Your Brain Is More Optimistic Than You Think

If we look back to make a list of the things that we remember the most and best about our lives, they will probably all be related to experiences that have moved us emotionally.

We will remember special moments : the hugs and loving words of our parents, our first kiss in love, the moment we met our partner or the birth of our children. Naturally, we can also record painful memories, such as the death of a loved one or a time when we feel especially alone and helpless.

On the other hand, if someone asks us where we were the day the Twin Towers of New York fell or the day Lady Di died, it won’t be hard to remember either. And, although both events did not have a personal impact on the lives of most of us, they did surprise and psychologically disturb us and left a mark on our memory.

We clearly remember the dress we wore on that special day many years ago, and instead we have to work hard to remember what we had for dinner yesterday.

How does our brain select memories?

University of California psychologist Michael Gazzaniga is a scholar of the human mind who has investigated our way of remembering. Gazzaniga defines two characteristics for any experience to be stored in our memory: we remember those events that excite us and also those that surprise us.

Thus, what has moved us and the unexpected will be present when we try to evoke our past. And, taking into account that our mind is nothing more nor less than an immeasurable network of electrical connections between billions of cells called neurons, we can conclude that only what especially excites these cells produces an indelible imprint on our neural circuits.

The intensity of what we live is, therefore, what lasts over time. The more intense our experience is, the more likely it is that we can recall it later. This would explain why, with the passage of a lifetime, elderly people relate in great detail memories of their childhood and adolescence, years in which everything was experienced for the first time and, therefore, lived very intensely.

However, the latest research on our brain activity in the moments in which we remember is revealing that, when we exercise our memory, we not only remember past events but also make up certain aspects.

Our mind remembers the main facts and invents the details

Daniel L. Schacter, a psychologist at Harvard University, has focused his professional career on the study of the biological bases of memory and has discovered that, each time we remember, we modify our memory, that is, we create variations of the initial memory. Thus, it seems that our brain is “programmed” to remember only the main facts and that, instead, the details do not remember them so well, so we unconsciously make them up every time we look back.

In his book The Seven Sins of Memory (Ed. Ariel), Dr. Schacter reports numerous experiments that have shown the extent to which we have a creative memory:

• One of the most common tendencies is to assign a memory to the wrong source. For example, we think that a friend told us something, when in fact we found out about it on television, a phenomenon that happens more often than we think.
• Other times it happens that we build memories from external influences, adopting as our own experiences that are not ; that is, we internalize something that someone has explained to us and, after a while, we believe that it has happened to us.

Some people might argue that there are recurring memories that we cannot forget and that we are able to explain in great detail, such as those of those unpleasant events. But, in reality, our brain does forget many of these experiences; what happens is that it allows us to keep the memory of those experiences that have been useful to us, that is, that have helped us to learn something. And it is that our memory knows what it is we should remember.

At this point, we could ask ourselves the following: if our memory is so intelligent, why does it make so many mistakes and change our memories? Science is looking for a definitive answer to this question, and there are already theories about it.

Memory is practical, creative and adaptive, it helps us imagine the future

We have already seen that the brain is very good at remembering important data and that it costs more to store details, but this way of remembering, rather than a failure of our mind, could have an adaptive purpose: by storing only what essential to a lived experience, we save energy and avoid cluttering memory with trivial details. And precisely these are the details that we unconsciously make up when we exercise the conscious activity of remembering.

But, in addition, this ability to add details that were not in the initial memory also has a practical function, since it exercises us to imagine the future. In other words, if we did not invent the past from small pieces of our memories, we would be unable to invent the future, to imagine.

This theory is based on scientific evidence thanks to innovative neuroimaging techniques, which allow us to see which areas of the brain are activated when certain activities are carried out.

The experiments carried out by the neuroscientist Yadin Dudai and the humanities professor and memory researcher Mary Carruthers have shown that some neural regions are put into operation both when we reconstruct past events and when we imagine situations that have not yet occurred ; In other words, we can say that remembering and imagining are, to some extent, the same.

This fact would explain, for example, why many patients with amnesia – people who have forgotten their past – are also unable to plan for the future.

We tend to optimism: we imagine that the future will be better than the past

Thanks to this ability to recreate details in the past and in the future, we can also be optimistic. According to psychologist Daniel L. Schacter, most of us are optimistic, since, when asked about our life expectancies, we tend to think that more positive than negative events are going to happen to us.

On the other hand, physiology tells us that optimism is good for health. More optimistic people are more psychologically balanced and tend to manage stress better, so their defense systems against infections are likely to be stronger and better equipped for survival.

Tali Sharot, a researcher in the department of psychology at New York University, carried out an experiment to measure the brain activity of eighteen adolescents, in order to determine how optimistic they were and what areas of the mind were involved in this quality purely human. The students were asked to imagine that good things and bad things would happen to them in the future. Subsequently, they had to indicate the degree of emotion with which they lived these hypothetical situations.

Dr. Sharot concluded that most of the boys believed that positive events were much closer in time than negative ones, that they were viewed as less important and blurred, located in the distant future and of little relevance. And, in addition, the students were convinced that the positive events that were to come were much more important than those they had already experienced and remembered fondly. The future, therefore, was always better for them than the past.

This research corroborates what most of us tend to think in relation to our lives: the maxim that “the good is yet to come” seems to be true, because we tend to believe that things will get better.

In fact, this research also showed that, at a biological level, there are mechanisms that encourage us to think like this.

The brain generates gratifying emotions for positive thoughts

When the adolescents in the study thought about negative experiences, the areas of the brain responsible for regulating emotions were inhibited ; that is, the mind was busy eliminating such pessimistic thoughts. And, on the contrary, when those same young people imagined positive events, those same brain areas were coordinated and activated to generate pleasant emotions. That is why, with these data in hand, we can conclude that our mind induces us to be optimistic.

From an evolutionary point of view, and taking into account that humans have developed in inhospitable terrain, being optimistic may have been key to the survival of our species. And it is that the collaboration between the different members of the group and the intelligence had to be essential, since our physical conditions were not extraordinary and a defeatist attitude would not have helped too much in difficult situations.

From an evolutionary point of view, memory has helped our survival as a species.

Imagine, for a moment, our ancestors grieved and frightened by all the dangers that threatened them in the African savannah, aware of how bleak their future was. With that pessimistic vision, they would have lacked the energy and commitment necessary to move forward and fight for their lives. On the other hand, optimistic ancestors, confident in their abilities and in the promise of a better future, would have a much better chance to fight and overcome difficulties,
as, in fact, they did.

For all this, we should be grateful to our optimistic brain for being able to imagine promising futures for us, but also for better remembering the good things that have happened in our past, leaving aside the bad experiences that, surely, we have all lived. . Without this inventive, creative and optimistic brain, we would most likely not be here now.