This optimism thing

For years I have been called a pessimist - always focussing on the negative and discounting the positive. I claim to be a realist - weighing the available information and acting according to that assessment but most people say 'nah!'. Now it finally turns out that optimists are optimistic because their brains filter out 'negative' information: which I assume means information our pre-rational brain regards as unhelpful in the survival and reproduction biz. See: BBC News.

Dr Chris Chambers, neuroscientist from the University of Cardiff, said: "It's very cool, a very elegant piece of work and fascinating.
"For me, this work highlights something that is becoming increasingly apparent in neuroscience, that a major part of brain function in decision-making is the testing of predictions against reality - in essence all people are 'scientists'.
"And despite how sophisticated these neural networks are, it is illuminating to see how the brain sometimes comes up with wrong and overly optimistic answers despite the evidence."
Optimism seem to be good for your health. A study on nearly 100,000 women showed a lower risk of heart disease and lower death rate in optimists.
But as Dr Sharot points out: "The negative aspect is that we underestimate risks."

While this is very helpful in explaining quite a lot of human behaviour which seems totally irrational (because it is) this is all a bit of a worry as well.

While our ancestors were evolving, always looking on the bright side of life might have helped them get through some pretty awful situations, like high infant mortality and high death rate generally, seasonal starvation and so on. But the world is different now (at the moment): it was recently suggested that we are now in the Anthropocene - the period of earth's history where the behaviour of our species actually changes the processes on the earth. So what we do counts big time, especially for our descendants.

If what we do follows from what we can think (some options having been weeded out by our optimistic brain before we even get to consciously consider them), then we may well be missing some important options. This is especially so when we consider that the human brain evolved to maximise our chances to stay alive and successfully reproduce - not to handle complex systems that interact with billions of other humans and the rest of the living world (and the atmoshpere and hydrospher for that matter as well).

The obvious points to be made are that all those optimists out there may be seriously underestimating some pretty serious risks, like their diet, the effectiveness of their political processes and social organisations, and just how bad things could get with climate change. How bad could it get? Pretty bad. How hard is it to get people to see these unpleasant things? Very hard. How long does it take to change people's minds and their systems? Too long.

Also, while our brain may test predictions against reality (or at least our previous experience of reality somewhat conditioned by our pre-existing tendancy to optimism), scientists have their work peer reviewed. Now that's a scary thought. What if climate scientists are optimists?