Optimists' brains think alike about future: report

Japanese researchers have conducted groundbreaking research analysing optimists’ brains when imagining the future.

The results revealed that people with an optimistic attitude show similar patterns of brain activity when they contemplate their future.

According to the first author of the research Kobe University in Japan, Kuniaki Yanagisawa, “Optimists seem to use a shared neural framework for organizing thoughts about the future, which likely reflects a similar style of mental processing rather than identical ideas.”

He further said, “It’s not just about having a positive attitude; it’s that their brains are literally on the same wavelength, which may allow for a deeper, more intuitive kind of connection.”

For that purpose, research was conducted with 87 participants to complete a questionnaire.

The participants underwent through MRI scans, as they were asked to imagine distinctive future life events. However, some results were positive like taking an epic trip around the world. On the other hand, some were negative and neutral as well.

In addition, a series of participants were asked to further imagine about scenarios related to death.

The team of prominent researchers have found that optimistic ones showed greater similarities in the patterns of their brain activity involved in future thinking called as medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC).

In this connection, teams found the patterns of brain activity in the MPFC. The results showed the clear differences for positive and negative future events in optimists.

Yanagisawa said, “This suggests that optimists not only ‘think alike’ in a structural sense, but they also process emotional information about the future differently with a greater ability to separate what’s good from what’s bad, which may help them stay resilient.”

It has been observed that different research teams shed light on the recent development to analyze the potential of the optimistic’ ones.

Professor Lisa Bortolotti at the University of Birmingham in the UK shared his views on study as, “The current findings might suggest that optimism does not amount to a form of irrationality or reality distortion because it does not change how we see things out there but how those things impact us.”

Further Bortolotti declared, “Picturing a positive outcome in detail as feasible and desirable makes us value it and work for it, ultimately making it more likely that we will achieve it.”