Want to quit smoking? Next time the urge to light up strikes, think of snow-capped peaks instead of the fleeting pleasure of a white cigarette. That’s the conclusion of a new brain study which shows that thinking happy thoughts could help dampen cravings.

Mauricio Delgado, a cognitive neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and his colleague Elizabeth Phelps of New York University measured the brain activity of 15 volunteers as they played a simple game.

The researchers told their subjects to associate blue cards with a real $4 payoff, and yellow cards with nothing. To control for potential biases, they swapped the colour assignments for half the volunteers.

Before either a yellow or blue card flashed onto a computer screen, the volunteers received an instruction to either concentrate on their prize or instead on some calming, natural object – a blue ocean, for instance.


Delgado’s team measured how excited volunteers were by attaching an electrode to each volunteer’s finger, as increased excitement changes the electrical behaviour of the skin, possibly because of changes in sweat levels. When there was not $4 up for grabs, volunteers stayed perfectly calm no matter what they were thinking.

Sweaty palms

But with the flash of a blue card and money on the line, volunteers who thought about the cash showed more excitement than those who pictured the sea, the sky or some other succour. The same trend held for the volunteers told to link yellow cards to cash.

Under an fMRI scanner, thoughts of clouds and oceans slightly lowered activity in the brain’s reward centre – the striatum – compared to thoughts of money, but only when the card promised a payoff.

Phelps, for one, isn’t surprised. Whether it’s a child ignoring the smell of cookies baking or a former smoker fighting the itch to light up at a bar, we all fight our impulses. “Anybody who’s functioning well in the world is doing it,” she says.

Holding back

If drug addicts, gambling addicts or alcoholics are worse at ignoring their cravings than others, cognitive control might help them kick their habit, Delgado says. Yet promise of a high will be harder to temper than the chance to win a few bucks.

Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, notes that in the study, as well as in real life, people can’t totally subvert their brains’ whims. “If it were so easy to do, then why do we eat the chocolate cake when we’re on a diet, why do we smoke crack cocaine when we see a pipe?” he says.

But Delgado says that making addicts think about more precious things could make the technique even more powerful. “The cocaine addict might not care about fluffy clouds, but they’ll really care about thinking about their family or loved ones,” he says.

Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2141

Drugs and Alcohol – Learn more in our comprehensive special report.