The Mind Report - Laurie Santos and Tali Sharot on Optimism and More

On this week's episode of The Mind Report, Laurie Santos and Tali Sharot, author of The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain (2012), talk about optimism, neurobiology, choosing, and a whole lot more.



Tali Sharot is the principle investigator at Affective Brain Lab:

I am the director of the Affective Brain Lab (funded by a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust) and a faculty member of the department of Cognitive Perceptual and Brain Sciences at UCL. 

My lab investigates how motivation and emotion determine our expectations of the future, our everyday decisions, our memories and our ability to learn. By understanding the brain mechanisms that mediate these effects we aim to identify ways to encourage behavioural change that enhance well-being. I am interested in questions such as when and how do other people influence our decisions and judgments? why do we process information in a biased manner? when, how, and why do people deceive themselves? how do these process go awry in depression?

Laurie Santos is Director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale University.

My research explores the evolutionary origins of the human mind by comparing the cognitive abilities of human and non-human primates.My experiments focus on non-human primates (in captivity and in the field) incorporating methodologies from cognitive development, cognitive science, and animal learning. My research examines the following broad questions: what domains of knowledge are unique to the human mind? Given that human infants and non-human primates both lack language, what similarities and differences do we see in the expression of non-linguistic domains of knowledge?

My current work explores whether primates possess precursors to a theory of mind, how primates reason about different kinds of things (foods, artifacts, and animals), and whether primates share human-like decision-making biases.

Cool discussion.

THE MIND REPORT

Aug 10, 2013

Laurie Santos (Yale University) and Tali Sharot (University College London)

Tali explains optimism bias 9:34

The optimal level of optimism 3:18

Optimism's neurology 3:21

Are animals also overly optimistic? 4:16

The act of choosing is hard to master 7:52

How to turn optimism bias to your advantage 4:52

LINKS MENTIONED

• Tali's book, "The Optimism Bias"
• Tali's new e-book, "The Science of Optimism"
• Tali's TED talk on optimism

Building Character—Resilience, Optimism, Perseverance, Focus—To Help Poor Students Succeed

Yes, yes, yes. Thomas Toch at The Washington Monthly reviews How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough. We have to deal with the psychological and emotional impact of poverty and violence if we want the kids who struggle most to succeed.

First-Rate Temperaments

Liberals don’t want to admit it, and conservatives don’t want to pay for it, but building character—resilience, optimism, perseverance, focus—may be the best way to help poor students succeed.

By Thomas Toch

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
by Paul Tough
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 256 pp.

When Barack Obama campaigned for the White House four years ago, Democrats and their allies in education policy circles were embroiled in a fierce debate over how best to improve the educational performance of the millions of K-12 students living in poverty.

One camp, a coalition of researchers and educators formed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, argued in a manifesto called A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education that tackling poverty’s causes and consequences was the way to free disadvantaged students from the grip of educational failure. “Schools can ameliorate some of the impact of social and economic disadvantage on achievement,” the coalition wrote. But, it continued, “[t]here is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can substantially, consistently, and sustainably close these gaps.”

In sharp contrast, a second reform group, led by then school superintendents Joel Klein of New York and Michelle Rhee of Washington, D.C., and others drafted a competing reform manifesto under the auspices of an organization known as the Education Equity Project that stressed tougher accountability for schools and teachers, governance reforms for failing schools, and the expansion of charter schools. They largely refused to acknowledge that poverty rather than school quality was the root cause of the educational problems of disadvantaged kids, for fear that saying so would merely reinforce a long-standing belief among public educators that students unlucky enough to live in poverty shouldn’t be expected to achieve at high levels — and public educators shouldn’t be expected to get them there.

While one of the few reformers with feet in both camps, Chicago schools superintendent Arne Duncan, was named U.S. secretary of education, the Klein cabal won the policy fight. The Obama agenda has focused almost exclusively on systemic school reform to address the achievement deficits of disadvantaged students: standards, testing, teacher evaluations, and a continued, if different, focus on accountability. The administration’s one education-related poverty-fighting program, Duncan’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative, is a rounding error in the Department of Education’s budget.
Duncan was right to align himself early on with both Democratic factions. Good schools can, of course, make a difference in student achievement just by being good. And the inadequate nutrition, housing, language development, and early educational experiences that many impoverished students suffer are real barriers to learning.

But in the last several years a new body of neuroscientific and psychological research has made its way to the surface of public discourse that suggests that the most severe consequences of poverty on learning are psychological and behavioral rather than cognitive. The lack of early exposure to vocabulary and other cognitive deficits that school reformers have stressed are likely no more problematic, the research suggests, than the psychological impact of growing up in poverty. Poverty matters, the new work confirms, but we’ve been trying to address it in the wrong way.

Former New York Times Magazine editor Paul Tough brings this new science of adversity to general audiences in How Students Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, an engaging book that casts the school reform debate in a provocative new light. In his first book, about the antipoverty work of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Tough stressed the importance of early cognitive development in bridging the achievement gap between poor and more affluent students. In How Students Succeed, he introduces us to a wide-ranging cast of characters—economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists among them — whose work yields a compelling new picture of the intersection of poverty and education.

There’s James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, who found in the late 1990s that students who earned high school diplomas through the General Educational Development program, widely known as the GED, had the same future prospects as high school dropouts, a discovery that led him to conclude that there were qualities beyond courses and grades that made a big difference in students’ success. His inclinations were confirmed when he dug into the findings of the famous Perry Preschool Project. In the early days of the federal War on Poverty in the 1960s, researchers provided three- and four-year-olds from impoverished Ypsilanti, Michigan, with enriched preschooling, and then compared their life trajectories over several decades with those of Ypsilanti peers who had not received any early childhood education.

The cognitive advantages of being in the Perry program faded after a couple of years. Test scores between the two groups evened out, and the program was considered something of a failure. But Heckman and others discovered that years later the Perry preschoolers were living much better lives, including earning more and staying out of trouble with the law. And because under the Perry program teachers systematically reported on a range of students’ behavioral and social skills, Heckman was able to learn that students’ success later in life was predicted not by their IQs but by the noncognitive skills like curiosity and self-control that the Perry program had imparted.

Tough presents striking research from neuroendocrinology and other fields revealing that childhood psychological traumas — from physical and sexual abuse to physical and emotional neglect, divorce, parental incarceration, and addiction, things found more often (though by no means exclusively) in impoverished families — overwhelm developing bodies’ and minds’ ability to manage the stress of events, resulting in “all kinds of serious and long-lasting negative effects, physical, psychological, and neurological.”

There’s a direct link between the volume of such trauma and rates of heart disease, cancer, alcoholism, smoking, drug use, attempted suicide — and schooling problems. As Tough writes, Children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointment, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their yearperformance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses [caused in part by disrupted brain chemistry] and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet.

In particular, such stressors compromise the higher order thinking skills that allow students to sort out complex and seemingly contradictory information such as when the letter C is pronounced like K (what psychologists call “executive functioning”), and their ability to keep a lot of information in their heads at once, a skill known as “working memory” that’s crucial to success in school, college, and work.

The good news, Tough reports, is that studies reveal that the destructive stressors of poverty can be countered. Close, nurturing relationships with parents or other caregivers, he writes, have been shown to engender resilience in children that insulates them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment. “This message can sound a bit warm and fuzzy,” Tough says, “but it is rooted in [the] cold, hard science” of neurological and behavioral research, though such nurturing is often in short supply in broken, impoverished homes (and even in many intact households and communities).

As important, Tough contends, is research demonstrating that resilience, optimism, perseverance, focus, and the other noncognitive skills that Heckman and others have found to be so important to success in school and beyond are malleable—they can be taught, practiced, learned, and improved, even into adulthood. Tough points to the work of Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author of Learned Optimism, and Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, whose research has demonstrated that students taught to believe that people can grow intellectually earn higher grades than those who sense that intelligence is fixed. This commitment to the possibility of improvement, Seligman, Dweck, and others contend, invests students with the ability to persevere, rebound from setbacks, and overcome fears.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth, a protege of Seligman’s, has done a range of studies—on college students with low SAT scores, West Point plebes, and national spelling bee contestants, among others—and has found that a determined response to setbacks, an ability to focus on a task, and other noncognitive character strengths are highly predictive of success, much more so than IQ scores.

That’s why some of the schools in the highly regarded KIPP charter school network have added the teaching of such skills to their curricula. And they’ve coupled their traditional academic report cards with ”character report cards” developed by KIPP cofounder Dave Levin, Duckworth, and others. Concerned about their students’ inability to make it through high school and college even though they’re prepared academically, they grade students on self-control, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, grit, zest, and social intelligence. Other experts add conscientiousness, perseverance, work habits, time management, and an ability to seek out help to the list of key nonacademic ingredients of success in school and beyond. Students from impoverished backgrounds need such skills in larger doses, Tough argues, because they often lack the support systems available to more affluent students.

To Tough, the logic of the importance of noncognitive qualities to students’ futures is clear: we need to rethink our solutions to the academic plight of impoverished students. The studies of Dweck, Duckworth, and others support conservative claims that individual character should be an important part of policy discussions about poverty. “There is no anti-poverty tool that we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable that character strengths,” Tough writes, a claim that won’t be easy for liberals to stomach.

But, Tough adds, the contributions of character traits to students’ success goes a long way toward refuting conservative “cognitive determinists” like Charles Murray, who claim that success is mainly a function of IQ and that education is largely about sorting people and giving the brightest the chance to take full advantage of their potential.

The research that Tough explores also undercuts claims by Klein, Rhee, and other signers of the Education Equity Project manifesto that we can get impoverished students where they need to be educationally through higher standards, stronger teachers, and other academic reforms alone.

What we need to add to the reform equation, Tough argues, is a system of supports for children struggling with the effects of the trauma and stress of poverty. He urges the creation of pediatric wellness centers and classes that help impoverished parents build the emotional bonds with their young children that are so important to the development of children’s neurological and psychological defenses against poverty’s ravages. He supports KIPP’s efforts to engender resilience, persistence, and other character strengths in its students, both in school and then beyond through support programs like KIPP Through College. Work by David Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin and others have shown that even modest interventions, like teachers writing encouraging notes on student’ essays, motivate children to persevere academically.

Above all, Tough makes a compelling case for giving poverty greater prominence in the education policy debate. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has talked mostly about school choice and states’ rights in education, playing to conservatives and Catholics, as every GOP candidate since Ronald Reagan has done. But the new science of adversity could be the basis of a compelling reform agenda in a second Obama term—one that merges the competing progressive agendas of the last presidential election cycle.

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If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

Steven Johnson’s New Book - Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age

The TED Blog has posted a review of Steven Johnson's new book, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age. They have also included three of his TED Talks. Johnson appears to be arguing for the emergence of a new political worldview - "influenced by the success and interconnectedness of the Internet, but not dependent on high-tech solutions" - that will usher in an end to the tired old thinking of the liberal and conservative categories.

Here is the publisher's promotional text for the book:

Combining the deft social analysis of Where Good Ideas Come From with the optimistic arguments of Everything Bad Is Good For You, New York Times bestselling author Steven Johnson’s Future Perfect makes the case that a new model of political change is on the rise, transforming everything from local governments to classrooms, from protest movements to health care. Johnson paints a compelling portrait of this new political worldview -- influenced by the success and interconnectedness of the Internet, but not dependent on high-tech solutions -- that breaks with the conventional categories of liberal or conservative thinking.

With his acclaimed gift for multi-disciplinary storytelling and big ideas, Johnson explores this new vision of progress through a series of fascinating narratives: from the “miracle on the Hudson” to the planning of the French railway system; from the battle against malnutrition in Vietnam to a mysterious outbreak of strange smells in downtown Manhattan; from underground music video artists to the invention of the Internet itself.

At a time when the conventional wisdom holds that the political system is hopelessly gridlocked with old ideas, Future Perfect makes the timely and inspiring case that progress is still possible, and that new solutions are on the rise. This is a hopeful, affirmative outlook for the future, from one of the most brilliant and inspiring visionaries of contemporary culture.

Seems to be getting positive reviews so far.

On our reading list: Steven Johnson’s book Future Perfect

Steven Johnson’s new book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age, tackles subjects ranging from underground music video makers to New York’s 311 telephone service to the planning of the French railway system to Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger and the “miracle on the Hudson.” His point? That new solutions to old problems are not only possible, but are on the rise.

Initial reviews for this new tome appear very positive. Publishers Weekly writes, “In the future, progress will not arise primarily out of government directives or policies but out of peer networks. A peer network builds tools that lets a network of neighbors identify problems or unmet needs in a community, while other networks propose and fund solutions to those problems … Stimulating and challenging, Johnson’s thought-provoking ideas steer us steadily into the future.”

Brainpickings.org calls the book “an absorbing, provocative, and unapologetically optimistic vision for the society we have the capacity to build if we use the remarkable tools of our age intelligently and wisely.” And Kirkus Reviews describes the book as a “thought-provoking, hope-inspiring manifesto.”

After the jump, watch three TEDTalks from Johnson.

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from
While great thinkers often say that they had a light bulb-over-the-head moment, Johnson debunks that mythology, showing that innovations happen within a network of knowledge and that there are patterns underlying idea creation.

* * * * * * *

Steven Johnson on the Web as a City
The internet is not a completely new structure. It is built by many, controlled by no one, and deeply interconnected while also functioning as independent parts — in other words, the internet has a lot in common with the structure of a city. In this talk, Johnson ruminates on both the power and fear that happen with density, both online and in our cities.

* * * * * * *

Steven Johnson tours the Ghost Map
What is the Ghost Map, you ask? It’s the charting of how sickness traveled during the cholera outbreak of London in 1854. In this talk, Johnson gives an overview of how the outbreak taught the importance of public health and influenced what our cities look like today.

The Optimism Bias: An Interview with Tali Sharot

This interview with Tali Sharot comes from the blog for Being Human 2012, a one-day conference this spring in San Francisco - and they lifted it from The Guardian UK. The book was released last summer in the U.S. as The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

The optimism bias: reasons to be cheerful

Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Saturday 31 December 2011

Tali Sharot: 'There’s a saying that you have expect the gold in order to get the silver.' Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

What exactly is the optimism bias?

The Optimism Bias: Why we're wired to look on the bright side
by Tali Sharot

Expecting the future to be slightly better than it ends up being. People tend to overestimate positive events – having a long-lasting relationship, or a certain salary, professional success – and underestimate the likelihood of negative events such as cancer, being in an accident, getting divorced. So it's this difference between your expectations and the outcome, where the former are slightly better than the latter.

How did you stumble across it?
I was looking at whether the neural mechanisms involved in remembering the past are involved in imagining the future. My work on memory is mostly about traumatic negative events, so I was interested in imagining negative traumatic events, but had to compare that with people just imagining everyday boring events. But when I asked people to imagine boring events, they usually imagined some kind of magnificent scenario, which I found very surprising.

Were you so surprised because you're actually a pessimist? You hadn't expected such surprising results.
Not at all. And you might say I was optimistic because I was looking for something specific. It wasn't because I was or am a pessimist. But neither do I think people can classify themselves accurately as pessimistic or optimistic.

How optimistic would you say you are?
I don't think people can know their own level of optimism. The only way to do it is to be tested; I know all of these experiments so I can't test myself. My guess is I would probably be average. That's the best statistical guess you can always make, right? The average person is mildly optimistic; 80% of the population will be on the optimistic side.

In some countries – for example, Britain –it is more culturally acceptable to be pessimistic. In the US, being optimistic is considered a good thing, so I suspect people there would usually say they are optimistic; here, people might say not. But there is no actual difference.

People who are pessimists actually seem to have a more realistic vision of the future, but this does them no good.
In general, you have to have positive expectation to reach your goals.

Does that mean Olympic athletes are victims of false cognitive biases? They can't all win gold, but they have to believe they can to propel them through years of training.
I don't know if athletes are more optimistic – maybe because you can say that about many professions. Look at mine. People always think that their next paper will be the one that changes everything. But they can't all be. And I actually encourage my students to think like that because it could be true and it motivates them to do things.

You give the example of the law students who are told there is a divorce rate of 50% but still believe their relationships will last for ever. Has it made you take a more realistic view of human relationships?
Yes, I suspect I do.

Does that mean you are less of a romantic than you were before?
Possibly. But it may be because I am older.

But in the book you say that being older doesn't necessarily make you wiser.
That's true, though research shows that happiness goes down to middle age, then starts going back up. So when you get to your 70s and 80s, you seem to be in quite a good place. We are looking at the optimism bias across the lifespan. It seems like there is not much difference but there hasn't been a very good investigation.

You talk about the introspection illusion. It seems that the harder you try to think about yourself, the less self-knowledge you seem to accrue.
It's not the harder you try, but that you end up attending to the wrong kind of things, not those that will matter. I give an example where people try to decide between two paintings to put on the wall. They try to think about which one will make them happier, but attend to elements which are not actually important for an emotional reaction.

Why are we are so bad at predicting what will make us happy?
First, because when we think about the future we rely on our memories – and they are biased as well. So we don't remember everything and don't remember everything accurately. Emotion changes how we remember things and that is really where I started my research, looking at memories from 9/11, which are vivid but not necessarily accurate. If you try to predict how you are going to feel on your next vacation, for example, what you remember from your previous vacations are the highlights so you don't remember all of the boring bits.

Second, we focus on specific elements rather than look at the whole. So you think how you are going to feel when you are sitting on the beach but not how you are going to feel while getting there.

You say that the financial crisis in 2008 is essentially a result of optimism bias.
Yes. It's a simple example, where most people, from individuals to financial analysts to government officials, all thought that the market would go up and up and up and ignored evidence to the contrary. Research we have done lately shows that people take into account more about information that indicates things will be positive in the future.

You studied at Tel Aviv University. Do you think that Israel is an example of a nation with an optimism bias?
I definitely think Israelis are. I make the point that a lot of times in very difficult circumstances people are actually more optimistic. Such as in the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Depression in the 1930s, because in those instances you need it even more. And I think that's quite often true of Israel.

You seem to say we are all engaged in making predictions, but the only people who seem to be any good at it are the ones who are a bit depressed.
It's not they are good at it, just that their prediction is more like the outcome.

So they're more accurate at it?
They are more accurate at predicting, but also their prediction is affecting the outcome so there's a circular thing.

Does this mean fortune favours the deluded?
Definitely. It's not only when you predict the future, it's also when you think about yourself. Most people have a positive illusion about themselves. It doesn't mean we think we are extremely good-looking and intelligent, but we think we're a little bit more than what some objective measure would show. It's good that we have this bias. It keeps us happier.

One of the most wonderful tricks you talk about is how we believe we've always made the best choice.
That's true. Depressed individuals don't do that, so they ruminate. One of the symptoms of depression is ruminating. People go back and say: "Why did I do that? I could have done this" rather than say: "This was the best decision at the time" and move on. It's the same with decisions. I often tell people who are having problems making a decision: "You know, it doesn't matter what you choose. You're probably going to think it's the right decision."

What are you researching next?
We're looking at altering optimism using biological measures and ways to try and enhance or reduce it.

Time Magazine: The Optimism Bias by Tali Sharot

Interesting . . . . This article is based on Tali Sharot's new book, The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain (June 14, 2011, release date).

The Optimism Bias

By Tali Sharot Saturday, May 28, 2011

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more).

The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as the optimism bias. It abides in every race, region and socioeconomic bracket. Schoolchildren playing when-I-grow-up are rampant optimists, but so are grownups: a 2005 study found that adults over 60 are just as likely to see the glass half full as young adults.

You might expect optimism to erode under the tide of news about violent conflicts, high unemployment, tornadoes and floods and all the threats and failures that shape human life. Collectively we can grow pessimistic — about the direction of our country or the ability of our leaders to improve education and reduce crime. But private optimism, about our personal future, remains incredibly resilient. A survey conducted in 2007 found that while 70% thought families in general were less successful than in their parents' day, 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future of their own family.

(See "The Case for Optimism" in TIME's special: 10 Ideas That Will Change the World.)

Overly positive assumptions can lead to disastrous miscalculations — make us less likely to get health checkups, apply sunscreen or open a savings account, and more likely to bet the farm on a bad investment. But the bias also protects and inspires us: it keeps us moving forward rather than to the nearest high-rise ledge. Without optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes and we might all be cave dwellers, still huddled together and dreaming of light and heat.

To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities — better ones — and we need to believe that we can achieve them. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals. Optimists in general work longer hours and tend to earn more. Economists at Duke University found that optimists even save more. And although they are not less likely to divorce, they are more likely to remarry — an act that is, as Samuel Johnson wrote, the triumph of hope over experience.

(See if the global "happiness" index will ever beat out the GDP.)

Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health. Researchers studying heart-disease patients found that optimists were more likely than nonoptimistic patients to take vitamins, eat low-fat diets and exercise, thereby reducing their overall coronary risk. A study of cancer patients revealed that pessimistic patients under the age of 60 were more likely to die within eight months than nonpessimistic patients of the same initial health, status and age.

In fact, a growing body of scientific evidence points to the conclusion that optimism may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain. The science of optimism, once scorned as an intellectually suspect province of pep rallies and smiley faces, is opening a new window on the workings of human consciousness. What it shows could fuel a revolution in psychology, as the field comes to grips with accumulating evidence that our brains aren't just stamped by the past. They are constantly being shaped by the future.

See TIME's special report "How to Live 100 Years."

Hardwired for Hope?
I would have liked to tell you that my work on optimism grew out of a keen interest in the positive side of human nature. The reality is that I stumbled onto the brain's innate optimism by accident. After living through Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City, I had set out to investigate people's memories of the terrorist attacks. I was intrigued by the fact that people felt their memories were as accurate as a videotape, while often they were filled with errors. A survey conducted around the country showed that 11 months after the attacks, individuals' recollections of their experience that day were consistent with their initial accounts (given in September 2011) only 63% of the time. They were also poor at remembering details of the event, such as the names of the airline carriers. Where did these mistakes in memory come from?

Scientists who study memory proposed an intriguing answer: memories are susceptible to inaccuracies partly because the neural system responsible for remembering episodes from our past might not have evolved for memory alone. Rather, the core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future — to enable us to prepare for what has yet to come. The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events, the researchers claimed. It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.

(See why happiness isn't always good.)

To test this, I decided to record the brain activity of volunteers while they imagined future events — not events on the scale of 9/11, but events in their everyday lives — and compare those results with the pattern I observed when the same individuals recalled past events. But something unexpected occurred. Once people started imagining the future, even the most banal life events seemed to take a dramatic turn for the better. Mundane scenes brightened with upbeat details as if polished by a Hollywood script doctor. You might think that imagining a future haircut would be pretty dull. Not at all. Here is what one of my participants pictured: "I was getting my hair cut to donate to Locks of Love [a charity that fashions wigs for young cancer patients]. It had taken me years to grow it out, and my friends were all there to help celebrate. We went to my favorite hair place in Brooklyn and then went to lunch at our favorite restaurant."

I asked another participant to imagine a plane ride. "I imagined the takeoff — my favorite! — and then the eight-hour-long nap in between and then finally landing in Krakow and clapping for the pilot for providing the safe voyage," she responded. No tarmac delays, no screaming babies. The world, only a year or two into the future, was a wonderful place to live in.

If all our participants insisted on thinking positively when it came to what lay in store for them personally, what does that tell us about how our brains are wired? Is the human tendency for optimism a consequence of the architecture of our brains?

(See the new science of happiness.)

The Human Time Machine
To think positively about our prospects, we must first be able to imagine ourselves in the future. Optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one's mind. Although most of us take this ability for granted, our capacity to envision a different time and place is in fact critical to our survival.

It is easy to see why cognitive time travel was naturally selected for over the course of evolution. It allows us to plan ahead, to save food and resources for times of scarcity and to endure hard work in anticipation of a future reward. It also lets us forecast how our current behavior may influence future generations. If we were not able to picture the world in a hundred years or more, would we be concerned with global warming? Would we attempt to live healthily? Would we have children?

While mental time travel has clear survival advantages, conscious foresight came to humans at an enormous price — the understanding that somewhere in the future, death awaits. Ajit Varki, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the awareness of mortality on its own would have led evolution to a dead end. The despair would have interfered with our daily function, bringing the activities needed for survival to a stop. The only way conscious mental time travel could have arisen over the course of evolution is if it emerged together with irrational optimism. Knowledge of death had to emerge side by side with the persistent ability to picture a bright future.

See the world's most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.

The capacity to envision the future relies partly on the hippocampus, a brain structure that is crucial to memory. Patients with damage to their hippocampus are unable to recollect the past, but they are also unable to construct detailed images of future scenarios. They appear to be stuck in time. The rest of us constantly move back and forth in time; we might think of a conversation we had with our spouse yesterday and then immediately of our dinner plans for later tonight.

But the brain doesn't travel in time in a random fashion. It tends to engage in specific types of thoughts. We consider how well our kids will do in life, how we will obtain that sought-after job, afford that house on the hill and find perfect love. We imagine our team winning the crucial game, look forward to an enjoyable night on the town or picture a winning streak at the blackjack table. We also worry about losing loved ones, failing at our job or dying in a terrible plane crash — but research shows that most of us spend less time mulling over negative outcomes than we do over positive ones. When we do contemplate defeat and heartache, we tend to focus on how these can be avoided.

(See 20 ways to get and stay happy.)

Findings from a study I conducted a few years ago with prominent neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps suggest that directing our thoughts of the future toward the positive is a result of our frontal cortex's communicating with subcortical regions deep in our brain. The frontal cortex, a large area behind the forehead, is the most recently evolved part of the brain. It is larger in humans than in other primates and is critical for many complex human functions such as language and goal setting.

Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, we recorded brain activity in volunteers as they imagined specific events that might occur to them in the future. Some of the events that I asked them to imagine were desirable (a great date or winning a large sum of money), and some were undesirable (losing a wallet, ending a romantic relationship). The volunteers reported that their images of sought-after events were richer and more vivid than those of unwanted events.

This matched the enhanced activity we observed in two critical regions of the brain: the amygdala, a small structure deep in the brain that is central to the processing of emotion, and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), an area of the frontal cortex that modulates emotion and motivation. The rACC acts like a traffic conductor, enhancing the flow of positive emotions and associations. The more optimistic a person was, the higher the activity in these regions was while imagining positive future events (relative to negative ones) and the stronger the connectivity between the two structures.

(See "Do We need $75,000 a Year to Be Happy?")

The findings were particularly fascinating because these precise regions — the amygdala and the rACC — show abnormal activity in depressed individuals. While healthy people expect the future to be slightly better than it ends up being, people with severe depression tend to be pessimistically biased: they expect things to be worse than they end up being. People with mild depression are relatively accurate when predicting future events. They see the world as it is. In other words, in the absence of a neural mechanism that generates unrealistic optimism, it is possible all humans would be mildly depressed.

Can Optimism Change Reality?
The problem with pessimistic expectations, such as those of the clinically depressed, is that they have the power to alter the future; negative expectations shape outcomes in a negative way. How do expectations change reality?

See how negative thinking affects your health.

To answer this question, my colleague, cognitive neuroscientist Sara Bengtsson, devised an experiment in which she manipulated positive and negative expectations of students while their brains were scanned and tested their performance on cognitive tasks. To induce expectations of success, she primed college students with words such as smart, intelligent and clever just before asking them to perform a test. To induce expectations of failure, she primed them with words like stupid and ignorant. The students performed better after being primed with an affirmative message.

Examining the brain-imaging data, Bengtsson found that the students' brains responded differently to the mistakes they made depending on whether they were primed with the word clever or the word stupid. When the mistake followed positive words, she observed enhanced activity in the anterior medial part of the prefrontal cortex (a region that is involved in self-reflection and recollection). However, when the participants were primed with the word stupid, there was no heightened activity after a wrong answer. It appears that after being primed with the word stupid, the brain expected to do poorly and did not show signs of surprise or conflict when it made an error.

(See how playing the part of an optimist can help your health.)

A brain that doesn't expect good results lacks a signal telling it, "Take notice — wrong answer!" These brains will fail to learn from their mistakes and are less likely to improve over time. Expectations become self-fulfilling by altering our performance and actions, which ultimately affects what happens in the future. Often, however, expectations simply transform the way we perceive the world without altering reality itself. Let me give you an example. While writing these lines, my friend calls. He is at Heathrow Airport waiting to get on a plane to Austria for a skiing holiday. His plane has been delayed for three hours already, because of snowstorms at his destination. "I guess this is both a good and bad thing," he says. Waiting at the airport is not pleasant, but he quickly concludes that snow today means better skiing conditions tomorrow. His brain works to match the unexpected misfortune of being stuck at the airport to its eager anticipation of a fun getaway.

A canceled flight is hardly tragic, but even when the incidents that befall us are the type of horrific events we never expected to encounter, we automatically seek evidence confirming that our misfortune is a blessing in disguise. No, we did not anticipate losing our job, being ill or getting a divorce, but when these incidents occur, we search for the upside. These experiences mature us, we think. They may lead to more fulfilling jobs and stable relationships in the future. Interpreting a misfortune in this way allows us to conclude that our sunny expectations were correct after all — things did work out for the best.

Silver Linings
How do we find the silver lining in storm clouds? To answer that, my colleagues — renowned neuroscientist Ray Dolan and neurologist Tamara Shiner — and I instructed volunteers in the fMRI scanner to visualize a range of medical conditions, from broken bones to Alzheimer's, and rate how bad they imagined these conditions to be. Then we asked them: If you had to endure one of the following, which would you rather have — a broken leg or a broken arm? Heartburn or asthma? Finally, they rated all the conditions again. Minutes after choosing one particular illness out of many, the volunteers suddenly found that the chosen illness was less intimidating. A broken leg, for example, may have been thought of as "terrible" before choosing it over some other malady. However, after choosing it, the subject would find a silver lining: "With a broken leg, I will be able to lie in bed watching TV, guilt-free."

(See how self-help can stop negative thoughts.)

In our study, we also found that people perceived adverse events more positively if they had experienced them in the past. Recording brain activity while these reappraisals took place revealed that highlighting the positive within the negative involves, once again, a tête-à-tête between the frontal cortex and subcortical regions processing emotional value. While contemplating a mishap, like a broken leg, activity in the rACC modulated signals in a region called the striatum that conveyed the good and bad of the event in question — biasing activity in a positive direction.

It seems that our brain possesses the philosopher's stone that enables us to turn lead into gold and helps us bounce back to normal levels of well-being. It is wired to place high value on the events we encounter and put faith in its own decisions. This is true not only when forced to choose between two adverse options (such as selecting between two courses of medical treatment) but also when we are selecting between desirable alternatives. Imagine you need to pick between two equally attractive job offers. Making a decision may be a tiring, difficult ordeal, but once you make up your mind, something miraculous happens. Suddenly — if you are like most people — you view the chosen offer as better than you did before and conclude that the other option was not that great after all. According to social psychologist Leon Festinger, we re-evaluate the options postchoice to reduce the tension that arises from making a difficult decision between equally desirable options.

See how to prevent illness at any age.

In a brain-imaging study I conducted with Ray Dolan and Benedetto De Martino in 2009, we asked subjects to imagine going on vacation to 80 different destinations and rate how happy they thought they would be in each place. We then asked them to select one destination from two choices that they had rated exactly the same. Would you choose Paris over Brazil? Finally, we asked them to imagine and rate all the destinations again. Seconds after picking between two destinations, people rated their selected destination higher than before and rated the discarded choice lower than before.

The brain-imaging data revealed that these changes were happening in the caudate nucleus, a cluster of nerve cells that is part of the striatum. The caudate has been shown to process rewards and signal their expectation. If we believe we are about to be given a paycheck or eat a scrumptious chocolate cake, the caudate acts as an announcer broadcasting to other parts of the brain, "Be ready for something good." After we receive the reward, the value is quickly updated. If there is a bonus in the paycheck, this higher value will be reflected in striatal activity. If the cake is disappointing, the decreased value will be tracked so that next time our expectations will be lower.

In our experiment, after a decision was made between two destinations, the caudate nucleus rapidly updated its signal. Before choosing, it might signal "thinking of something great" while imagining both Greece and Thailand. But after choosing Greece, it now broadcast "thinking of something remarkable!" for Greece and merely "thinking of something good" for Thailand.

(See pictures of couples in love.)

True, sometimes we regret our decisions; our choices can turn out to be disappointing. But on balance, when you make a decision — even if it is a hypothetical choice — you will value it more and expect it to bring you pleasure.

This affirmation of our decisions helps us derive heightened pleasure from choices that might actually be neutral. Without this, our lives might well be filled with second-guessing. Have we done the right thing? Should we change our mind? We would find ourselves stuck, overcome by indecision and unable to move forward.

The Puzzle of Optimism
While the past few years have seen important advances in the neuroscience of optimism, one enduring puzzle remained. How is it that people maintain this rosy bias even when information challenging our upbeat forecasts is so readily available? Only recently have we been able to decipher this mystery, by scanning the brains of people as they process both positive and negative information about the future. The findings are striking: when people learn, their neurons faithfully encode desirable information that can enhance optimism but fail at incorporating unexpectedly undesirable information. When we hear a success story like Mark Zuckerberg's, our brains take note of the possibility that we too may become immensely rich one day. But hearing that the odds of divorce are almost 1 in 2 tends not to make us think that our own marriages may be destined to fail. (See "A Primer for Pessimists.")

Why would our brains be wired in this way? It is tempting to speculate that optimism was selected by evolution precisely because, on balance, positive expectations enhance the odds of survival. Research findings that optimists live longer and are healthier, plus the fact that most humans display optimistic biases — and emerging data that optimism is linked to specific genes — all strongly support this hypothesis. Yet optimism is also irrational and can lead to unwanted outcomes. The question then is, How can we remain hopeful — benefiting from the fruits of optimism — while at the same time guarding ourselves from its pitfalls?

I believe knowledge is key. We are not born with an innate understanding of our biases. The brain's illusions have to be identified by careful scientific observation and controlled experiments and then communicated to the rest of us. Once we are made aware of our optimistic illusions, we can act to protect ourselves. The good news is that awareness rarely shatters the illusion. The glass remains half full. It is possible, then, to strike a balance, to believe we will stay healthy, but get medical insurance anyway; to be certain the sun will shine, but grab an umbrella on our way out — just in case.

Adapted from The Optimism Bias, by Tali Sharot. Copyright © 2011 Tali Sharot. Reprinted with permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved

Sharot is a research fellow at University College London's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging

See the perils of positive thinking.

Tags: Psychology, bias, optimism, positivity, brain, evolution, hard-wired, Time Magazine, The Optimism Bias, Tali Sharot, books, consciousness, the Irrationally Positive Brain, rational, irrational, perspectives, imagination, hope

Seeking a Cure for Optimism (On Barbara Ehrenreich)

I like positive thinking and I think people need feel that they are worthwhile human beings. However, when either of these is pasted over a negative sense of self-worth, or depression, or any number of other less-than-healthy feelings, they can much more harm than good.

Optimism is the natural outflow of a healthy system, but not too many are really healthy - so the seemingly positive culture of optimism that Barbara Ehrenreich is rejecting really is not so good, and she is doing us a favor in exposing it.

The author of the article also speaks to Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of the Positive Psychology movement, and he is not pleased with Ehrenreich at all. I think Seligman has done a great service for psychology in trying to offer a more hopeful look at human beings, but I also fear that those who are attempting to use his approach are simply throwing a fresh, pretty coat of paint on cracked walls and a shaky foundation.

We have known for years that depressed and anxious people tend to have a better grasp of reality than those who are not suffering those feelings. This has posed a paradox for treatment models, since it is also well-known that depressives have a very unrealistic self-concept. So they tend to have more realism about the outside world, and less realism about themselves.

On the other hand, I have clients who use "positive thinking" and "looking on the bright side" as ways to avoid their pain. I think this has become a common issue among "spiritual but not religious" type people. But that is just my assessment and I have not read the book yet to see where Ehrenreich comes down on why this is happening.

Seeking a Cure for Optimism

Susana Raab for The New York Times

The author Barbara Ehrenreich argues that positive thinking may actually do some harm.

ABBY ELLIN

Published: Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 5:12 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 5:12 a.m.

AMERICANS are an optimistic, can-do lot. We subscribe to the belief that we have a right to not just pursue happiness, but to be happy. No matter how grim the last year has been, no matter how rotten the economy or one’s own setbacks, people believe it can all change with the flip of the calendar: all you need do is look on the bright side.

Happiness is not just our birthright, it is a growth industry. Beyond the perpetually positive Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins and the thinking-makes-it-so gurus behind “The Secret,” the Internet offers many new programs for self-improvement. Happier.com was created in the fall with promises of “scientific solutions for real improvement.” LiveHappy, a $9.99 a month “mobile happiness boosting program,” is based on the book “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who says that activities like “envisioning your best possible self” are “scientifically shown” to make people happier.

Is any of this true? Can an optimistic attitude and a will to happiness lead to a better you in the new year?

Recently, a number of writers and researchers have questioned the notion that looking on the bright side — often through conscious effort — makes much of a difference. One of the most prominent skeptics is Barbara Ehrenreich, whose best-selling book “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” published in the fall, maintains that thinking positively does little good in the long run, and can, in fact, do harm.

“Happiness is great, joy is great, but positive thinking reduces the spontaneity of human interactions,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. “If everyone has that fixed social smile all the time, how do you know when anyone really likes you?”

A study published in the November-December issue of Australasian Science found that people in a negative mood are more critical of, and pay more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who are more likely to believe anything they are told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world,” Joseph P. Forgas, a professor of social psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote in the study.

Psychologists and others who try to study happiness scientifically often focus on the connection between positive thinking and better health. In the September 2007 issue of the journal Cancer, Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford University School of Medicine reported his efforts to replicate the findings of a 1989 study in which he had found that women with metastatic breast cancer who were assigned to a support group lived an average 18 months longer than those who did not get such support. But in his updated research, Dr. Spiegel found that although group therapy may help women cope with their illness better, positive thinking did not significantly prolong their lives.

Ms. Ehrenreich, who was urged to think positively after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer several years ago, was surprised by how many readers shared her visceral resistance to that mantra. She created a forum on her Web site for people to vent about positive thinking, and many have. “I get so many people saying ‘thank you,’ people who go back to work after their mother has died and are told, ‘What’s the matter?’ “ she said. Likewise, there are “corporate victims who have been critics or driven out of jobs for being ‘too negative.’ “

Such criticism has annoyed those in the burgeoning academic field of positive psychology, which traces to 1998 when the president of the American Psychological Association at the time, Martin Seligman, sought out good scientific research on positive emotion. He found hundreds of studies showing the health benefits of thinking positively. While it is impossible to change one’s inherent temperament, Dr. Seligman said, “it’s certain you can change pessimism into optimism in a lasting way.”

Dr. Seligman, who now runs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania and makes a rather unflattering appearance in “Bright-Sided,” is not pleased with Ms. Ehrenreich’s book. In a posting on a positive psychology list serve, he accused “Barbara I Hate Hope Ehrenreich” of “cherry picking” studies to suit her purpose.

“Where Ehrenreich and I agree — we’re both trying to separate wheat from chaff,” he said in an interview. “We just differ on what we think is wheat and what we think is chaff.”

Many experts have come to question the connection between optimism and health. “Being optimistic is secondary to having health and resources,” said James C. Coyne, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who conducted a study on positive thinking and cancer and found no correlation between optimism and improved outcomes. “Ranges of cross-studies have found this,” he said.

“It’s easy to show an association between optimism and subsequent health,” he said, “but if you introduce appropriate statistical controls — if you take into account baseline health and material resources — then the effect largely goes away.”

Other experts are less definitive. Barbara L. Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been exploring the function of positive emotions since the early 1990s. Dr. Fredrickson, whose book “Positivity” was published this year, differentiates between positive thinking and positive emotion. “Positive thinking can sometimes lead to positive emotion, but it won’t always,” she said. “It’s like the difference between wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Life is Good’ and actually feeling deep in your bones grateful for your current circumstances.”

With that in mind, she cautions that the idea of “fake it till you make it” can actually be harmful to one’s health. “What my research shows is that those insincere positive emotions — telling yourself ‘I feel good’ when you don’t — is toxic and actually more harmful than negative emotions. We need to become more sophisticated about what is real and what is fake within people’s attempts to be positive.”

Ruth Rossoff, 79, of Philadelphia, said that she has felt tyrannized by the agents of positivity. In September, she said, her husband, who had been ill for some time and had realized he would never again live the kind of life he had been used to, decided he was ready to die. “After seeing all the people who mattered to him and discussing his decision with me and our adult children, he made his wishes known to the people caring for him in the hospital,” Ms. Rossoff said.

Then a doctor who was covering for her husband’s physician stopped by. “This young man came in and proceeded to tell him about his own mother’s miraculous recovery from some illness by sheer willpower and pushed him to try harder to get better,” Ms. Rossoff said. Her husband, energized, lived a few weeks longer. “I was livid,” Ms. Rossoff said. “My husband suffered a few extra weeks with the same end result by listening to the pep talk.”

As for Ms. Ehrenreich, she believes that negative thinking is just as delusional as unquestioned positive thinking. She hopes to see a day when corporate employees “walk out when the motivational speakers start talking,” she said. “It’s all about control and money.” Her goal? To encourage realism, “trying to see the world not colored by our wishes or fears, but by reality.”

Tags: Psychology, culture, optimism, Seeking a Cure for Optimism, Barbara Ehrenreich, Positivity, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Positive Psychology, Martin Seligman, Abby Ellin