Optimism (OR: The Science Behind Believing That You Won't Die in a Fire)

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Hey there! As you may know, my little region of Southern California has been suffering the effects of a sprawling inferno for the past week or so. I'll admit, after days of non-stop live coverage of devastated homes and new blazes cresting hills and threatening nuclear facilities like a ticking time bomb, it's tough not to totally retreat into your own reality, windows drawn from the ashen air rattling your lungs and clogging your brain, and just sit down on othe floor watch marathons of Yo Gabba Gabba (a delightfully psychotropic Banana Splits-like show my little sister introduced me to the other day during my family's evacuation visit). But in situations like this, optimism is one hell of an asset -- knowing, just knowing your house won't burn down in a fire and that everything will rebuild and be all right makes days a whole lot easier to take.

It's easy to tell someone to just be optimistic, but everyone knows it's not quite as simple as that. Scientists, however, are cracking into the state of mind we call optimism and discovering that it's more of a state in your mind than anything, and (cue shock here) it seems to be in cohabitation with its evil twin.

Imagine receiving a big chunk of cash in the future. Or winning a prize. Chances are, such optimistic thoughts are coming from two places in the brain that play an important role in enabling people to, as the old song says, accentuate the positive, New York University scientists said on Wednesday.

Pinpointing the brain regions involved in optimism and positive thinking about the future, the researchers said, may also have shed light on what might be going wrong in people with depression.

Personally, I wouldn't call "imagining receiving a big chunk of cash in the future, or winning a prize" optimism so much as believing in luck and faeries, but maybe I'm just more cynical than I thought. Anyway, researchers hooked fifteen young adults up to highly fancy and sophisticated brain-tracking machinery, and asked them to imagine several scenarios from the future, running the gamut from winning a grand award to being dumped and attending a funeral. While envisioning the more optimistic episodes, the the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala of the subjects (way down in the established emotion centers of the brain) lit up like crazy. The researchers' monocles collectively popped upon realizing that these are the same brain areas that are known to control pessimism and depression, and then lots of thinking went on.

It had been unclear what was going wrong in these two regions that might contribute to depression. "But our data would suggest that one of the things they're doing is making it hard to think about things optimistically. Of course, one of the primary symptoms of depression is pessimism," [Elizabeth] Phelps [NYU professor/researcher of psychology and neural science] said.

So what we know now is that optimism is also controlled by emotions. In this vein, researchers noted problems controlling "optimism bias" in their subjects, where -- given neutral situations -- the subjects tended to build them up better than they were. We're just a chipper lot, we young adults.

The good thing about this research is that it has the potential to go a long way in more effectively treating depression. Perhaps one day we'll have a more perfect pill to cancel out the negative and accentuate the positive, attacking and enhancing the same site at once. It'll be a nice thing, I imagine (optimistically). Until then, I'll just be here on the floor, watching kids' shows with cameos by Biz Markie. It's the next best thing.


_DictionaryGirl_ wishes the kids' shows of her youth featured Biz Markie.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/geek/22539/Optimism-OR-The-Science-Behind-Believing-That-You-Wont-Die-in-a-Fire/