The brain science behind optimism
Many psychological studies have confirmed that people tend to take a dim view of bad things happening to them personally while keeping the faith that things will go their way, but now neuroscience is getting in on the action to explain why we look at the world through rose-colored glasses.
To do this, scientists are using prediction errors or “… the brain’s way of keeping track of how well it is doing at predicting what is going to happen in the future,” and in the case of a study at University of College London, monitoring what regions of the brain were being used to process good versus bad news about future events.
Interestingly, the more optimistic a participant was the less efficiently one of these regions coded for undesirable information. Thus, the bias in how errors are processed in the brain can account for the tendency to maintain rose-colored views.
So, if our brains are to blame for having those happy thoughts, might as well go along with Albert Einstein when he said, “I'd rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right.” Here’s to hoping for the best.
Full story at Scientific American.
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