Optimism and Your Brain

A recent article in Nature Neuroscience suggests that human optimism may be the result of the brain's failure to code certain functions.

"So we do not lose heart," the apostle Paul famously wrote to the Corinthians. This came at the conclusion of a passage in which he summarized the troubles he and his coworkers had faced: "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus ..." (2 Corinthians 4:8-10).

All of that, and they do not lose heart? An unbiased reader might conclude that Paul's brain was addled, and recent research suggests that such a conclusion might not be unwarranted. In a study published in the October 2011 issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London present evidence that people who are naturally optimistic learn only from information that reinforces that rosy outlook.

That would seem to apply to Paul. He clumped all those troubles into the category of a "slight momentary affliction" that...