I like knowing a little trivia. It’s probably related to wanting to maintain a positive view of myself. If I know a little trivia, maybe that makes me more competent.

Trivia of the day: Hardly any of you know that my friends Mike Bevill, Neil Balholm, Greg Hopkins, and I invented Karaoke in Mike Bevill’s basement back in 1974. Neil had a portable microphone system. We’d plug it in, put on background music, and belt out tunes, as if we were Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Bevill, Balhoum, Hopkins, and Sommers. We created a fake band, named ourselves the “Nugget Brothers,” and sang with great enthusiasm, but little talent, along with a variety of pop musicians.

One odd outcome of this was my continued preoccupation with creating fake bands into and after college, despite nearly complete lack of talent. As an example of the awkwardness of youth, I could “fake perform” to large groups, but I was unable to speak up in classes. Weird, I know. My guess is it was safer to publicly perform with no talent that it was to do so in areas where I was serious.

Here’s a photo attesting to my fake band performance legacy.

As a part of the Montana Happiness Challenge, we’ve been encouraging people to share their favorite songs. . . and now we’re taking it to the next step. Please, if you will, share yourself singing a song that makes you happy, or that you find meaningful. Post it on social media and give us a tag or hashtag: #MHPHappinessChallenge or #MontanaHappiness.

You may wonder, other than embarrassment and social media humiliation, what’s the point? The point is that singing is nearly always therapeutic, partly because of what’s happening in the brain. Think about it.

Singing involves movement, creativity, feedback and adjustment, listening, planning, memory, and language. Some researchers emphasize that singing triggers the release of the so-called “feel-good” neurotransmitter dopamine, which is a limited view, because there’s also more serotonin at the synapse, an oxytocin shower, and more or less involvement by 100s of other neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, and brain structures (including, but not limited to the hippocampus, insula, frontal lobe, Wernicke’s region, occipital cortex, and motor cortex). If you want to light up your brain, sing!

For the Montana Happiness Challenge, we highly recommend singing out loud. Although we would love to watch and listen to you singing on social media, if that’s not your thing, go ahead and sing in the shower, while housecleaning, in the car, or anywhere else you can let your joy happen.

One last point. Research on positive emotions indicate that we don’t need to have BIG positive emotions to experience happiness and well-being benefits. What’s important is to weave in many intermittent small positive emotions. IMHO, singing privately or publicly is one way to give yourself frequent positive emotional boosts.

For my part, I’ve recorded three videos on my social media singing. These videos are silly and embarrassing, which I’m completely embracing. I got nervous for each of these videos and didn’t even say all of what I planned to say. Feel free to skip them and/or #neverspeakofthem.

Video One – Prep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmja7e4SnyE

Video Two – Your Brain on Singing: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UXhDPYEEq0E

Video Three – My Performance : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJLtckXrnUY

Thanks for reading this. Please share everything you can about the Montana Happiness Project. Our goal is to reach MANY people with free ideas about positive emotions and meaningful happiness.