of the window,
and then they were able to grab him and drag him out.
Seconds later, after pulling him out,
the cab started burning.
And within a minute later, the whole truck is,
it's gone the rest of the way.
You could say, it seems like a scene from a movie,
that it was all just acted out.
(energetic music) (crashing)
- [Albert] You don't mean acting,
as in putting on a show, you know?
- Yes, he may very well have had gone through
that process in a movie as an actor.
I think a lot of people,
even though they may have training
and they may have the ability to do something,
if you allow fear to overtake you,
then you won't do anything.
You'll stand there.
And in this case, watch a human being burn to death.
- Although it might have seemed like a movie,
it was clear that this experience was very real.
However, part of this story stands out.
EMT is a guy who's trained in emergency practice.
Jamie Foxx is an actor.
How come the EMT guy hands the scissors to Jamie Foxx?
- I don't know.
- The public sees a character
and they see them in a movie do heroic deeds.
And then they treat them outside of that role
as if they were that character,
and there's something called situational narcissism,
which, in a different context, would be the idea
that when you're treated a certain way,
and everyone treats you as if you're important,
you start to feel very important.
So the same could be true.
The same effect could happen, I believe,
when you play roles.
- [Albert] Are heroic actors just playing out the roles
that we expect from them?
World-renowned psychologist Philip Zimbardo
leapt to fame in the early 70s
after creating the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment,
which demonstrated that people are changed
by the roles they play.
- Once you put a uniform on
and are given a job to keep these people in mind,
you really become that person
once you put on that khaki uniform,
you put on the glasses,
you take the nightstick.
- [Albert] Is it possible that playing
the role of a hero in a movie
creates the mental preparation for heroism?
Zimbardo coined the concept of heroic imagination,
a theory that heroes often have visual pictures
of what they should do in their minds before they do it.
- The actors that we all know and admire,
whether or not we love them, you know,
have internalized a set of actions
that can be triggered in the real world
the same way as on a movie set.
- If you physically practice rescuing someone from a car,
a dozen times in films,
and maybe a dozen times in one scene
with all the different takes, well,
it's going to be much easier for you
to envision yourself as someone who does that.
- [Albert] Research shows that when people
experience a traumatic incident
in which they have no frame of reference,
they often freeze.
However, having pictures in your mind
of possible actions you could take,
could break that freeze.
- Actors, where they either do their own stunts,
or they have recreated dangerous situations
where they took risks to help other people,
the acting, that mentality stays with them.
And so now, it's almost like the call.
Somebody yells, if you're on the set,
what are you going to do?
You're going to run over, you know,
challenge the guys, beat them up, do the judo trick.
(punching)
I think it becomes part of,
part of what you carry on in your imagination,
is that they walk around and say, "Oh, I could a hero."
It's simply, a situation occurs,
maybe they have that movie playing all the time,
and soon as somebody says, "Help,"
they are ready to help rather than look around
who's going to help.
- [Albert] Actors like Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford
may get the visual pictures of what they can do in a crunch
from the very movies in which they act.
It's quite possible that in these moments,
they've become their roles.
If it's true that acting brave might make you that way,
what about acting miserable, evil, or violent?
Will it make you that way?
(dramatic music)
In 1958, English actor Gareth Jones
would become famous for dying of a heart attack
while portraying a man dying of a heart attack.
More recently, Heath Ledger famously died
after portraying a heavily disturbed,
death-obsessed joker in "The Dark Night."
(crashing)
Actor Paul Walker, who played a key role
in "The Fast and the Furious" franchise,
movies which glorified street racing,
died in a high-speed car accident.
And Ricardo Medina,
who played the Red Samurai Power Ranger,
killed his roommate with a sword.
Actor Cory Monteith was famous for portraying
a bubbly singing high school senior
on the TV series, "Glee."
♪ Just a small town girl ♪
- [Albert] But given that he had already
had addiction issues,
was Monteith affected by being cast
as a drug addict in the movie, "McCanick"?
- Is playing a certain role on screen or on stage,
can that kind of predispose you to live or die
the way your character did in the role that you embody?
I can certainly see the possibility of that,
but it wouldn't be a simple one-to-one correlation.
- [Albert] Dr. Gabor Mate studied Monteith's case
and believes that when actors have already
been marked by life experiences,
it can predispose them to being impacted
by the roles they play.
- In "Glee," Monteith would have been portraying
a different aspect of himself.
And it's the other side,
it's the other side of the darkness,
but the both are real.
And it's a question of which is reinforced by life,
and that would have quite an impact on him,
especially since both those roles represent
powerful aspects of his personality.
The effect is not purely that one of role,
the effect is a role on a certain template
that's already inside.
(somber music)
- [Albert] On July 13th, 2013 in Vancouver,
Cory Monteith, aged 31, would die alone
of a combination alcohol and heroin overdose.
(thuds)
If there is a pattern among the stars who rescue,
is that almost without exception,
they are actors who do their own stunts.
We are in an era where action rules,
and science would seem to agree.
New research shows that action
almost always trumps thought.
A study showed that students learned far quicker
when a lesson was mimed to them
than when the same lesson was studied from textbooks.
Just the simple act of looking up
can improve people's moods.
Research also shows if you want to remember something,
don't think it, say it out loud.
Research on our physical nature
has led to a whole new field of science
called embodied cognition.
(pensive music)
This is Professor George Lakoff,
widely considered the father of embodied cognition.
Lakoff revolutionized neuroscience with a claim
that all thought is embodied,
meaning, the brain uses the body to think,
and maybe the other way around.
It was the practice of Tai Chi that helped Lakoff,
develop his series of embodied cognition.
- I came home one Saturday afternoon,
looked in the window, had some friends with me,
looked in the window, and there are two guys
rolling up our rugs.
This was during a period when I was studying
what is called staffs.
Now, I happened to have my staff
right next to the front door.
I quickly opened the door, pushed it open,
jumped in, grabbed this thing.
And I rammed it and I go like this
and I said, "Okay, you bastards,
I'm going to get you guys right now!"
And they ran.
They ran, they ran.
- [Albert] Lakoff said that in this case,
he didn't think about what to do.
His body thought for him,
proof that the body and mind are one.
- All thought is physical.
Thought is physical.
That's the main thing.
Think of it this way.
If there were no connections
between the brain and the body,
suppose there were no connections at all,
and all thoughts were there, what could you think about?
- [Albert] Brainy things.
- You could not even do that.
I mean, you would be nothing.
You wouldn't see anything, hear anything, feel anything.
You'd be nothing to think about.
You know, the fact that you think about stuff
means it's embodied.
- [Albert] Author Josh Davis put the theories
of embodied cognition to the test
when he opened a lab devoted to it
at Columbia University.
- I started the lab because
we are not paying, in my opinion, enough attention to
a huge, huge potential source of input
into what it means to be a human.
- [Albert] What Davis is talking about is your body.
From our earliest days, we are taught not to move,
that we are minds carried around by bodies,
but embodied cognition says
that our bodies change our thoughts.
They may even create our thoughts
as they change the way we perceive the world.
What we do actually change is what we see.
People who are in the middle of laughing
often think what they're looking at is funnier.
People who are dancing report
the music is better while they're dancing,
and people who throw tantrums
often think the world is an angry place.
This is an entirely new form of scientific inquiry,
as if our own bodies were some kind
of undiscovered territory.
(bright music)
- When we smile, you know, we tend to be happier.
There have been a series of studies
showing that your facial expressions
do influence your emotional experience.
The tendency to approach something,
it leads you to like it more.
When you're avoiding something,
moving away, you tend to like it less.
- So I was avoiding what you're saying by moving back,
I'm going to be less interested,
than if I was stepping forward,
to you, that's interesting.
That is interesting.
Weirder still, the angle at which we look at people
affects how we see them.
When we look up at people,
our feelings are different
than from when we look down at them.
Although we think our brains are neutral,
Davis said that making skeptical facial expressions
makes whatever we're looking at less credible,
while a more open, wide-eyed expression
makes everything more believable.
Just saying the word wow, in a dramatic way,
even without reason, will sometimes make us feel
like something exciting is happening,
even if nothing is happening at all.
- Wow is one of those, you know, it's one of those words
that's more directly tied to an emotional response.
Wow!
- [Albert] This same principle extends to the whole body.
- What happens to me if I give the thumbs up,
or if I put up a different finger
that sends a very different type of message, right?
- For example, if I was walking towards you
and you went, "Hey, nice to see you,"
that's changing the way you think about me.
And also, if you walked into me and you went, "Hey,"
now, there are chemical changes in my body
that is changing the way I see things.
- So, we know that these gestures influence
the ways that we think and feel.
Some of the ideas are that it's priming.
So, it's just bringing up the idea
that the movement is associated with these ideas,
and so the movement conjures the idea
of hostility or friendliness,
and then that influences you.
Now, some of the other posture research has to do
with how, like this kind of hunched posture
affects sort of feeling more down and depressed.
If you see someone and you look at them,
they really look down, they really look depressed,
that kind of a posture can influence sad feelings
or more of a kind of a depressed-
- Is this kind of like a loser posture
that you're saying, or (indistinct) on the street,
we'd call that loser? - Yeah.
- But if I walked down the streets,
shoulders down, neck down, is that what it is,
shoulders and neck- - Yeah, shoulders
and neck down, kind of like, yeah.
And there's, you know, that kind of thing
should actually influence how you feel.
So if I am like all tense,
that's a different feeling
than if I am like, you know, kind of relaxed.
We have these underlying assumptions about a separation
between mind and body that we should change.
We are our bodies, there's no separation.
(pensive music)
- If the way we act can make us cheerful,
interested, or angry,
could the way we act also be making us sick?
A new theory challenges medical convention
about the nature of chronic disease.
Is it possible that chronic illnesses could be provoked
by our emotional and behavioral realities?
(pensive music)
- In my family practice,
who got sick and who didn't get sick
wasn't accidental.
There were certain patterns there,
emotional and psychological patterns,
where I saw multiple generations of people at all ages
that then I worked in palliative care,
and all the people that were dying of ALS or cancer,
or sometimes chronic heart disease and so on,
they had certain personality patterns,
they're inescapable.
If your eyes were open, you can just notice them.
And based on both my medical experience,
observations, and a tremendous amount of research,
the emotional factors play a huge role
in chronic illness especially,
multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis,
colitis, Crohn's disease, chronic fatigue,
fibromyalgia, ALS, almost any chronic condition.
These conditions represent a little split
of mind and body in the individual,
where they really ignore their own needs.
- [Albert] This flies in the face of conventional thinking,
which says that chronic illness
is either of medical or unexplained origin.
Mate's theory says that people prone to chronic illness
may engage in a dramatic pattern of ignoring
or negating their body's physical needs.
(pensive music)
- For the sake of pursuing certain roles,
they end up not saying no to situations
that are actually bad for them.
They end up taking on situations
that are stressful for them,
physiologically stressful for them,
but because of their identification
with the role of the helper
and the role of the nice person,
and the role the person
who's always there for everybody else,
and the rigid and compulsive identification
with their jobs rather than their personal needs,
the body eventually says no where they didn't.
When we forget how to say no,
we end up taking on stressful lives,
which then result in physiological wear and tear
on the body.
And so, my contention is that
when we don't know how to say no,
the body can often say so in the form of illness.
If people ask me that how I live my life
has something to do with the onset of my cancer,
I say yes, it did.
If they say, "Are you blaming me for my cancer,"
I say, no, I'm not saying you deliberately caused it.
I'm not saying you did anything wrong.
I'm not saying you were to blame.
You were programmed in a certain way,
but you've had no choice but to act out,
because you can't separate mind from the body.
Physiologically, there's no separation whatsoever.
Yes, those behaviors and those emotional patterns,
those social relationships have, in fact,
contributed to the onset of your disease.
(pensive piano music)
But I can certainly say that there've been people
with significant chronic illness
written off by Western medicine
who have made complete recoveries
through the agency of agency,
and through dropping the role
and finding themselves underneath the role.
- [Albert] Eyoalha Baker, a case in point.
Baker, a Vancouver-based photographer,
says she had become lost in life,
but with a single act, she changed her role,
and possibly herself.
- Kind of a point in my life where everything
just seemed to not be going well for me.
I was depressed, had a breakup
that was really rough and unhealthy,
and my self-esteem was really low,
and I kind of just emotionally shut down.
And I realized that I really
didn't want to feel like that anymore.
So, I decided to make some drastic changes
and I sold everything I owned.
I sold my car, I packed everything I had into two bags
and went traveling for a couple of years
to try and reconnect to myself and figure out
what it was that I actually wanted to feel,
and how I wanted to express myself in the world.
And during that time period,
I would do jumping photos with friends.
And it would always alter the way that I felt.
(pensive music)
One of the days I was doing jumping photos with a friend,
we laughed a lot and we realized
how good we felt after doing it,
how it really shifted the way
that we felt emotionally and physically.
We were just altered. Our states were altered.
(pensive music)
Other people's like watching us, we're starting to do it.
And it was this great ripple effect.
Yeah, actually, I really want to do that.
Like, I want to feel joy,
and I want to share that with people,
and I want to be creative and play,
and interact and really connect.
I thought if I did hundreds of these photos
and they were shared with the world,
it would be like the same contagious effective.
You go to a soccer game or something,
and someone does, "Go," and everybody jumps up together.
And it's like in unity,
like our reaction is to jump in celebration.
It's almost like I was altering my state into joyfulness
by physically jumping into the air
and lifting my hands up and lifting my,
it's like I was lifting my emotions up
just through the physical act.
And I just kind of learned that as I went,
and then later, I actually saw that there were studies
proving that jumping is good for your body
and it's good for your health.
So it's like, I didn't know
that this was called the victory pose,
but it really makes sense to me.
But I just had this idea
that I wanted to do this as a project.
And I just thought, if I could travel around the world,
taking photos of people jumping for joy,
'cause this is such an innate emotion that we all feel,
and we can all connect to.
I had met a woman that owned a building
in the downtown east side of Vancouver,
which is one of the worst down and out parts of Canada.
A lot of drug use, a lot of homelessness.
And of course, I said yes right away,
even though I had no idea how to make a mural,
and I had never even thought about it,
but it made sense with what I wanted to do.
So, I just went in there and started doing a mural.
And all these people in the alleyway
were literally doing heroin and crack,
and all kinds of stuff, right beside me.
And these are the least likely people
that I thought would have a reaction to this,
but surprisingly, they were excited about it, too.
And not only did they want to be a part of the project
and they helped me to make the mural,
they actually jumped and took part in the project,
and they have the same excitement,
the same reaction that everybody else did.
And I realized that this is something
that we all feel and crave and desire.
And no matter what, even if you are depressed,
it will physically alter you to jump for joy.
Yeah, the mural came down unexpectedly,
and it was a bit heartbreaking
because so many people's energy had gone into this.
It had had such a positive impact
on this down and out lane way with all these people.
So, I was a bit heartbroken.
- [Albert] Baker's mural disappeared.
- I love my mural.
- [Albert] But perhaps she had already proven
that on the street, jumping for joy could be contagious.
(pensive music)
If acting can empower us and perhaps even heal us,
can it enter what might be
the most challenging domain of them all?
(bright music)
- I think it's true that I have,
in a sense, hacked love.
You know, love is always seen as
something so mysterious,
something beyond our control.
I am quite sure
that love doesn't have to be mysterious,
and that we can take control
over the love we experience in our lives.
- [Albert] Most of us believe
that love is not in our control,
a matter of fate decided by the stars.
Our goal is to find our one true soulmate,
and then love magically happens.
Epstein's study of successful arranged marriages,
an idea most Westerners find troubling,
revealed something surprising.
In arranged marriages, people felt like they had no choice,
so they practiced loving behaviors,
in some cases, transforming their partners into soulmates.
(pensive music)
- Some people look at my work and think
that I'm advocating arranged marriage, okay,
I have never advocated arranged marriage.
I have looked at arranged marriages
in which love has been built over time.
So, I can better understand how that works.
- [Albert] Epstein believes he knows
how to make just about anyone fall in love.
- If you gave me 10 couples,
I got to the point where I was pretty sure
I could get at least six of them
to fall deeply in love.
- [Albert] If Dr. Epstein had hacked love,
as he says, there was a way to find out.
To try some of Dr. Epstein's love exercises
right here, right now,
his first exercise is called soul gazing,
which is based on an ancient tantric intimacy practice.
Rather than follow instinct to look away,
people look deep into each other's eyes.
(pensive music)
- Well, in soul gazing,
you look into their eyes,
except that you, you know, try to hold that gaze.
And this person is trying to hold the gaze with you.
And that's all there is to it.
(mellow music)
- [Albert] Unexpected eye contact between mammals
is normally threatening.
However, research on eye gazing suggests
that prolonged eye contact, even acted,
produces feelings of compassion,
empathy, and connection.
Due to the power of mirror behaviors,
studies on couples in love
show that they mirror each other.
Eye gazing means acting like lovers.
Could that be why eye gazing,
even done deliberately,
creates feelings of love?
(mellow music)
- I love doing this because,
for me, it works.
I mean, I started to feel
like it was the first time
I had ever actually looked at you.
At you, and of course, I've been, in some sense,
looking at you for two hours, but,
I started to feel that more and more and more
that I was actually seeing you now
for the very first time.
- [Albert] That was pretty weird.
Weirder yet, Epstein was inspired
to develop his next love exercise
based on experiences in his own love life.
- We are so inept
when it comes to relationships and love.
It's pathetic.
I was in a relationship many, many years ago,
in which my girlfriend at the time was a wonderful person
who had a wonderful daughter.
And (sighs)...
She was trying for two years
to get me to say I love you to her.
And I wouldn't say it.
Now, this was a long, long time ago.
I mean, looking back, I say to myself,
"What an idiot I was!
What an incredible idiot I was."
This was a wonderful, wonderful human being who adored me.
And I liked her very, very much.
And what was stopping me?
Why could I not say those words?
And looking back, I now realize
if I had just said the damn thing,
if I had just said, "You know what, I love you, too,"
I have a feeling there would have been
this rush of emotion for me.
I have a feeling it would have opened up
floodgates of feelings that I just was holding in.
(mellow music)
- [Albert] We took Professor Epstein to a nearby beach
where we attempted love hacks
with people who had never met before.
Epstein introduced his killer exercise,
the I love you game.
In this love hack, people must say
I love you to each other.
The only rule is they must say it differently each time.
- I love you.
- I love you, friend.
- [Albert] According to Epstein,
the game often starts with awkward,
uncomfortable feelings.
- I love you.
- [Albert] But it often produces unexpected,
real feelings of love.
This is due to the power of vulnerability.
- In relationships, one person or the other
is usually holding back because the notion is,
we get this notion from our movies and our novels,
that if you cross over into that world,
everything's going to change.
And there's a lot of risk involved,
because when you say those words,
it means a lot in our culture.
And unfortunately, the way that plays out
is that we tend not to say those words.
The more you say those things,
the more you'll mean those things.
- I love you.
- I...
I love you.
(mellow music)
- Okay, so that, wow, that totally...
Whoa.
So I got this little tingling thing going on over here.
If two people are saying that to each other regularly,
it really is very healthy for our relationship.
- Is it okay to say that
after a particularly good interview?
(laughing)
- Yes.
- I love you.
- And I love you, Albert.
(mellow music)
Come here.
I feel closer to you than I did before.
(mellow music)
- By faking it until you make it,
it looks like you could get more
of what you wanted in life,
more happiness, more confidence,
and maybe even more love.
And according to Professor Epstein,
this is based on solid psychological science.
However, I would then meet someone
who had turned this whole thing on its head.
(mellow music)
- I had read an article
in Scientific American Mind
by Robert Epstein.
And I realized that the exercises
that he said were scientifically inspired,
that were pretty much guaranteed to increase
a couple's sense of vulnerability and lead to love,
I looked at them and essentially, they were games
I'd been doing since I was a 12-year-old
going to theater camp.
- [Albert] Hold on, let's get this straight.
Epstein's breakthrough theories
and exercises on how to hack love
are based on dozens of psychological behavioral studies
done at universities around the world.
- And they're all things we've been doing
in theater for hundreds of years.
This is theater 101.
- [Albert] And in fact, Amy Cuddy's
revolutionary power posing science
is also a very common theatrical exercise
known as status, which are theatrical exercises
where actors train at playing different roles of power.
- They're sort of the bread and butter of acting training.
And so I thought, "Hmm, this is interesting,"
science and theater actually telling us
a lot of the same things.
And so the first was soul gazing,
which I think we talked about.
It's the looking deeply into your partner's eyes.
Epstein explains soul gazing
as a situation where two people are given permission
to gaze into each other's eyes.
(pensive music)
(laughing)
- I had one called fall in love,
and this is literally falling in love,
where you stand there and then you fall
into the arms of your partner.
And I mean, honestly, I can't even think of
a theater class that hasn't done that.
It's a trust exercise,
and they're all things we've been doing
in theater for hundreds of years.
- [Albert] Vander Schaaff doesn't question
the revolutionary aspect
of Professor Epstein's or Cuddy's research.
She believes they're both onto something.
She's just amazed that so much of their breakthroughs
are based on fundamental acting techniques.
And if they're right, shouldn't actors be falling in love?
(dramatic music)
- A showmance is a term that describes
the romance of people that's developed
while they're doing a show.
My understanding is that showmances occur
in every level of theater, be it community theater,
and movie work, through Broadway.
It's a term that describes the reality
that I think a lot of performers face,
which is the sort of falling in love,
every show they do.
(dramatic music)
So my theory is that people who are doing
these exercises regularly, people in theater,
rehearsal, training, et cetera,
should be falling in love.
So I wanted to see if that was true.
And I created a survey.
I asked, for example, "Have you ever fallen in love
with someone while working on a production,"
and 78% of the respondents said yes.
(dramatic music)
And what I thought was really interesting is
I asked where in the process they developed these feelings,
and 93% said during rehearsal.
And it's during rehearsal
that you're doing these exercises
that are most similar to the ones
that Dr. Epstein discusses in his article.
- [Director] Okay, action.
(mellow music)
- It's definitely the same process.
It's exactly the same process where
each person is made to feel more and more vulnerable.
Their defenses are getting lower and lower and lower.
Each person is becoming more needy.
And then there are these moments where finally,
they start to support each other.
They start to admit that,
"Hey, I actually like you."
And that little admission just (puffs)
and the bond just goes like that.
- Through doing these exercises,
what that does is it feels like love.
And it is love.
- In the entertainment industry,
people are often put through exercises
that are exactly like the exercises
that I recommend to people who want to fall in love.
Well, Mr. And Mrs. Smith is a great example
of what I've been talking about.
It's a whole industry in which people
are constantly being made vulnerable to each other.
And in fact, that's the key to good acting.
- [Albert] Not only do actors go through
the motions of being lovers,
but due to rehearsal,
repeat these behaviors over and over again.
Actors are often eye gazing by default.
And in fact, the classic love scenes of Hollywood cinema
all include powerful moments of eye gazing.
- I know. (dramatic music)
He is looking at you, kid.
(dramatic music)
- [Albert] Aside from an apparent cocktail
of love-producing exercises,
actors also share something else which drives bonding.
- I think the nature of theater and movie work
is inherently filled with risk.
And that's what's exciting about it.
When you go through risk together, you are closer
and you will have that bond probably forever.
- Even where people know it's not real,
which is odd, it strengthens the bond.
And I don't think that happens
very much in many professions.
I don't think it happens if you're
in the pharmacy profession, let's say.
(beeping)
But in that industry, I think that will happen.
I think you're going to be put through exercises
that I consider to be emotional bonding exercises.
- [Albert] If just repeating the phrase I love you
promotes real love, could this explain
why so many actors fall in love on the job?
- I love you.
(mellow music)
- Actors are put into the situation all the time,
where they have to act like they're in love.
Well, guess what?
If you act like you're in love,
that creates love.
(dramatic music)
- Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are certainly
one of the more famous showmances.
- [Robert] Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a great example
because, you know, these actors,
at some point, gaze at each other.
These actors go through all kinds
of physical crazy stunts together.
(dramatic music)
These actors fall in love.
And then in fact, a serious relationship results.
- I think playing the part of being in love
can definitely put someone at risk
of actually falling in love.
- And so it's no wonder that their relationships
are often very unstable.
They end up cheating on each other right and left.
It's the nature of the industry.
It actually immerses people in this process
that I've been setting for a long time.
What do you expect?
(dramatic music)
- Because of its obvious power,
and the rise of the science of embodied cognition,
could acting be the next transformational health trend?
It could help us become happier.
It might help us become more confident, even brave,
and it might help us find and deepen love.
And it's actually very easy to learn how to act,
but there is one catch, and it's a big one.
Most people are afraid of acting.
But why?
- I think people are afraid of acting
because we have this sense
that we're supposed to be our authentic selves,
and that if we put on anything that is not that,
that somehow we are lying.
- [Albert] But our fear of acting
could be something even more basic.
These researchers who study acting
explain it with the theory of mind.
- When we're very, very young,
we're not afraid of acting,
taking on roles, role-playing.
We love it, all children do.
They can be a dog, or a big cat,
or a truck, or any numbers of things.
They can do them all.
And then around six years of age,
they start to notice that people are looking at them.
And those people have a mind
that's thinking about them,
maybe not as positively as
they were obliviously unaware of
just a year earlier.
So, many, many people who once loved doing that
are now self-conscious
because they know others are looking at them.
And that socializing fear of shame is paralyzing.
- [Albert] Paralyzing, maybe,
but here's the twist.
Even if we've lost our childhood love
of role-play and acting,
aren't we all acting anyway?
- Welcome to the movie.
- [Albert] This professor says that we are all acting.
We just may not know it.
- Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage,
and we are but the players."
What he meant by that is that
we are constantly participating in a play.
This is one big movie.
We're all acting, right, all the time.
And there's no way to stop.
All these people, they're all acting in a play
a collective hallucination
that makes this society possible.
- [Albert] "All life is drama," says Hamer,
"and we all find ourselves playing roles."
- You might be a store owner.
You're a police officer.
You're a firefighter.
Every little thing you do is acting.
It's drama, from little gestures
to big things, small things.
Everything you do is acting.
That's what Shakespeare means by all the world's a stage.
You could take a little bit of what Tom Cruise is doing
when he films these action movies into your own life.
By recognizing that if you adopt
certain power poses, certain body language,
if you do certain things with your body in the world,
that will shape your experience of the world.
Look at "Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol."
Well, it's significant that Tom Cruise,
he does his own stunts,
but he also does them out in public areas,
in the middle of cities, with lots of people watching.
So, he's essentially in that situation,
not only making a movie,
he's getting everybody else to become extras in his movie.
And so, he's acting the part of a hero
in a real public place,
very much kind of laying bare how much, right?
This is all a movie.
It's funny that people are pathologically afraid of acting,
but we can't avoid it.
The only difference between you and Tom Cruise
is Tom Cruise isn't afraid to act
in every sense of the word.
(mellow music)
- There might be a fairly outrageous concept here
that you can actually change who you are by the way you act.
And that's something that we can control.
But most of us, it appears, are afraid to act.
So, we don't know what our real potential is.
The science is also controversial, unproven, and new.
What about a public test?
What if you went to a place
which would be a very tough sell?
This is Idea City, a conference dedicated
to scholars, intellectuals, and brains.
If anyone is out of their bodies, these people are.
Could they be triggered by the fundamental principles
of innate embodied cognition?
Would they feel it?
Would they do it?
Would they act?
It was showtime.
I'm here today to introduce what I believe
could be an entirely new form, a new form of exercise.
But first, before I start,
I just want to charge Idea City with discrimination.
Idea City is described as Canada's
premier meeting of the minds.
Are we just minds?
Are we merely brains on sticks?
(audience laughing)
No, no.
I would recommend right now that you look down.
What is that?
Yes, that's your body!
There's a whole new field of science
which looks at the way the body feedbacks to the brain.
So I'd like to ask you to do a simple test and exercise.
And if you can, I would like you to assume this posture.
If you can just put your hands, just cross your arms.
Beautiful.
By holding this position,
you become more skeptical.
You're probably thinking this is a crock.
Okay, now, try this expression then.
Here's an entirely different expression.
Yes, open your eyes wide.
Now, the second step of this is open your mouth.
Drop your mouth open.
Wow. Now, you find, "He's starting to make sense.
I understand."
Everything becomes believable in his posture.
And if you add in the simple term,
the simple word, wow.
- [All] Wow.
- We'll find, you have entered a moment
where something important seems to be happening,
even if nothing important is happening at all.
(audience laughing) I then asked the audience
if they wanted to test the series of embodied cognition.
And here's the twist.
A study or a researcher, sorry,
in New Jersey named Sarah Vander Schaaff
looked up these fields of science
and discovered something kind of strange,
that all these exercises were exactly similar
to things that happen in Theater 101.
(audience laughing)
I would like to propose an entirely new exercise modality
that is based on acting.
Yes.
This exercise is called the I love you game.
And let me explain how it works.
It's based on the idea that the actual expression,
I love you, is very taboo.
I love you.
- [All] I love you.
- Thank you, it's beautiful.
Yeah, keep going, I love you.
- [All] I love you.
- I love you.
- [All] I love you.
- I love you!
- [All] I love you.
- [Albert] I love you!
- [All] I love you.
- Now, you're going to turn to somebody next to you.
Yes.
I love you.
(mellow romantic music)
Beautiful!
Okay. Okay, now, the wonder woman pose.
So, hands on hips, head up,
shoulders out, projecting power.
Now, there's a formal study at the University of Michigan,
where they studied this particular gesture.
Yes.
That this changes your brain chemistry
to feel that whatever is in front of you
is much more positive.
Thank you.
Hey, you're beautiful.
Thank you. Now, there's another gesture that was heavily studied,
and I'm sure you're familiar with this gesture.
And that is this gesture here. (laughing)
Research at the University of Michigan suggests
by making this gesture,
we will change what is in front of us
to become more negative in terms of our viewpoint.
So, let's see if that's true.
Let's conduct an experiment.
Now, this is merely an exercise.
So first, you take your right arm, let's say.
Take your right arm and you extend it like this.
Now, as you gesture like this,
you'll find a certain part of you is activating,
hostile, primal.
In fact, I recommend doing it with both hands.
(audience laughing)
That's when I realized it was working.
These people might be brainiacs,
but right now, they were in their bodies.
You might see a room full of people giving me the finger,
but I saw a room full of people acting.
(all cheering)
Victory pose.
(all cheering)
Wait, but wait, we're being judged.
Look, there's cameras watching everything we do,
adults judging us for acting like children.
So, our final gesture is a rejection.
It will be a powerful rejection of that feeling of judgment.
Yes, this is it!
Yeah, take this!
Judge this!
Yes.
I love you, judge this!
Yes, thank you. (clapping)
Thank you very much.
If Shakespeare is right,
and all the world is a stage,
here's an idea.
We can act when we want to.
And acting on positive human universals
might improve our lives.
Laughter yoga continues to spread,
and new research shows
that less frowning may make us happier.
And so does, it appears, jumping for joy.
- Out of the blue, I got a call
from someone in Palm Spring.
They asked me to come down to California.
And here I am, I'm jumping for joy again.
- T[Albert] om Cruise continues to perform
outrageous stunts in public.
Harrison Ford rescued someone else.
And a professor at Stanford
has come up with a new book
that suggests practice heroism
could make people more brave.
And so, it's possible
we can rehearse our way to better lives.
And maybe it's a good idea to listen to our bodies
because we are our bodies.
And although it's good to be truthful and authentic,
sometimes it's worth noting that it's okay
to do a little bit of acting.
- Hey!
This is all fake.
(dramatic festive music)
(uplifting piano music)