Barbara Fredrickson Micro Moments Effect

Moments are typically defined as “a minute portion or point of time” (Merriam-Webster.com, “Moment”), ultimately small in the grand scheme of life. This thought process is due to a logical question: how can a split second have any effect on you, when you live decades in your lifetime? And although this logic poses a valid question, authors Barbara Fredrickson and Azar Nafisi, in their works “Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become” and “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” respectively, explain how moments are in fact the supreme factors in deciding the path of your destiny. Their viewpoints, although similar, are ever deviating from each other. Barbara Fredrickson implies the importance of small moments through

“When you share your positive emotions with others, when you experience positivity resonance together with this sense of expansion, its also deeply physical, evident in your brain” (Fredrickson 113). According to Fredrickson, this is a “micro-moment” of love; however, the effect it has on us as humans is even more profound. This altering of human biology and brain function causes us to synchronize with people we engage in conversation letting us experience a phenomenon that changes the way we think and operate. “Even more so than ordinary communication, a micro-moment of love is a single act, performed by two brains. Shared emotions, brain synchrony, and mutual understanding emerge together” (Fredrickson 113). This defines the biological and psychosocial change caused by love. The changes love’s “micro-moments” have on us give us 2 major things. First is the “biological manifestation of oneness” (Fredrickson 113), which allows increasing positive emotions to course through you and whoever you are conversing with and causes empathy and expands your focus to “we” instead of just “me.” Second are the enduring resources that these “micro-moments” allow us to have and sustain: “your physical health, your social

Barbara Fredrickson’s points about Neural Synchronization truly change a reader’s thought process towards love and what happens when you experience it. “When you and another truly connect, love reverberates between you. In the very moment that you experience positivity resonance, your brain syncs up with the other person’s brain” (Fredrickson 110). Statements such as these cause us to contemplate over out relationship with others and causes us to pay closer attention to others in order to actively observe and record our experiences with this phenomenon. Azar Nafisi, on the other hand, brings forth the idea that literary works can alter what we perceive as reality in order to create a world that appeals to us and is not affected by the real world or any of its problems. “Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth” (Nafisi 278). Statements like these from Nafisi can allow us to attempt to escape the world we live in and surround ourselves in the world of whatever book or literary piece we are reading. Reading literature can do this by giving key sensory details to us that will allow us to envision the setting as if we are there as well. These effects change the way we encounter literature, whether it would be by