Neuroscience

While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue... See more

neural pathways we don’t use die off over time. What makes our brains hold on to these pathways — and create more — is not simply repeating the same things we’ve learned over and over again, but continually taking on difficult problems.

The next time you’re driving home in a car or sitting down to enjoy a meal, spare some thought for the ways in which the neurochemical soup in your brain mimics your gut: helping you to digest complex patterns of information as you navigate the intricacies of your daily life.

Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health, to how quickly wounds heal, to slower disease progression.

one of the latest big theories in neuroscience says that humans are fundamentally creatures of prediction, and not only is creativity not at odds with that, but it actually goes hand in hand with improving our predictive power. Life itself, in this view, is one big process of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe... See more