The Optimist's Brain (Redux)

From time to time I'm going to reprint older posts both to make life easier and to introduce this material to new readers (or remind old ones). This post is from October 23, 2011. I made a few edits for clarity. Enjoy — Dave

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People think fossil fuel energy makes the human world go round, but that's a mistaken view  

It's our delusional optimism, the obligatory Hope, that makes the world work, even when it's not working. Realists find it harder and harder to get out of bed—what's the point? More and more scientific research into human cognition is finding a perversive bias to see the glass as half-full even when the water's nearly gone. The latest finding came from University College London (UCL), as reported in the BBC's Brain 'rejects negative thoughts'.

A study, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests the brain is very good at processing good news about the future.

However, in some people, anything negative is practically ignored - with them retaining a positive world view.

The authors said optimism did have important health benefits.

Scientists at University College London said about 80% of people were optimists, even if they would not label themselves as such.

The details of the study are not important, for it's as if these researchers had re-discovered the wheel. Writing this blog requires me to sort through lots of potential source material about the economy, energy, the environment and other subjects. Unwarranted optimism is everywhere you look, despite massive evidence to the contrary. In fact, I was preparing a post along these lines when the UCL study surfaced. Their press release offers up some additional insights.

In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at UCL's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging show that people who are very optimistic about the outcome of events tend to learn only from information that reinforces their rose-tinted view of the world. This is related to ‘faulty’ function of their frontal lobes.

People’s predictions of the future are often unrealistically optimistic. A problem that has puzzled scientists for decades is why human optimism is so pervasive, when reality continuously confronts us with information that challenges these biased beliefs.

“Seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty can be a positive thing – it can lower stress and anxiety and be good for our health and well-being,” explains Dr Tali Sharot. “But it can also mean that we are less likely to take precautionary action, such as practising safe sex or saving for retirement. So why don’t we learn from cautionary information?”

Safe sex? Saving for retirement? What about learning from cautionary information that shows humans are radically altering the climate, destroying the oceans, and running out of easily exploitable oil? And that's just a partial list. I had prepared a semi-facetious diagram of The Optimist's Brain before I heard about this UCL study. Here it is in slightly modified form. This processing "model" first arose during discussions with my psychotherapist in the mid-1990s. Before that in the late 1980s, I got my first clue about what really goes on in Daniel Goleman's book Vital Lies, Simple Truths, subtitled The Psychology of Self-Deception, which contains a chapter called Awareness Is Not A Necessary Stop.

The optimist's brain "rejects" negative (pessimistic) thoughts, meaning these thoughts never enter awareness (red circled area). A pessimistic or otherwise unwelcome input enters The Unconscious (blue circled area) directly—this is always the case. There are three possible outcomes: 1) the input is filtered and ejected (discarded); 2) the input is buried (remains) in the unconscious, where it might do all sorts of mischief later; or 3) the input passes right through as though it had never existed. This last might be called the "neutrino theory" because neutrino particles are so minute that they pass through "solid matter" without actually colliding with anything, even on the atomic level. Unfortunately, the elegant "neutrino theory" is too parsimonious. Under this view, how would an optimist be able to distinguish between pessimistic inputs which must be disregarded and positive inputs which are retained and reach awareness?  Image source.

It is notable that the UCL researchers believe The Optimist's Brain suffers from "faulty" functioning in the frontal lobes. But if 80% of people are optimists, as the UCL scientists also claim—this would appear to be a a substantial underestimate—then the large majority of humans have "faulty" frontal lobes. If Nature gave us such frontal lobes—they must have had survival value a few million years ago and thereafter—it is apparent they have little adaptive value in our troubled modern world.

The more parsimonious explanation is that Nature designed us to be optimists of the type described here, and nothing has changed, and it's the brains of the much smaller minority of realists pessimists that are out of kilter with respect to "normal" human cognition.

I've ridiculed optimism and persistent positive bias a number of times on DOTE. For example, see The Astounding World Of The Future, The Eternal Optimist, or Our Fantastic Future, featuring Arthur C. Clarke. But my "favorite" optimist is The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley. In Ridley's (malfunctioning?) Big Brain, it surely must be a full-time job ignoring pessimistic (albeit realistic) inputs coming from everywhere everyday. In that spirit, I've included two short videos about "rational optimism" below.

Let's finish up with this remarkable statement from Dr. John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging—

“Being optimistic must clearly have some benefits, but is it always helpful? And why do some people have a less rosy outlook on life?

Understanding how some people always manage to remain optimistic could provide useful insights into happens when our brains do not function properly.”

The problem is that the Optimist's Brain is functioning properly. Our brains process information just the way Nature designed them to. The end result of all that evolution is unsatisfactory, to say the least. The results are so disappointing that John Williams believes our brains are not functioning properly. It certainly appears that way.

Perhaps the headline should read—

Scientists Demonstrate Humans Routinely Ignore Reality!

How about that for Front Page News?

 

 

Comments

[JohnWDB, MD]

Dave, I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion of this study. It could be that the brain is selectively attending to anything that is consistent with its preconceived ideas. Optimism could be influenced by teaching, temperament, and culture, and the brain could attend to evidence which confirms it. In that case, the study has only demonstrated confirmation bias or cognitive inertia. To say this proves the brain is naturally wired for optimism goes too far. People who experience trauma expect danger to be lurking around every corner. It's clearly their experience that influences how they think the world is and how the brain filters information. I'd wager they find different results in war-torn third-world countries.

We are wired for is to seek pleasure. Rewarding stimuli flood areas in our brains with dopamine. The expectation of reward can be almost as stimulating as the reward itself. Alcoholics salivate when they pass the glowing neon sign of a bar, for example. Optimism makes us feel good, and as such it sells. We are bombarded with messages that prosperity is to be expected. Progress and economic growth are forces of nature. Romantic movies almost exclusively have happy endings. Self-help books are almost universally based on one central idea -- the power of positive thinking. The Law of Attraction has become a religion. What you have, then, is a positive cultural feedback loop. People want to feel good. Optimistic messages make them feel good. They pay for optimistic messages, which cement optimistic cognitive schemas. Disseminators of optimistic messages produce more of them in exchange for increasing pay. Schemas are further cemented. People become more dependent on continued messages the more the world fails to jibe with the schemas. They clamor for more, and more is produced.

[Ben]

@JohnWDB, MD

Century of The Self. Episode One: Happiness Machines: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9167657690296627941

[Dave Cohen]

@John

That's a good comment, but I respectfully disagree with your conclusions. Optimism is independent of culture. Go anywhere in the world, you will always find the same cognitive bias, the same optimism. It should not surprise us that culture generally (and everywhere) reflects and reinforces this fundamental bias.

What must be explained is why there are "pessimists" (realists) who don't function in the normal way. These people are quite rare in the general population.

That is not to say that traumatic experience doesn't change the way people process information, and the way they "think" generally. It certainly does. The situation is obviously very complex.

No one ever got elected President by saying we're screwed, and there's nothing we can do about it :-)

-- Dave

[Gail]

Dave, I joke that some of us didn't get the denialist gene. You have probably read Reg Morrison's The Spirit in the Gene: Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature. I just came across it yesterday. Favorite quote so far: "Humans display only animal behavior. Watch the action without the sound track and this truth becomes obvious."

His website has a lot to say about overpopulation and peak oil: http://regmorrison.edublogs.org/files/2012/06/Population-4b-13by0yr.pdf

but in reference to your subject - the inability of what Henri le Chat Noir would simply describe as, We Cannot Escape Ourselves - here's an excerpt of the section called The Peacock's Effect:

Evolution’s great strength lies in the fact that even the most efficient and fecund species are available for culling. This universal vulnerability hinges on what might be called the Peacock Effect. In peacock society the male’s spectacular tail is a major reproductive asset, but only in the species’ birthplace—a forest. Should the forest disappear, the peacock’s cumbersome tail instantly doubles as a gaudy advertisement for fast food in the eyes of any passing predator.

All species possesses adaptive specialisations that have enabled them to survive and reproduce within the habitat that nurtured their specialisation. But change the environment, and such specialisations become handicaps—the more extreme the specialisation, the more lethal the handicap. In other words, each species has its own personal peacock tail, even that ‘paragon of animals’, Homo sapiens.

In an evolutionary sense our peacock tail is just as spectacular as the bird’s, although you wouldn’t know it to look at us since it is entirely intangible and very well concealed, residing as it does in the three billion base pairs of our DNA. It is an emergent behavior, produced, it seems, by a host of genes that interact according to environmental circumstances.

Our peacock tail is our inherently mystical nature. It is expressed in our peculiar capacity to believe implicitly in the patently unbelievable, and to attribute unnatural power or mystical significance to anything that either contributes to, or threatens, our genetic survival—thereby revealing its true origin. Mysticism’s universality and its umbilical links to DNA’s primal imperatives, ‘survive and reproduce’, clearly identify it as a genetic artefact.

Whether our mysticism relies on a belief in supernatural forces such as gods, angels, witchcraft, astrology and intergalactic aliens, or whether we believe in luck, tea leaves, memes or market forces, the precise nature of the belief is of little consequence to our genes. The only thing that matters to them is the quality and strength of the tribal passion that those beliefs generate. Darwinian selection does the rest. Two million years of hunter-gatherer hardship has honed human mysticism into a weapon of unparalleled power—an evolutionary Excalibur …

The Rational Delusion

Reproduction is the pivotal feature of all biological existence, and the complex machinery that drives our sexual urges and regulates our daily behaviour is embedded throughout our DNA. It ensures that this crucial machinery lies beyond the reach of our new and incompetent rational cortex. Our genes insert their directives into human behaviour under the cloak of morality and culture, and reinforce those directives by powerful tides of emotion. This ensures that our genes are not handicapped by ‘rational behaviour’ when speedy genetic responses are required for genetic survival.

That is why, under the spell of our genetically programmed ‘spirituality’, we cannot help falling in love, seeking sexual gratification, nurturing our children, forging tribal bonds, worshipping our gods, suspecting strangers, uniting against common enemies, and on occasions, laying down our lives for family, friends or tribe. The gaudy tides of emotion that protect and reinforce these patterns of behaviour ensure that we remain entirely unaware that these behaviours are genetically directed. In a metaphorical sense, no gene could ask for more.

Such crucially important genetic machinery has been carefully shaped by rigid Darwinian selection during the past five million years and it brooks no ‘intellectual’ inteference. Masked by an impenetrable smokescreen of morality and culture, our DNA is now able to provide a highly flexible ‘volume-control’ for our fecundity, a control that responds quickly to environmental cues, and whose genetic origins remain concealed from us ... *

Emotion: The Battle-Cry of Genes

The appearance of emotion signals that our genes have been stung into action by some external threat, explicit or implied. From that moment on, any other judgements made by our rational cortex may be overridden or remoulded in favour of ancient genetic behaviour that has survived in human genomes for a million years or more. The switching device is known as the “Suspension of Disbelief”.

The only real problem arises when there is a major discord between behaviour that might help an individual’s to survive and reproduce, and behaviour that contributes to the tribe’s survival. Such discords lie at the very core of the ‘hero’s dilemma’, and in varying degrees, they represent the genetic foundation of all human ‘morality’.

Looked at in this light, all culture is blatantly genetic. It is preserved by emotions that disengage rational thought whenever our genes perceive the slightest threat—to themselves or to their alleles.

Suspension of Disbelief

There is an intriguing mental device that our genes use whenever they want to squeeze our perceptions into a shape that better suits their purpose. This curious neuronal phenomenon is commonly known in theatrical circles as the ‘suspension of disbelief’. The term refers to the brain’s ability to switch out reality and replace it with a fictional scenario that rhymes with our genetic imperatives.

Like the ‘hot-wire’ that a car thief uses to fire up the motor when he has no key, the ancient hotwire that links our senses directly to our genes allows us to by-pass our inexperienced and error-prone rational cortex the moment our genes perceive the slightest threat, either to them or to their alleles. It gives us instant access to violent behavioural responses, such as ‘fight’ and ‘flight’, that have helped to preserve human genomes for the past two million years.

This ancient genetic hotwire has an astonishingly wide variety of every-day uses. The world of entertainment utterly depends on ‘suspension of disbelief’ to seduce the viewer into switching off rational thought and believing instead in the fictitious characters and events being portrayed on the stage or screen before them.

This ancient neuronal short-circuit switches on the moment a fictional character or event touches one of the multitude of mental buttons that are linked to our basic genetic imperatives to survive and reproduce. Touch one of those buttons and a stew of hormones and neurotransmitters flood the body and brain, generating a rush of emotion that switches out the neuronal cortex, and brings rational assessment to a halt. The imagination fires up, transforming fantasy into ‘reality’, and in that extraordinary instant almost anything becomes mentally possible. In that bizarre moment even the most trivial event may be transformed into something ‘divine’.

Here is our genes’ secret weapon in their age-old struggle to survive and reproduce in a hazardous and unstable environment. Here is the shrewd old genetic midwife that delivers passionate belief in the patently ridiculous—in witchcraft and spells, in gods, miracles, angels and devils; in the validity of religious dogma and astrological predictions; in sustainable development, in ‘market forces’, in alien abductions and perpetual economic growth.

In essence then, here is the device that bestows peculiar mystical significance on ‘the home team’, ‘the political party’, ‘the Church’, and ‘the Flag’, thereby bonding us into families, tribes, nations, religions and ethnic groups; into teenage and criminal gangs, and into political parties and their childish factions. And it was this same dream-making facility that allowed 19 al Qa’eda terrorists to see only heroic martyrdom in their suicidal attacks on New York and Washington on the 11th of September, 2001.

As our social stress levels grow, so will the level of emotion throughout society. And in consequence, our ability to censor reality will grow stronger, nurturing more nightmares in the form of religious, ethnic and political extremism. In this fashion our genes will keep us largely oblivious to the threat of extinction that faces our species as it slides headlong into resource depletion, climate change and population collapse. Our ancient ability to switch off rational thought and believe genetically sanctioned ‘visions’ will nurture even more tribal extremism—religious, political and pathological.

[Dave Cohen]

@Gail

Good stuff!

What Morrison calls "our inherently mystical nature" is, in my terms, our inherently delusional nature. There is no bullshit so preposterous that no humans can believe it. Other more acceptable bullshit is believed by nearly all of them.

Thanks for the book reference.

-- Dave

[JohnWDB, MD]

Dave, how do we know optimism is independent of culture? I have assumed it is culturally dependent. I haven't had time to research it, but here's one study that found "unrealistic optimism" far greater in North America than Japan. https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/id/4839/ubc_1993_fall_heine_steven.pdf

I do know more about self-perception biases, such as "The Dunning Kruger Effect" (tendency to rate oneself above average, in short), which has been shown to be almost entirely a Western phenomenon. This type of bias requires a similar type of filtering, attending to that which confirms the bias and rejecting that which conflicts with it.

[Anywhere But Here Is Better]

Gail and Dave - I sit firmly on your side of the realistic-pessimist v. deluded-optimist divide, but I have a big question to ask regarding Morrison's analysis.

If he is right and there is a genetic-survivalist imperative that underpins Homo sapiens' resort to emotional mysticism that "brings rational assessment to a halt", this appears contradictory when this same blinkered mysticism ensures mankind in general does nothing rational to ensure genetic survival in our current era - i.e. conserve resources, share wealth and control population growth.

In other words, how can it be a genetic survival tactic to wallow in mysticism while ignoring the evidence that our species is heading for a fast exit?

I can understand mass delusion as the cause of our demise, but not genetic factors. Please enlighten me!

Thanks, Oliver

[JohnWDB, MD]

@Oliver, evolutionary scientists will tell you that whatever adaptive mechanisms helped a species get where it is don't necessarily improve its chances of survival in the present. In less abstract terms, the tendency to voraciously exploit resources encourages proliferation of that set of genes over those that tend toward prudence and conservation. While resources are abundant, the population drifts toward the first type. When resources dwindle, the second type has the misfortune of realizing their demise but lacks the ability or manpower to do anything about it. Lots of species drive themselves to extinction.
*I say this and I'm not entirely sure of the article's conclusions...just offering a speculative explanation

[Anywhere But Here Is Better]

John - Thanks for that insight. It's all rather puzzling... this survival-of-the-fittest thing. I guess I am too simplistic, expecting a 21st century Darwinian "drift" from profligate resource users to prudent resource conservers to avoid species extinction - i.e. as a biological/genetic necessity.

Perhaps those who voraciously exploit the earth - just about every corporation, financial institution and government worldwide - are too busy greedily stealing from the next generation to notice that they are denying life to their own descendants. In this sense, Homo sapiens evolution is way off the rails and all bets are off on species survival.

Regards, Oliver

[Dave Cohen]

@Oliver

I haven't read Morrison. Some of what I just read (in Gail's comment) sounds dubious to me. I don't believe human irrationality has any survival value at all. I think that's just the way our species turned out.

-- Dave

[Dave Cohen]

@John

I believe that that optimism is culturally-independent because that's what the psychological literature (and common sense) tells me. For example --

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.msu.edu%2F~dwong%2FCEP991%2FCEP991Resources%2FPeterson-FutOptimism.doc&ei=y3Z3UMOZFYL30gH3iIDgDA&usg=AFQjCNHfOl0b6OK7p_qrrIZNtvCqNh757w&sig2=Oq2Y-OiRPBPLvDrddAR0yA

And to quote form that Word document --

"Little optimism subsumes specific expectations about positive outcomes: for example, “I will find a convenient parking space this evening.” Big optimism refers to—obviously—larger and less specific expectations: for example, “Our nation is on the verge of something great.” The big-versus-little optimism distinction reminds us that optimism can be described at different levels of abstraction and, further, that optimism may function differently depending on the level. Big optimism may be a biologically given tendency filled in by culture with a socially acceptable content; it leads to desirable outcomes because it produces a general state of vigor and resilience. In contrast, little optimism may be the product of an idiosyncratic learning history; it leads to desirable outcomes because it predisposes specific actions that are adaptive in concrete situations...

Do cultures or historical eras differ in their characteristic optimism? The answer is probably no insofar as our focus is on big optimism. Big optimism makes society possible, and a pessimistic civilization cannot survive for long...."

When I refer to optimism, I am always talking about Big Optimism.

-- Dave

[Anywhere But Here Is Better]

Thanks for that Dave. This whole topic of evolution/survival/adaptive genes etc reminds me of Alice: curiouser and curiouser. If we are going down with the ship, I still have an interest in understanding what's going on with our strange species.
Regards, Oliver

[Dave Cohen]

@Oliver

When I say that human irrationality has no survival value, I should add that optimism did have survival value in the deep and recent past, but that trait is now working against us in the 21st century in so far as the shit is hitting the fan.

Which is why I like to ridicule optimists.

-- Dave

[John D]

While irrational, mystic optimists are worthy of our scorn, the worst are the subset of optimists known as the techno-optimists. Their calm faith that technology will solve all our problems drives me up a wall. They are irrational and mystical in their own way.

[Gail]

I have only begun to read Morrison and notice he has been criticized for less-than-scientific assumptions about genetic predispositions, and I'm certainly no expert. Having said that, Oliver, I think that it's important to keep in mind the timescale over which evolution occurs, the many generations for adaptation to occur. Without guessing as to what that might be, I'm pretty sure that it WOULDN'T be the last 200 years from the beginning of the industrial revolution.

And I really like the implications of his perspective, which is basically that there's nothing we can do to alter mass perceptions/delusions. It's difficult for me to accept, emotionally, because I tend to want people see the truth. Take the trees (my favorite subject). More and more people are noticing that they are dying, particularly on the East coast, because all the leaves are falling off a month early without turning fall colors - I'm getting lots of emails, and there is a rash of youtube videos from Canada to Florida. But virtually every single person is utterly convinced that it's either a chemtrail conspiracy, or the Rapture, or HAARP, or radiation from a hidden planet! Nobody wants to accept that we are destroying our planet with pollution ourselves, even when there is plenty of scientific evidence that ozone kills plants.

So it's tempting to think that there's no use in trying to persuade people of the facts when almost all of them are not operating rationally, and can't change. This is the first of a fascinating series of four (the others are linked at the top) about this subject, https://vimeo.com/20861423