Brain Imaging Shows We're Hardwired for Optimism

Humanity is a pretty optimistic species. In terms of our evolution, we’ve had to be. Humans leapt into tiny canoes and migrated across vast oceans, optimistic that they would find new land at the end of their journey. We’ve built enormous cities, flown experimental aircraft, and put people on the moon, all with incredible (some might even say unrealistic) optimism about the outcomes. Despite what may be portrayed in the media, or what may be commonly socially accepted, as a species, we’re a pretty optimistic group of organisms. However, recent studies by neuroscientists have revealed that we may actually be hardwired for maintaining a positive outlook.

A team of neuroscientists from England and Germany have long believed that the secret to the “It can’t happen to me” cognitive process lay somewhere in the error processing center of the frontal lobe. To study this, they used brain imaging technology in addition to a number of interviews. The interviews asked respondents to estimate their chances of experiencing 80 different negative life events; divorce, Alzheimer’s, infidelity, job loss, cancer, etc. When patients had answers, the researchers told them the actual percentage likelihood that they would experience these life-impacting events. After respondents had been informed of their statistical chances of experiencing something like cancer, researchers watched brain scans as respondents again estimated their chances.

Researchers found that when respondents were told that their actual chances of experiencing certain negative life events were slim, their answers tended to change drastically the second time around to reflect that. However, when respondents found that their statistical chances of experiencing those events were greater, their second estimate was almost always the same as the first estimate. Brain scans revealed that when things were better than expected, brain activity in the frontal corticies associated with error estimation spiked, but when things were worse than expected, error estimation activity was much weaker. In other words, when we make estimations or decisions where chances of success are high, we tend to weigh errors in judgement and problem-solving more than when we make decisions where chances of success are low. In those cases we tend to dismiss information that may be undesirable to reaching our goals or feeling optimistic about the outcomes.

Evolutionary biology would suggest that this may have been a necessarily hardwired aspect to our neuro-physiology; a survival mechanism that allowed early humans to take chances necessary to continue to develop and innovate. However, in modern man, researchers point to the danger in dismissing those undesirable errors. “Unrealistic assessment of financial risk is widely seen as contributing factor to the 2008 global economic collapse,” the authors of the study write, “Dismissing undesirable errors in estimation renders us peculiarly susceptible to view the future through rose-colored glasses.”