When Ismail Demirkan sits down for a Thanksgiving meal with friends and family this year, his gratitude will be profound. Just two months ago, he landed a job in metro Denver that allowed him to move his family back to Colorado from Istanbul, where he had spent the past two years working as a university professor.
“The is not good,” he said. “They’re going after everyone who is criticizing the government, and it’s becoming a dictatorship.”
After working as an electrical engineer in Denver for seven years, he had moved to his native Turkey in 2013 — and just three months later, the country erupted with he government cracked down on dissent, becoming increasingly unstable and autocratic.
“I’m particularly thankful to this country for giving me the opportunity to come back and find a job,” said Demirkan. “And I’m thankful to God that I found a job, because it’s very hard to find a job from outside the United States.”
This , as people gather to count blessings and give thanks, they’re practicing gratitude in a year of renewed focus on the emotion. Such books as Janice Kaplan’s “The Gratitude Diaries,” published in August, look at pioneering research, and this week, there’s the new book “Gratitude,” written by neurologist when, facing death, he chronicled his appreciation for the gift of life.
“My predominant feeling is one of gratitude,” he wrote, listing his many joys on life. “Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
And there’s a movement to put gratitude under the scientific microscope, examining how it might help people thrive in life.
Over the past decade, psychologists and scientists have been collecting empirical data that show people who report feeling gratitude in their daily lives feel more loving, forgiving and enthusiastic. and mental and physical health with such benefits as lowered blood pressure and improved immune function.
Now neuroscientists are pioneering a new frontier, for the first time creating maps of brain activity when people are focused on gratitude. This field of investigation, at the brain level, is so new that only a handful of researchers are doing it.
“If we want to harness the best of gratitude, we need to find out how it works in the brain, which allows us to examine the nature of gratitude itself and hone in on it,” said Glenn Fox, a neuroscientist at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.
He is the lead author of a study by USC neuroscientists on the neural basis of gratitude, published Study participants were put into MRI scanners and guided to reflect on true-life stories from Holocaust survivors who experienced intense gratitude after other people provided life-saving food or hiding places.
Brain activity was enhanced in two key places — the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex — areas previously linked to things such as interpersonal bonding, rewarding social interactions and the ability to understand the mental states of other people.
“What we can learn more broadly from this is that even in really dire times, there is still room for gratitude, and to recognize things that others do to benefit us,” Fox said.
Some of the forthcoming brain imaging studies have been funded by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, which created a $5.6 million three-year project to expand the scientific database of gratitude.
Researchers emphasize that gratitude is not a magic bullet.
“We can’t think of gratitude as a synonym for happiness or an escape hatch from a tough situation,” Fox said.
Cultivating a grateful disposition requires regular practice, he said, “but it can shrink the scale of suffering when we can look at what we have on a basic level, even when we lose things we care about very much.”
Derik Eselius, director of , has focused on daily gratitude for years as part of his spiritual practice.
“It helps me have perspective and appreciate what life gives me and also helps to round out the edges of difficult times,” he said.
But he was particularly challenged recently when his 8-year-old son, Rama, was hospitalized for two months with an autoimmune disorder, and his family plunged into crisis.
Gratitude wasn’t his dominant emotion. But now that his son is home again, he’s reflecting on the gifts of that time.
“It was an eye-opening experience,” he said. “My levels of appreciation have expanded tremendously. People were like heart and soul for us, cooking meals and taking care of my older son. I didn’t have to touch a pot for months. It was a real, tangible thing to be grateful for within the adversity.”
Gratitude is a social emotion that creates bonds between givers and receivers, often inspiring recipients to pass on such acts of kindness to others, which experts consider a “social glue” that benefits the larger community.
Philip Kubat, a commercial real estate broker in Denver, has practiced gratitude for two years, after a painful divorce left him at a crossroads in facing his future.
“At that point, gratitude wasn’t even on my radar,” he said. “I tended to blame, deflect and hide.”
But he decided to focus on self-development, and gratitude emerged as one of his top values in life. He devoted chunks of time to reading about the emotion, reflecting, and keeping a gratitude journal. Each night before bed, he lists three to five things he most appreciated that day.
“It’s paid off huge dividends,” he said. “I went in thinking it was this really complicated thing, and then I realized it’s so simple and powerful and that it changes your life. … It’s opened up my life to other core values, like wisdom and success and health.”
Michelle Scott, a life coach in Colorado, believes that her regular gratitude practice helps direct attention away from herself.
“It takes the focus off ‘me,’ and that gives my mind a chance to quiet, my emotions a chance to calm and for me to experience a sense of peace inside,” she said, “and that’s when I truly feel gratitude.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or @coconnordp
