The Brain’s So-Called Christmas Spirit Network Lit Up in 10 Holiday Lovers, but Red Pictures Might Explain It

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Five areas responded more strongly to festive images in people who celebrate Christmas than in people who do not.

Then came the twist. In the same paper, published in The BMJ’s 2015 Christmas issue, the authors conceded that the Christmas pictures might simply have contained more red than the comparison images, and that their results should ideally be reproduced before anyone draws firm conclusions.

With the holidays approaching, the study remains a useful lesson in what brain scans can show and what they cannot.

The research came from the Danish Headache Centre and the Functional Imaging Unit at Rigshospitalet in Glostrup, part of the University of Copenhagen. The scans were not originally collected to study Christmas. They came from healthy control participants in an earlier migraine study, who gave explicit consent for their data to be reused.

Twenty-six participants filled out a questionnaire about their Christmas traditions and feelings, and 20 were included. The Christmas group consisted of 10 ethnic Danes who celebrated the holiday. The non-Christmas group included 10 people with no Christmas traditions: expatriates from Pakistan, India, Iraq and Turkey, along with Danish-born people of Pakistani descent. Each group had eight men and two women.

The others were excluded. Two had a strong connection to Christmas despite not celebrating it, and the rest had a Christmas-celebrating background but did not have positive feelings about the holiday.

Inside a 3-tesla scanner, participants viewed 84 images through video goggles, each for two seconds. Blocks of six Christmas-themed pictures alternated with blocks of six everyday images with similar features. Participants were told they would see different images but were not told about the holiday theme.

Functional MRI does not read thoughts. It shows which brain areas use more oxygen during a task, an indirect sign of increased activity, according to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

Both groups showed more activity in the primary visual cortex when viewing Christmas images. The Christmas group also showed significant increases in the primary somatosensory cortex.

When the researchers compared the groups directly, they found five regions where people who celebrate responded more strongly: the left primary motor and premotor cortex, the right inferior and superior parietal lobule, and the primary somatosensory cortex on both sides of the brain. No regions responded more strongly in the non-Christmas group.

The authors linked those areas to earlier research on spirituality and self-transcendence, on mirroring other people’s actions and emotions, and on recognizing emotion in faces. In a nod to holiday overindulgence, they also reported that baseline blood flow to the brain was similar in both groups despite the Christmas group’s annual feast.

The paper is unusually candid about its weaknesses. The design could not tell whether the response was specific to Christmas or simply reflected joy, festivity, or nostalgia in general. The paired images may have differed in ways the team did not detect, with red coloring as the example they offered. And the two groups differed in cultural background and possibly in other ways besides their holiday habits.

The authors also cited a famous critique of brain imaging: a study that reported apparent fMRI activity in a frozen salmon, used to show how weak statistical corrections can produce false positives.

They pointed to reproducibility concerns in psychology as well, citing a 2015 replication project published in Science in which only 36% of repeated studies produced statistically significant results. With 10 people per group, the Christmas scan study was small.

The paper also coined a joke diagnosis. The authors suggested that millions of people lose their Christmas spirit after years of celebrating, a condition they dubbed the “bah humbug” syndrome. It is not a real medical condition.

Senior author Bryan Haddock, a medical physicist, was candid about the open questions when the study came out. Asked whether the team had found a festive center unique to Christmas, he told VOA News, “These are questions that we actually can’t answer.”

The paper itself proposed next steps, including comparisons with other celebrations such as Easter, Hanukkah and Diwali. The researchers also wondered whether responses change as people grow from children who mostly receive presents into adults who mostly buy them. They had tested the idea earlier in a four-person pilot study, published in Danish in 2012, and closed with a joke about patenting a Santa hat for family members with symptoms.

Speaking with STAT, Haddock described the work as playful theorizing about what goes on in the brain.

For readers, the takeaway is not that holiday cheer can be pinpointed or treated. The study suggests that personal and cultural experience can shape how the brain responds to familiar images, and it shows how easily a brightly colored photo can complicate a brain scan.

People who celebrate Christmas showed stronger activity in five brain regions when viewing holiday images than people without Christmas traditions.

Twenty, split into two groups of 10. Each group had eight men and two women.

Did researchers really locate the Christmas spirit?

No. The authors said the response might reflect general joy or nostalgia, or even differences in the images, such as more red coloring.

Functional MRI tracks changes linked to oxygen use in the brain, an indirect marker of neural activity. It shows where activity changes, not what a person feels.

The authors called for replication, noting the small sample and the risk of false-positive results in brain imaging research.