Fox - Rainy brain, sunny brain: how to retrain your brain to overcome pessimism and achieve a more positive outlook

RAINY BRAIN,
SUNNY BRAIN

RAINY BRAIN,
SUNNY BRAIN

How to Retrain Your Brain to
Overcome Pessimism and Achieve
a More Positive Outlook

ELAINE FOX

BASIC BOOKS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York

Copyright 2012 by Elaine Fox

Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

Designed by Brent Wilcox

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
e-book ISBN: 978-0-465-02923-5

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

1Rainy Brains and Sunny Brains
The Affective Mind

2Sunny-Side Up
Investigating Optimism

3The Rainy Brain
Why Optimism Is More Elusive Than Pessimism

4Optimism and Pessimism Genes
Are There Genes for the Way We Are?

5The Malleable Mind
The Remarkable Plasticity of the Human Brain

6New Techniques to Reshape Our Brains
From Fear to Flourishing

At every single moment of ones life one is what one is
going to be no less than what one has been.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist
sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Winston Churchill

ALVYS PSYCHIATRIST
How often do you sleep together?

ALVY
Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.

ANNIES PSYCHIATRIST
Do you have sex often?

ANNIE
Constantly! Id say three times a week.

Annie Hall

P sychological science has established a simple truth: how we view the world and how we interact with it change how the world responds to us. Its a compelling fact thats all too easily forgotten. Our way of being, our take on things, the attitude we bring to life, what I call our affective mindset, colors our world, affecting our health, our wealth, and our general well-being. Psychologists have developed several ways to measure different mindsetspessimism and optimismso that its now possible to quantify the differences between these fundamental ways of thinking. Most remarkably, these differenceswhether we turn toward the bright side of life or the darkcan be traced to specific patterns of activity in the brain itself. Bundles of nerve fibers connecting contemporary areas of our thinking brain with ancient regions that control our most primeval emotions make up different aspects of our affective mind. The rainy brain part highlights the negative, while our sunny brain draws us toward the good things in life. Both are essential, and its the checks and balances between these two systems that ultimately make you you and me me. Its our affective mind that gives meaning to our lives by tuning us in to what really matters.

For over twenty years, the diverse ways in which people interpret the world around them have been at the heart of my scientific work. My quest has been to try to illuminate, piece by tantalizing piece, those parts of our brain that allow us to experience joys and fears, appreciate beauty, have fun, and worry to the point of existential despair. Affect infuses our mind with meaning, making us aware of what might harm us, alerting us to what might go wrong, drawing us toward whats good for us, and highlighting the pleasures and sheer joys of living. Across millions of years of evolution, ancient neural structures have reached out to forge links with more recent brain regions, developing circuits and networks that tune us in to whats important. Subtle differences in the reactivity of these affective brain circuits result in deeply divergent attitudes and outlooks on lifethe heart of what I call our affective mind. It is here that we will surely find the answers to why we differ so much from one another.

Our affective mind gives us soul, puts the fire into life. This capacity to experience and feel emotions, especially in how we react to pleasures and dangers, is shared with many other species, but when linked up with our enlarged cerebral cortexthat part of our brain that gives us our unique cognitive talents to speak, think, and solve problemsour affective mind allows us to transcend the rest of biology. This glorious intersection of thinking and feeling can lead us to be stopped in our tracks by the haunting beauty of a sunset or to be moved to tears by a simple sequence of musical notes or words.

The same combination of ancient and contemporary brain regions also has a downside, however, leaving us vulnerable to existential angst. All too easily, we can be overwhelmed by fears and worries and laid low by the sheer monstrous crying of the wind, as W. B. Yeats so beautifully put it.

My own attempts to understand the affective mind in all its complexity has followed the path of psychological science itself, initially focusing on the negative before turning to the question of why some people flourish, seemingly resilient to all that life throws at them. For most of its history, psychology has been concerned with problems: anxiety, depression, addictions, compulsions have all been central topics. Over the years, thousands of research grants have been won and scientific papers written on why some people are prone to a pervasive pessimism that can slide into depression and anxiety, and armies of researchers have tried to figure out effective ways to alleviate the distress caused by all this negativity. A focus on the negative is understandable and appropriate, of course, given the devastation that anxiety disorders and severe depression can cause in peoples lives.

My own approach to unraveling this mystery has been to probe the minds of the anxious and depressed with the traditional tools of cognitive psychology. Flashing positive and negative images on a computer screen, sometimes so fast that they are below the radar of consciousness, and then asking people to detect items that occur in the same location as quickly as they can, allows me to measure how quickly people react to different types of imagesnegative or positiverevealing a momentary glimpse of what captivates the unconscious mind. If your mind is drawn toward a negative scene, like the aftermath of a car crash, for instance, in preference to a happier image, then items appearing in that location will be found faster. The difference may only be hundredths of a second, but decades of research using techniques like this reveal that the anxious brain shifts imperceptibly toward the negative.

The tide within psychological science is gradually turning to what makes us happy and optimistic. And this unfolding story is telling us that the optimistic mind is drawn inexorably toward the positive, while simultaneously delicately turning us away from the negative. The cognitive styles of those prone to pessimism and anxiety and those prone to optimism and happiness are, indeed, fundamentally different. Why? Do these deep-set biases play a causal role in why some people are pessimistic and anxious, while some are deeply hopeful and optimistic? In a nutshell, how and why does the affective mind differ so much among people?

Breathtaking developments in psychological science, alongside startling advances in the technology underlying neuroscience and genetics, give us an abundance of new evidence on these old questions. Most modern-day psychology departments house a variety of sophisticated brain-imaging machines that allow us to peer into the inner workings of our brains as never before. Combined with traditional methods, this new information throws fresh light on just how much our outlook on life is linked to processes taking place deep inside our brain.