The most optimistic have frontal lobes that want nothing to do with bad news.
For some people, the glass is always half full. Even when a football fan's team has lost ten matches in a row, he might still be convinced his team can reverse its run of bad luck. So why, in the face of clear evidence to suggest to the contrary, do some people remain so optimistic about the future?
In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) 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?"
I hear Eric Idle singing "always look on the bright side of life".
Human brains have assorted biases built into how they work that limit their ability to understand the world accurately. This is about more than just intelligence. However, I suspect genetic outliers exist who have fewer biases. If the outliers also have sufficient intelligence they make good stock market traders and good scientists.
Brain scans of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have shown for the first time why people affected by the condition sometimes have difficulty in concentrating. The study, by experts at The University of Nottingham, may explain why parents often say that their child can maintain concentration when they are doing something that interests them, but struggles with boring tasks.
Using a 'Whac-a-Mole' style game, researchers from the Motivation, Inhibition and Development in ADHD Study (MIDAS) group found evidence that children with ADHD require either much greater incentives — or their usual stimulant medication — to focus on a task.
The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, found that when the incentive was low, the children with ADHD failed to “switch off” brain regions involved in mind-wandering. When the incentive was high, however, or they were taking their medication, their brain activity was indistinguishable from a typically-developing non-ADHD child.
So the kids are just tuned for zoning out waiting for interesting events to happen. I suspect this tendency was selected for in some environments. Becoming too easily engrossed could cause a hunter to miss some prey.
How can you avoid the risk that your kid will find Phil Collins entertaining and still find a way to make ADD/ADHD kids able to learn? My modest proposal: Make versions of the most popular video games that have educational content mixed in to them.
Trying to develop video games from scratch that will be sufficiently interesting to hold the attention of someone with attention deficit disorder seems like a zero profit herculean task. Video games routinely take tens of millions of dollars to develop. Better to take games that have already succeeded and make variations of them that teach history, vocabulary, math, and other topics. An added benefit: Even non-ADD kids could learn from top notch video games that also did some teaching.
Some Harvard and MIT researchers found that the type of object a person holds influences their judgment about resumes, stories, and other information they are asked to evaluate.
The researchers conducted a series of experiments probing how objects' weight, texture, and hardness can unconsciously influence judgments about unrelated events and situations:
- To test the effects of weight, metaphorically associated with seriousness and importance, subjects used either light or heavy clipboards while evaluating resumes. They judged candidates whose resumes were seen on a heavy clipboard as better qualified and more serious about the position, and rated their own accuracy at the task as more important.
- An experiment testing texture's effects had participants arrange rough or smooth puzzle pieces before hearing a story about a social interaction. Those who worked with the rough puzzle were likelier to describe the interaction in the story as uncoordinated and harsh.
- In a test of hardness, subjects handled either a soft blanket or a hard wooden block before being told an ambiguous story about a workplace interaction between a supervisor and an employee. Those who touched the block judged the employee as more rigid and strict.
- A second hardness experiment showed that even passive touch can shape interactions, as subjects seated in hard or soft chairs engaged in mock haggling over the price of a new car. Subjects in hard chairs were less flexible, showing less movement between successive offers. They also judged their adversary in the negotiations as more stable and less emotional.
Nocera and his colleagues say these experiments suggest that information acquired through touch exerts broad, if generally imperceptible, influence over cognition. They propose that encounters with objects can elicit a "haptic mindset," triggering application of associated concepts even to unrelated people and situations.
We believe we have more conscious control of our opinions and decisions than we really do. We are regularly doing things for reasons unknown to us. The human mind is a very flawed instrument for reasoning.
Update: If you get too worked up by tactile sensations you could always get botox treatment in order to dampen your emotions. If you can't smile or frown you can't feel all that happy or sad.
Fernbach and the other researchers explored the degree to which people are overly focused on a single cause when pursuing two fundamental kinds of thinking — predicting the likelihood of an outcome and diagnosing the causes of an outcome.
They see these two kinds of thinking as flip sides of the same coin. Predicting outcomes calls for thinking forward from the cause of the outcome, such as predicting the likelihood that someone who goes on a diet will lose weight. But offering a diagnosis involves thinking backward from an outcome to the cause, such as diagnosing whether someone who lost weight dieted.
The researchers conducted three studies with medical professionals and Brown undergraduates. Their findings: In each case, the subjects considered alternative causes when they made diagnoses, but did not do so when making predictions.
I can see a way to try to use this result to think more productively: When trying to predict the future list some possible paths. Then for each path imagine you are in the future and a series of events caused developments to happen along that path. Think back from this imagined future vantage point and try to identify the causes of the outcome. If you do that for each possible outcome you might shift your mind into a more backward-looking diagnostic mode.