Help your brain. Stand up straight!

The chicken-and-egg dilemma is an old one.

The question is which is cause and which is effect. Which came first? Google tells us that Plutarch asked that question about 2,000 years ago.

That conundrum of course is unanswerable, but questions about causation — is this cause? Is it effect? Is it somehow both? — continue to puzzle us.

Janice Kaplan, who will speak at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly on Wednesday, February 26 (see box), looks at the problem of the brain influencing the body — or is it the body influencing the brain?

She does it lightly but substantively in her new book, “What Your Body Knows About Happiness.” This work follows “The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life,” which, she said “is about my spending a year living more gratefully, and I discovered how changing your perspective can change how you feel about things.” (One of the many things for which Ms. Kaplan can feel grateful is how well “The Gratitude Diaries” did; it was a New York Times bestseller. “What Your Body Knows” is Ms. Kaplan’s 15th book.)

“This new book follows up the Gratitude Diaries by saying yes, all that is true, but there is another way to approach it,” Ms. Kaplan said. (“It” here means how to transform your feelings, moving from grim to joyous.)

“That way is to realize that your body is part of the game. Your mind and your body are partners. There are times — we’ve all had them — when we just feel happy. Maybe you’re on a beach, or you’re out hiking, or you’re on the top of a mountain, and you go, ‘Wow! I’m happy!’

“That was an experience I had, and I realized that I didn’t have to do any of my little gratitude exercises just then. What just happened made me feel good.” And it happened entirely unprompted.

“That’s what got me interested in thinking about body-mind connections.

“As with my other books, some of it is my own stories, but it’s also very heavily research-based — but in a fun way,” she continued. “I interviewed a lot of great psychologists, neurologists, and pain doctors — all sorts of people — and I take you along with me as I talk to them.”

She learned that the way she — and most of us — think about our brains isn’t quite right. “We tend to think of our brain as a big computer that’s telling our body what to do,” she said. “But now we’re learning that it often works the other way.

“We’re learning that your brain may be marvelous, but it’s basically a three-pound blob stuck in the darkness of your skull. It takes all the information from your senses, from your body, from the information that your senses are sending it from the environment.” (If you’re getting flashes of It from the classic children’s book “A Wrinkle in Time” you’re not entirely wrong, except that Ms. Kaplan’s brain is not at all evil, as It is. But it is a pulsing blob, encased in darkness.)

“So research shows that if we can change the environment, we can change the way we feel.

“There’s great research, for example, showing that going outside makes you feel better. Being in nature is one of the number of things we can do to improve our happiness.”

Bodies of water are particularly potent, Ms. Kaplan continued. “Two hours a week around water — an ocean, a lake, a stream, a pond — seems to have a very calming effect.”

So does bringing a little bit of nature inside your home. Pick flowers, or at least buy them! And get some fruit, too. “We seem to be wired to appreciate flowers,” Ms. Kaplan said. “It may go back to evolutionary times, when blossoms and fruit” were signs of health and fertility.

And stand up straight! “It turns out that when you sit up straight, or when you stand up straight, research shows that you have better access to positive emotions,” Ms. Kaplan said. “Our brains constantly scan our bodies. It may be that when you are depressed, you naturally slouch. Or it may be that you slouch, so your brain decides that you’re depressed. Standing up straight is what we do to show excitement or power. Our brains see that in their own bodies and are way more upbeat.”

She thinks that when it comes to deciding which influences behavior more, the outside-the-body environment or the necessarily interior brain — the physical and practical or the theoretic or metaphoric — the outside forces win. They’re the cause, she thinks; the brain’s processing all this is the effect.

“There’s a famous smile study, where people were asked to hold a wood pencil in their mouths,” Ms. Kaplan said. (It’s the Strack, Martin, and Stepper work, published in 1988.) “Some people were asked to hold it in a way that made their faces seem to be frowning, and others were told to hold it so it looked like they were smiling. And the people with the fake smiles reported that they felt happier and found things to be funnier.

“You would think that your brain would be smart enough to tell the difference, but the facial feedback hypothesis finds that the brain, which is constantly scanning, is looking at your facial muscles, and using what it finds to determine how you feel.

“The flip side of that is that some new research suggests that Botox” — the injectable drug that causes people’s facial muscles not to move, and therefore smooths out wrinkles — “may help in depression, because it keeps you from frowning. If you can’t frown, your brain can’t get the information that tells it that you’re depressed.”

In her book, Ms. Kaplan discusses a study that reveals “some fun research about the mind-body connection and how when people hold something warm, say warm coffee, they feel more warmly or positively toward people than they do when they’re holding cold coffee.”

It seems as if our brains think metaphorically, she said. “Another study shows that when people sit in hard chairs, they negotiate harder than when they sit in soft chairs.

“This research is fascinating to me on two levels,” Ms. Kapla n said.

“One is that it is inherently interesting, and a reminder that our bodies and our minds work together, in ways that we just don’t realize. If I were to ask you if the chair you were sitting in had anything to do with the way you were negotiating, you’d say of course not.

“You can use that information for practical reasons. If you are having a party, be sure to have some soft pillows out on the couch. And maybe instead of cocktails, serve hot toddies.”

And although our tendency is to crouch forward and concentrate intently on a task, physical fluidity tends to evoke creative fluidity. If you want to think through a problem or figure out how to write a story, take a walk. Ideas will flow.

Who: Janice Kaplan

What: Will talk about her new book, “What Your Body Knows About Happiness”

When: On Wednesday, February 26, at 11:30 a.m.

Where: At the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly

Why: For the community health seminar

How much: $8 for JCC members, $10 for everyone else

For more information or to register: Go to jccopt.org and search for Janice Kaplan or Community Health Seminar