A new study by Kobe University has found that optimists’ brains show strikingly similar patterns when imagining the future, while pessimists’ brains display more individual variability. Researchers used fMRI to scan participants’ brains during a future-thinking task, revealing distinct neural activity patterns in optimists and pessimists.
Optimists tend to process positive and negative scenarios in shared ways, which may explain their greater social connectedness. In contrast, pessimists reinterpreted negatives as positives, distancing themselves emotionally from bad outcomes. This study sheds light on how shared mental frameworks help people feel “on the same wavelength” and communicate more effectively.
The findings suggest that optimists’ brains work similarly when thinking about future events, while pessimists’ brains show a much larger degree of individuality. Kobe University psychologist Kuniaki Yanagisawa says that this may be due to shared neural representations in optimists’ brains, which enable them to envision the future similarly and understand each other’s perspectives.
Yanagisawa assembled an interdisciplinary team from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to test this hypothesis. They recruited 87 test subjects who covered the full spectrum of pessimism to optimism, asking them to imagine various future events while their brain activity was recorded with fMRI. The results showed that optimists’ neural activity patterns were mutually similar, while pessimists’ patterns displayed more diversity.
The study also found that there is a more pronounced difference in neural patterns when thinking about positive events or negative events in optimists than in pessimists. Optimists perceive a clear distinction between good and bad futures in their brains, processing negative scenarios in a more abstract and psychologically distant manner.
Yanagisawa believes that elucidating the process by which this shared reality emerges is a step towards a society where people can communicate better. He hopes to gain a deeper understanding of what causes loneliness and how to develop strategies to improve communication among individuals with different optimism levels.
Source: https://neurosciencenews.com/optimists-brain-future-thinking-29495