Sunny-Side Up
Investigating Optimism
Istill have vivid memories of David, a boy I knew in school. In a sea of Irish faces, he stood out with his shock of blond hair. He was also the first person I ever met whose pleasure brain seemed to be stuck on overdrive. He would light up a room as soon as he walked in, exuding an infectious sense of fun and happiness. Everyone loved David. He was bright, attractive, and one of life’s risk takers; by the age of fifteen, he had fallen off cliffs, crashed his father’s car, experimented with drugs and sex, and otherwise pushed himself to the far edges of excitement. Fear for David was fun. What he seemed to crave more than anything was the rush of adrenaline, which drove him to seek out danger. At sixteen, he died when he tried to leap from the roof of one city building to another but missed his target and fell to the street below. As our parents and teachers wondered about suicide, we teenagers knew that depression was a million miles from David’s experience. What killed him was having too much fun.
David’s experience gives us a glimpse into the life of the sunny brain, with all its ups and downs. My theory is that the spark at the source of the sunny brain is the pleasure center deep in the ancient regions of our neural tissue. All of us crave pleasure, but some of us, like David, bring it to the verge of addiction. Think of the satiated pleasure you feel after an excellent meal or the triumphant pleasure after a win by your favorite team. Now imagine sitting down after a long day and unwrapping that bar of chocolate that you have been thinking about. As you bite into the smooth and silky surface, the taste and aroma fills your senses as only a rich, dark chocolate can. Feelings of pleasure like this are caused by our pleasure-seeking brain, which allows us to react to the good things in life. This hedonic cone, or pleasure center, is the engine room that propels our wider sunny brain. The sunny brain, in turn, drives an optimistic mindset. To understand the roots of optimism, then, we need to understand in more detail how the pleasure brain works.
The function of our pleasure system is to entice us into doing things that are biologically good for us. This is why delicious food, especially in the company of family and friends, is one of the great pleasures of life. In ancient times, just as now, a supportive network and a ready supply of food were vital to our well-being and survival. Our pleasure brain tunes in to all those things that enhance our survival prospects. Thus, the sensory appreciation of tastes, odors, sights, sounds, and touches are at the very heart of feeling good. The sensual caress of a lover, the rich smell of coffee, the freshness of a sea breeze can all lift our spirits in a chain of events that eventually leads to a rosier view of life. Even seeking out a warm log fire on an icy day is biologically meaningful and gets the attention of the pleasure brain, sparking neurological reactions that make us seek them out over and over. For many, sensory pleasures are what make life worth living. If we cannot stop and smell the roses (or the coffee or the chocolate), it’s difficult to feel alive, happy, and positive.
Ironically, it is scientific research on depression that is now providing new evidence for this view. Andy was a young man who took part in one of my studies on optimism and pessimism. For several years, Andy suffered severe depression. Endless varieties of drug and talk therapies had little impact on his persistent black moods. Andy’s main complaint, however, was not the dark moods and pervasive pessimism; his “inability to feel joy” is what really bothered him. “I used to enjoy life,” he said. “Simple, everyday pleasures like a good cup of coffee would give me a real boost.” However, as his depression crept back, it was usually the lack of pleasure that he first noticed. “The edge is taken off things. I lose interest in everything. Life just seems dull.”
Andy’s gradual loss of interest in meeting friends, having sex, and even the simple pleasure of going to a movie or out for dinner has been difficult for successive girlfriends to deal with. Technically called anhedonia, this inability to experience pleasure forms a crucial part of depression and is a close companion of pessimism. Neuroscience research tells us that the pleasure brain is underactive in depression. It’s hard to imagine an optimist, deeply engaged with life, unable to experience and enjoy pleasure. Optimists usually have great enthusiasm and energy, and they are eager to relish all that life has to offer. Savoring pleasure, whether it’s sensory experiences like the bliss of a cold beer on a hot day or the more abstract pleasure of being captivated by a wonderful painting, is central to optimism and to feeling good.
The Pleasure Center
Psychologists and neuroscientists are now beginning to learn more about the parts of the brain that ensure that some experiences or objects will be highlighted so that they seem rosier, or shinier. By painting such a “pleasure gloss,” or what is called a hedonic tone, on some experiences, the brain makes sure that some things are viewed through rose-tinted glasses. Nature has devised this cunning way to make sure we seek out those things that are good for us. Pleasure, in other words, is the currency that keeps us coming back for more.
It’s important to appreciate, however, that pleasure is something more than a sensory experience. As the Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda puts it, pleasure is the “niceness gloss” that’s painted onto our sensations, and it’s this gloss that nudges us toward useful objectives like seeking out food, water, and sex. Without these motivations we probably wouldn’t survive for long, and so pleasure forms one of the great driving forces—seek out pleasures—alongside the other great motivator of avoiding danger or pain. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 BCE, defined pleasure as the “absence of suffering.” The eighteenth-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham also claimed that pleasure and pain are the two “masters of mankind,” believing that humans were designed by nature to seek out pleasure and to avoid pain. Modern science continues to view pleasure and pain as important motivating forces, and much effort has been spent on figuring out ways to measure pleasure and to find its source in our brain.
These research efforts tell us that the pleasure-seeking brain’s core is a tiny structure called the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). This ancient structure sits underneath the cortex, right at the front of the brain. As with many fundamental discoveries in science, the uncovering of the brain’s “pleasure center” came about by accident.
Back in the 1950s, two young Canadian psychologists named James Olds and Peter Milner were trying to figure out how the brain controls the sleep-wake cycle. After working on this problem for some time, they realized that implanting electrodes deep into the brains of rats might help find the answer. When activated, electrodes deliver a tiny pulse of electricity directly into a specific part of the brain. The resulting effect on the animal’s behavior could then be observed. The procedure is painless, since the brain does not contain any pain receptors, and the electrodes are implanted surgically under a general anaesthetic. When the animal wakes up after the operation, it can move around freely, unaware of the electrode inside its head.
Olds and Milner had a good idea of which brain area might be involved in arousal, and they hoped that by stimulating this region they would get the final proof. Their plan was to place the electrodes in a part of the brain called the midbrain reticular formation, located along the midline of the brain. Previous studies had indicated that this region was probably the one that controlled the sleep-wake cycle. Luckily for the science of pleasure, however, their aim was not very good, and they inserted the electrodes a short distance away from the intended target. Thus, when they stimulated the electrodes, the rat’s level of arousal did not change at all. What did happen, though, was that the rats seemed to be drawn to the location they were in when they were stimulated. Running around the cage, the rat would stop in its tracks and return to the precise spot where it had been when the electrode was activated. The rats gave every sign that they craved more of the stimulation.
Realizing they were on to something, Olds and Milner then conducted the now famous experiment where the rats were given free rein to press a lever that activated the electrode as often as they liked. The results were astounding. The rats couldn’t get enough of the tiny jolt of electricity and would press the lever over and over again, sometimes up to 2,000 times in an hour. The rats even gave up opportunities to eat, drink, or have sex for another hit.
Olds and Milner eventually discovered that instead of inserting the electrodes into the midbrain reticular formation, as they had intended, they had in fact implanted them in the NAcc. This tiny region was soon heralded as the “reward center” or the brain’s “pleasure zone.” It wasn’t long before electrodes were implanted in humans to see whether activating this newly discovered pleasure zone might help people struggling with depression or pain. If people like Andy were unable to experience pleasure, then perhaps zapping their pleasure center over and over would kick-start the system, eventually lifting the dark clouds of depression.
In what was to become one of the most controversial research programs ever conducted in psychiatry, Dr. Robert Heath at the Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans began implanting electrodes deep in the brains of patients with a variety of mental health problems. His view was that a dysfunction in the pleasure response was the root cause of many mental illnesses, such as depression and schizophrenia. If only the pleasure center could be switched back on, Heath thought, we might be able to cure a variety of mental problems.
One of his patients, labeled B-19, was a typical example. Tortured by depression for several years, the twenty-four-year-old confided that he was troubled daily by thoughts of suicide. Inspired by the work of Olds and Milner, Heath implanted a scattering of small electrodes deep into B-19’s brain. When the patient recovered from surgery, the research team stimulated each electrode in turn and asked B-19 what he felt. Most electrodes had little effect, but when the electrode in the NAcc was stimulated, B-19 reported an immediate hit. “It was pleasurable and warm,” he said, making him want to masturbate and have sex. Just like Olds and Milner’s rats, this young man stimulated this particular electrode over 1,500 times in one three-hour session and complained vigorously when it was taken away.
News soon spread about the new techniques, and patients in other hospitals began to report similar feelings. The Spanish neuroscientist Jose Delgado, who was working at Yale University, described several experiments on the implantation of electrodes into a variety of species, including humans. Perhaps most famous for stopping a charging bull in its tracks by stimulating an implanted electrode, Delgado also found that stimulating the NAcc in humans could lift depression, at least temporarily. This transience, however, turned out to be a problem. Stimulating electrodes in the NAcc undoubtedly had intense effects, but the effects never lasted very long, which is why implanting electrodes in the NAcc never became a viable cure for depression.
The fleeting nature of pleasure makes a lot of sense. The urge to eat, drink, and reproduce are all critical for the survival of our species, but once we have eaten, quenched our thirst, or had sex, there’s little need for the pleasure brain to linger. Hence, the pursuit of happiness only by means of pleasure is generally a futile exercise. There’s little doubt, however, that stimulating the NAcc does lead people to want more. Before we can see how this works, we need to digress a little to see how communication takes place within the brain.
A Little Anatomy
There are a number of ways to look at the brain. It is made up of two halves, which are mirror images of each other. We can also divide the brain into three parts from bottom to top. At the bottom, where the brain and spinal column connect, sit a number of structures that are essential for life. These are the parts of the brain that ensure that we keep breathing, keeping blood pressure and body temperature well balanced and generally sustaining life. Up a step is the middle part of the brain, which contains many of the core areas for emotions and memory, among other things. These are often called subcortical (below the cortex) and are much older in evolutionary terms than the upper part of our brain, the cortex. Indeed, many of the brain parts we find in this midbrain region—often with exotic sounding names like amygdala, nucleus accumbens, hippocampus—are similar to those we find in the brains of other creatures with whom we share this planet. Our cortex, however, is different. It has grown so big that it has been forced to fold over and over to fit inside the skull; hence, the familiar convoluted appearance of our brain. The cortex encases the middle brain regions and is responsible for many of the attributes we consider uniquely human, like language, reasoning, and imagination.
The various regions of the brain need to be able to communicate with one another so that actions can be coordinated. This is achieved by means of dense networks of connections that allow all areas of the brain, from bottom to top, to “talk” to each other. To see how such brain networks develop, let’s look at how internal communication takes place. Among the several types of cells found in the brain, the most important for sending and receiving messages are the nerve cells, also known as neurons. Each neuron is made up of three parts. The dendrites are treelike branches whose main function is to receive input from other neurons. The soma, or cell body, contains all the important things that the cell needs to stay alive, including its DNA. The third part is the axon, which is like a living electrical cable that carries electrical impulses at lightning speeds toward the dendrites of other neurons. Most axons in the brain are extremely short, while others, like those that run down our legs, can reach up to six feet in length.
While estimates vary, most neuroscientists agree that there are more than 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and that each one can contact up to 10,000 other neurons. This leads to a bewildering complexity of communication. In the early days of neuroscience, the belief was that neurons “talked” to each other by means of electrical impulses that sparked from one neuron to the next. This view changed dramatically when a crucial experiment was conducted in 1921 by Otto Loewi (1873–1961), a professor of pharmacology at the University of Graz in Austria. Around Easter that year, he wrote in his diary that he had had several sleepless nights. He had become absorbed with the idea that electrical communication might not be the only way that messages were transmitted. Perhaps, he thought, chemicals might also be involved. During one fretful night, he awoke frequently and wrote down several ideas that came to him in a dream. The next morning he could not remember anything of the dream and was unable to read his hastily scribbled notes. Describing the next day as “desperate,” he knew that he had dreamed something important. On waking from the same dream again the following night, he went straight to the laboratory to conduct the critical experiment. This test proved that chemicals are indeed crucial to sending messages around the brain.
Let’s see how he worked this out. Loewi knew that the vagus nerve controls the speed at which a heart beats and that stimulating this nerve slows down the heart. But was this because an electrical impulse jumped from the nerve to the heart? Or was there a chemical that seeped from the nerve to the heart? In an ingenious experiment, he removed the hearts of two frogs with the vagus nerve still attached and, with the hearts still beating, placed the first heart in a solution. He then stimulated the vagus nerve of this heart and, as expected, the heart slowed down. He quickly placed the second heart in the same solution and to his joy saw that the beating of the second heart also began to slow down. In this eureka moment, Loewi had discovered that chemicals must be involved in the transmission of information from one neuron to the next. How else could the second heart have slowed down? We now call Loewi’s discovery neurotransmission, and he shared the 1936 Nobel Prize with his long-term friend and collaborator, the British scientist Sir Henry Dale, for this work.
While Loewi discovered the chemical basis of neurotransmission in 1921, it was another twelve years before the precise chemical, acetylcholine (Ach), was identified. Since then, more than fifty other neurotransmitters have been discovered. We now know that at the end of each axon there are tiny sacks called synaptic vesicles that contain a specific neurotransmitter, such as dopamine. When an electrical impulse arrives down the axon, this causes the synaptic vesicles to move to the edge of the neuron and spill their contents out into the tiny gap between neurons. These chemicals then drift across the synaptic cleft and are detected by receptors on the walls of the dendrites of the next cell.
Just like a lock and key, if the neurotransmitter has the right shape, it will fit the receptor on the next neuron. This will cause that neuron to send an electrical impulse down its own axon, which will in turn release its own neurotransmitter and continue the process. If the neurotransmitter does not have the right shape, then it will not stimulate the next neuron.
FIGURE 2.1 Diagram of a synapse: An illustration of neurotransmission. An electrical impulse stimulates the neuron to spill small amounts of neurotransmitter into the small space between neurons (synaptic cleft). The neurotransmitters then drift in the fluid, and if appropriate receptors are positioned on the dendrites of another neuron, the neurotransmitter will cause this cell to fire and so the chain of messages continues. Source: www.wpclipart.com/science/experiments/chemical_synapse.png.html.
The chemical messengers most active in our sunny brain are dopamine and the opioids—the endogenous brain variety of opiates. The NAcc is filled with cells that contain either dopamine or opioids, and it is the action of these neurotransmitters that facilitates our enjoyment and desire for a wide range of experiences. I believe that these chemicals, the oil in the engine room of our wider sunny brain, are one of the principle sources of optimism.
When a rat is given something good to eat, like sugary water, the level of dopamine in its NAcc increases instantly, as it does when it engages in sex. The same thing happens to humans. When an electrode implanted in the NAcc is activated, as with B-19, the NAcc becomes flooded with dopamine. Fun activities also kick-start our dopamine systems.
Matthias Koepp, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Neurology in London, conducted an intriguing study using student volunteers who played a battle-tank video game when lying inside a brain scanner. Whenever they destroyed an enemy tank or collected a flag, the students won money. Whenever this happened, an immediate burst of dopamine could be seen in the volunteers’ NAcc.
It has been shown, however, that the story of pleasure is much more complex than dopamine alone. Kent Berridge, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, made the crucial discovery that the opioid chemicals are also critical for the functioning of the pleasure brain. Stimulating different areas of the NAcc in a large number of rats, he found that when neurons containing opioids were activated, sweet things tasted even sweeter. In other studies, rats were found to work very hard, happily learning to jump through all sorts of hoops, just for the reward of a shot of angel dust (PCP)—another activator of the opioid receptors—directly into their NAcc.
Berridge then tested people who used cocaine recreationally. Cocaine increases the amount of dopamine released in the brain; this fact had long been thought to be the reason why cocaine makes you feel good. However, by artificially suppressing the typical surge of dopamine when taking cocaine, Berridge made a remarkable discovery: the pleasure from the cocaine did not decrease in the slightest. What did change was people’s desire for the drug; it still felt great, but the desire to take more was reduced. These findings led Berridge to the crucial insight that dopamine is involved in wanting something but not necessarily for liking it. Wanting and liking are different aspects of pleasure, with different neurotransmitter systems involved. It’s the opioids that paint the pleasure gloss on our experiences, while dopamine keeps us coming back for more.
When stimulated by pleasure—whether it’s through having sex, taking drugs, eating chocolate, playing games, or activating an implanted electrode—the NAcc becomes flooded with dopamine and opioids. This shows us that cells communicate with one another by means of chemicals, and it is the sweeps and waves of these neurotransmitters on which brain circuits are dependent. If the same neurons talk to each other over and over again, pathways develop that form links among different brain areas. Just as a stream carves a channel through the sand, the flow of synapses among groups of neurons can establish entrenched pathways. Once laid down, these pathways ensure rapid communication between areas of the brain that may be very far apart. In this way wider circuits, like the sunny brain, begin to develop. Modifying the activity of neurotransmitters to even a small extent can therefore have profound effects on the responses of entire networks across the brain with a resulting impact on our personality and temperament.
Circuits that make up the sunny brain consist of neurons in the NAcc that form links with neurons in particular areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is the part of the cortex that sits right at the front of our head above our eyes. The whole architecture of this network begins when the NAcc begins to form links with nearby subcortical structures involved in emotion and pleasure. Gradually connections are made with more distant areas like the PFC. Among many duties of planning, reasoning, and problem solving, the PFC also plays the vital role of inhibiting more ancient parts of the brain, like the NAcc. Imagine visiting your local bakery and savoring the colorful array of cakes on display. Your NAcc will instantly sense reward and send out the signal to eat; the PFC, however, can assess the situation and send signals back that there’s no need to panic, you are not starving. Like an accelerator and a break, the NAcc drives us toward pleasure, while the PFC inhibits our more primal impulses. Information is sent back and forth along these pathways in repeating loops, allowing these brain areas to respond as a unit.
The network of connections running upward from the NAcc to the PFC and downward from the PFC to the NAcc is a vital circuit that controls our response to positive and rewarding situations. The dynamics of the links between the ancient pleasure centers and the more recent control centers in the cortex are crucial, one pushing us to act, the other dampening down our impulses. In the right balance, these brain circuits nudge us toward happiness and optimism.
Is the Sunny Brain More Active in Optimists?
Andy’s experience tells us that the absence of pleasure can often be more difficult to deal with than the sadness that goes with depression. Neuroscientists are beginning to realize that this anhedonia—the inability to appreciate the simple pleasures of life—is the forgotten side of depression. There is, however, growing scientific support for the notion that the sunny-brain circuit does indeed differentiate between those who are depressed and unable to experience pleasure and those who are happy and optimistic.
FIGURE 2.2 A schematic illustration of the sunny brain showing the links between the PFC and the NAcc.
Richard J. Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tested this theory with twenty-seven people who were depressed and nineteen healthy and happy control volunteers. To simulate the ups and downs of everyday life, all the volunteers were shown a series of pictures that depicted positive as well as negative scenes while their brains were being scanned in an fMRI machine. Each picture was presented on a screen just above the person’s head as he lay in the scanner during a session that lasted about forty minutes. In the early part of the session, the NAcc of the volunteers became active when the pleasant positive images were viewed. This is what we would expect. What was more surprising was that the depressed and happy groups were very similar. The NAcc of the depressed jumped into action just as much as the pleasure circuits of the control volunteers.
Something very different happened during the second half of the session. Now, when happy volunteers viewed positive images, their NAcc continued to stay active, but the pleasure brain of the depressed slid back to baseline. The depressed people were unable to sustain the firing of their pleasure brain after its initial activation. Pleasure is always short-lived, but it’s far more fleeting in the depressed.
A closer look at the data from this study tells us that it is not just the pleasure center but the entire sunny-brain circuit that’s involved. Early on in the session, when the NAcc responded to positive images, so did the PFC. But during the second half of the session, when activity in the NAcc declined for the depressed group, so did activity in the PFC.
This study suggests that it’s not so much that depressed people cannot feel pleasure, but that they just cannot sustain it. In fact, the depressed patients for whom activity in the NAcc declined most sharply also reported the most difficulty in experiencing pleasure and happiness. This is strong evidence that the functioning of the brain in depression makes it difficult to sustain positive feelings and that the sunny-brain circuit is vital to enhancing pleasure and happiness.
Is there evidence that the sunny-brain circuits are important for optimism? Studies that measure brain activity tell us that the sunny-brain circuitry is indeed involved, not only in feelings of happiness and pleasure but also in the desire to approach rewards. And approaching rewards is one of the important components of optimism. We can measure the electrical activity of the brain by strapping an array of electrodes on a person’s scalp. The electrodes pick up the activity generated by the millions of synapses that occur at any moment in the brain. Every time a neuron fires, it generates a tiny electrical pulse that is detected by these highly sensitive electrodes. Using such electroencephalography (EEG) techniques, researchers have discovered that merely approaching positive things is associated with a higher degree of activity in the left half of the cortex in healthy people. Thus, if you are looking at a picture of a stunning sunset or a luscious box of chocolates, the neurons in the left half of your brain will fire more vigorously than those on the right. We don’t fully understand why this is the case, but there’s little doubt that a leftward asymmetry in cortical activity is associated with approaching pleasurable things.
The activity of the brain when it’s resting tells a similar story. When people are sitting quietly, there is a baseline difference between optimists and pessimists. Pessimists show substantially less activity in the left half of their brains, while optimists show much more activity in the left half relative to the right half of their brains. This reduction in the normal leftward asymmetry is a neural marker of the lack of pleasure that we see in depression.
The same cerebral asymmetries are seen in monkeys, with happy healthy monkeys showing much more activity in their left cortex compared to fearful and apprehensive monkeys, which show relatively more activity in the right side of their brain. Whether these asymmetries originate in subcortical or cortical areas is not fully understood as yet, but it is clear that these asymmetries are linked with the propensity to approach or avoid rewards, and people with a marked leftward asymmetry are happier and more optimistic than those with a more rightward asymmetry.
Fundamental brain differences like this show us that the roots of optimism can be traced to the functioning of the brain circuits that make up our sunny brain. The anatomical links and connections between the NAcc and the cortex also tell us that greater happiness and an optimistic mindset are associated with ancient pleasure circuits in the brain. It was no surprise that Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, found in an extensive review of the literature that those who enjoyed life and regularly experienced simple everyday pleasures were consistently happier than those who took a more ascetic stance on life.
To verify that optimists really are keener to seek out pleasure, I set up a study at the University of Essex. The idea was to measure optimism as well as a trait known as sensation seeking, which is the degree to which a person pursues sensory pleasure and excitement. High-sensation seekers crave vigorous, intense experiences. They will take risks just for the intensity of the moment. Low-sensation seekers prefer quieter, slower, and inherently less risky experiences, perhaps a dinner party with excellent conversation, over a hell-raising party with loud music.
Like other personality traits, sensation seeking lies on a spectrum, with most people being somewhere in the middle. About 10 percent of people are at the highest end of the scale, and 20 percent fall into the low-sensation-seeking part. Men score a bit higher than women, and those under twenty years of age score higher than those over thirty.
To find out where you stand on this spectrum of sensation seeking, you can fill out the questionnaire below and then turn to the notes at the back to work out your score. Check the box that most accurately describes you for each of the following questions.
I had two hundred students fill out the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale shown on the next page as well as the LOT-R that we saw in Chapter 1. I wasn’t surprised to find that those who reported a more upbeat outlook were also more inclined to seek out and experience pleasure. I was more intrigued to see whether the patterns of brain activity would relate to these self-reports of optimism and sensation seeking.
I selected two groups of people who reported either very high or very low scores on optimism/sensation seeking. When I examined the patterns of brain activity of these two groups using EEG, the brains of the optimists/high-sensation seekers showed the telltale leftward asymmetry. Cortical activity in the pessimists was primarily in the right half of the brain.
Other research demonstrates that the brains of high-sensation seekers contain higher levels of circulating dopamine relative to low-sensation seekers. In other words, high-sensation seekers, who are more likely to be optimists, have a highly active pleasure brain. In one study, a team of psychologists at the University of Kentucky led by Jane Joseph showed high- and low-sensation seekers a series of photographs while their brains were being scanned. When highly stimulating pictures were shown, the pleasure brains of the high-sensation seekers went into overdrive with almost no activity in the PFC. For the low-sensation seekers, the most active part of the brain was the PFC, the area that inhibits and controls emotions. This pattern of neural activity means that the high-sensation seekers not only derive a bigger hit from excitement but are also less able to regulate that excitement.
The Brief Sensation Seeking Scale
This tendency to be highly responsive to rewards has many benefits, but it also has some downsides. Because the experience of pleasure is fleeting, the pursuit of pleasure can all too easily spiral out of control, sometimes tipping into dangerous risk taking and addictions. But if kept under control, experiencing pleasure is the spark that strengthens the circuits and networks that make up the sunny brain. And one of the great benefits of the sunny brain is the optimistic mindset it nurtures, which is not only about feeling joy and happiness, or even just about feeling good or thinking positively about the future, but also about sticking with tasks that are meaningful and beneficial. Our sunny-brain circuits help us to stay focused on the things that bring us rewards, and this keeps us engaged on important tasks.
This is a central insight, backed up by anatomical evidence, of how our sunny brain works. Optimism is about more than feeling good; it’s about being engaged with a meaningful life, developing resilience, and feeling in control. This dovetails nicely with psychological research showing that the benefits of optimism come from the ability to accept the good along with the bad, and being prepared to work creatively and persistently to get what you want out of life. Optimistic realists, whom I consider to be the true optimists, don’t believe that good things will come if they simply think happy thoughts. Instead, they believe at a very deep level that they have some control over their own destinies.
As the University of Kentucky psychologist Suzanne Segerstrom puts it, “Optimism leads to increased well-being because it increases engagement with life’s goals, not because of some miracle happy juice that optimists have and pessimists don’t.” This deep-rooted mindset and propensity to act sets off a chain of events that leads to all of the benefits that can come with a genuine form of realistic optimism. In the face of difficulties, optimists don’t give up. Instead, they redouble their efforts and try to figure out a way of dealing with their problems.
This type of optimism is different from the “happy thoughts will solve all our problems” approach that fills many self-help books. Thinking positively or negatively is important, but there’s much more to dispositional optimism than wishful thinking. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Smile or Die presents a devastating critique of what she sees as the cult of positive thinking that pervades contemporary society. She realized how mindless this cult had become when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and was immediately deluged with positive messages on how this would “make her,” would allow her to “find meaning in life,” would even help her to “find the divine.” Faced with a devastating illness, she was horrified at the suggestion that she should be grateful and that all she needed to do to get better was think happy thoughts. With a clear-eyed view, Ehrenreich demolishes the notion that the power of positive thinking is the solution to all of our problems. She’s absolutely right. The scientific research tells us that optimism often has more to do with what people do and how their brain responds, rather than what people think at a superficial level.
What’s perhaps most surprising is just how optimistic we are. Even in the darkest of times, we are able to find hope and think positive thoughts about the future. When two airliners flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I was at work in the University of Essex in Colchester, England. People gathered around a TV that had been set up in a corridor to watch the surreal events unfold. Nobody spoke much. As we watched the towers crumbling to the ground, one after the other, there was a sense of the world, as we knew it, ending forever. “America Under Attack” screamed the headlines. I wondered about one of my best childhood friends, who worked near the crash site in lower Manhattan. Many of our students and staff were American and were unable to contact their families and friends back home. As we all stared at the TV screen, the phone lines between England and America were silenced. The events were both personal as well as distant and surreal.
What emerged over the next few weeks was remarkable. The “self-centered,” “rude,” and “impatient” stereotype of the hard-boiled New Yorker seemed to crumble, as a gentler, more community-spirited New Yorker emerged. A CBS News/New York Times survey of 1,008 people one year after the attacks found that 82 percent of people felt that the city had profoundly changed for the better. While there was still fear and unease, many respondents said that New Yorkers were less arrogant and nicer, with a stronger sense of community and unity. Many had made real changes in their own lives, such as spending more time with family and friends. Several likened it to the spirit of the London Blitz during World War II.
Gary Tuchman, a CNN reporter, credited the September 11 attacks as a turning point in New York’s character. There’s now a “more humane” and “civil” atmosphere in the city, he claimed.
When I spoke to my childhood friend Anne, whom it turned out had been just a couple of blocks away at the time of the attack, she said this was absolutely true. “People are talking to each other on street corners now,” she told me. “For the first time since living in New York, I’m regularly chatting to complete strangers.”
Survey after survey confirm that, even in the darkest moments, people are usually positive about the future. Take the following findings from a survey conducted by the United Kingdom’s National Lottery in 2009. Overall, 75 percent of the British people questioned described themselves as optimists, while 58 percent said that being around optimists was infectious and made them feel happy. The United States is no different. Following the election of Barack Obama as American’s first African American president in 2008, a wave of optimism swept across the nation, according to newspaper reports. Even though the country was in one of the deepest economic crises it had ever experienced, national polls reported that 71 percent of Americans believed that the economy would soon start to improve. In terms of their own personal financial situations, 63 percent of Americans thought that things were about to get better, and an impressive 80 percent said that they were strongly optimistic about the next four years.
It was not only in the United States that optimism was surging following the election of Barack Obama. A survey of 17,356 people in seventeen different countries found that citizens in fifteen out of these seventeen countries were convinced that the world would become a better place. On average, 67 percent of people believed that the Obama presidency would lead to improved relations between the United States and the rest of the world.
What is the reason for such irrepressible optimism, especially in the face of so many global problems? The answer is both complex and intriguing. One part of the puzzle is that our brain is wired to ensure that we remain hopeful for the future. As we have seen, our sunny brain also plays an important role in keeping us engaged with ultimate rewards. Optimism is a crucial survival mechanism, honed by nature, to keep us going even when everything seems to be going wrong. Psychologists call this the optimism bias, and almost all of us have fallen prey to its appeal at some point.
An Optimism Bias
The optimism bias, or what’s often called the positivity illusion, is the finding that people consistently overestimate the likelihood of good things happening to them. Answer the following: What do you think are your chances of earning a higher salary than average? Be honest—what do you really think? Over your lifetime, do you think you will earn more than the norm, about average, or a bit less? Chances are you will say “more.” But if you think about it for a moment, it’s impossible for everyone to earn more than average, yet almost everyone believes that they are the exception. Living longer than average or having a great marriage and great kids is no different. In his book Irrationality, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland reported that 95 percent of drivers surveyed claimed that their driving was better than the norm. We all expect to drive better and live longer, healthier, wealthier lives than average.
The same thing happens when we ask about bad events: How likely are you to get a serious illness? Most people consistently underestimate their chances.
Why are our brains biased in such an optimistic way? One reason is that it’s simply what makes us get up in the morning. It’s essentially a cognitive trick that helps us stop worrying about all the things that might go wrong and being overwhelmed by possible problems and pitfalls. The potential downsides are real, though, since an overly rosy view may lure us into ignoring potential dangers. A woman ignoring a lump in her breast because she believes that she will never get cancer is putting herself in real danger.
Because the optimism bias is so common, it must have been highly adaptive, and, from an evolutionary perspective at least, there must be some survival benefit to this mindset.
Science gives us several clues as to how the optimism bias might be of benefit. Take the tendency of men to overestimate how appealing they are to women to see how this adaptation works. Frank Saal, a psychologist from Kansas State University, paired up forty-nine males and forty-nine females who hadn’t previously met and got them talking to each other individually for a few minutes. Following this interaction, other groups of men and women observed the conversations on videotape. Women almost always said that the woman in most of these interactions exuded an air of general friendliness, but the men usually thought the woman was displaying sexual interest. In two subsequent studies, where male managers interacted with their female employees, or male professors interacted with students, men consistently mis(interpreted) female friendliness as a sexual come-on.
Martie Haselton, a psychologist from the University of California, Los Angeles, claims that these effects are predictable. He and David Buss developed the error management theory, in which they argue that because men are limited in the number of people they can mate with from an evolutionary perspective, there’s a high cost to missing out on an opportunity, while the pain of rejection is short-lived and not overly costly. Therefore, it pays for men to overestimate how appealing they are to women, and so the seeds of optimism—realistic or otherwise—are sown.
An inbuilt optimistic bias has real benefits in our everyday life as well. For one thing, our belief that things will be good in the future makes us feel happier and more satisfied with life at the moment. Countless surveys, such as those conducted by the University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener, have shown that people say they are happy and satisfied with life most of the time. Diener and his colleagues developed the simple Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) back in 1985, which is still used to see how content we are with our lives. Have a go below to find out how you compare to others, and then turn to the notes at the back for information on scoring the SWLS.
If you are like most people, you will have scored fairly high on this simple scale. In agreement with international surveys on optimism, Diener finds that most of us say we are fairly satisfied and happy with most areas of our lives.
The Satisfaction with Life Scale
Below are five statements with which you may agree or disagree. Using the 1–7 scale below, indicate your agreement with each item by placing the appropriate number on the line preceding that item. You need to be open and honest in your responding. The points in the scale are: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = slightly disagree, 4 = neither agree or disagree, 5 = slightly agree, 6 = agree, 7 = strongly agree.
______ 1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
______ 2. The conditions of my life are excellent.
______ 3. I am satisfied with my life.
______ 4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.
______ 5. If I could live my live over, I would change almost nothing.
Optimism, no matter how we measure it, is very common, and the brain states that underlie this optimistic mindset are rooted in the pleasure center of the brain, with the NAcc at its core. A close look at this hedonic core reveals that there are two key parts to the pleasure brain: feeling good and desire. Wanting is the unsung side of pleasure, coordinated by a complex network of dopamine-containing neurons that guarantee we stay engaged and focused on things that are of ultimate benefit to us.
The distinction between “wanting” and “liking” is crucial to understanding the sunny brain. Self-help books generally focus on the good feelings that come with liking something, along with the idea that positive thoughts will bring a range of benefits. It’s this “positive-thinking mafia” that generated Barbara Ehrenreich’s skepticism. The story, however, turns out to be much more complex than “happy thoughts will solve everything.” Wanting and liking are separate and equally important components of pleasure, and it’s the former that, in my view, spawns many of the benefits of optimism.
We can see this effect in one of the most obvious characteristics of optimists, which is the ability to stick with a task in spite of setbacks. When you speak to optimists like Michael J. Fox, one of the things that strikes you is their refusal to give in to difficulties. Optimism is not a passive mindset; it’s about being actively engaged with life.
Armed with a better knowledge of what optimism is and the brain circuits associated with it, we can now examine whether there are major benefits to optimism. Startling claims have been made for optimism, or at least for the power of positive thinking. All that’s required, according to the creed, is to think positively, and good things will start to happen. Your cancer will be cured. You will get that job you have always wanted. The perfect partner will suddenly appear in your life. As Ehrenreich reminds us, much of this descends into magical thinking, completely divorced from reality.
While thinking alone is not as effective as many gurus would have us believe, there is solid evidence that optimism is associated with actions that do bring advantages. An accident survivor, paralyzed from the waist down, who believes that she can still have a high quality of life is likely to go to the gym to work on her upper body strength, and get out and about to enjoy an active social life. Someone who believes her life is over will probably not do these things. The difference in quality of life has less to do with the power of positive thinking and more to do with the power of positive actions. The two are not unrelated, but it’s the actions that reap the rewards of optimism.
With this in mind, a careful look at the scientific evidence shows that there is a case for at least three major benefits to an optimistic mindset: better health and well-being, the ability to pick ourselves up after a crisis, and greater success in life.
The Benefits of Optimism
While there has been much unsubstantiated hype, there are many scientific studies that suggest that a positive mindset, like optimism, is associated with better health and well-being. This is almost certainly due to the link between an optimistic mindset and beneficial actions rather than any magical power of thoughts. Most dramatic of all is the assertion that optimism can make us live longer.
In a now famous study, Deborah Danner and her colleagues at the University of Kentucky examined the handwritten diaries of 180 Catholic nuns from all over the United States, describing their lives from the moment they joined their convents in 1930. The average age of the novices was twenty-two when the study began, and Danner’s team managed to track all these nuns down almost sixty years later, when the nuns’ ages ranged from seventy-five to ninety years old. The diaries were carefully examined for signs of how the nuns responded to life events and were coded as to which nuns showed an optimistic outlook and which a more pessimistic view of life. This is not an ideal way to measure optimism and pessimism, but it was the best the researchers could do with the data at hand. In spite of the rather crude measure, this was a great study because the nuns all lived in fairly similar and sheltered conditions for most of their lives, and their diet and daily activities were also similar.
When the nuns were contacted in the 1990s, 76 of the 180 had died. Over 50 percent of the nuns had exceeded their life expectancy, which was not particularly surprising given their abstinent and healthy lifestyles. The notable finding was that the optimistic nuns lived the longest. Those who had written upbeat diaries in their youth outlived their more negative sisters by an average of ten years. When we consider that giving up smoking is estimated to add maybe three to four years to your life, an extra ten years for a rosy outlook is remarkable.
So how does this work? If optimism really does help us to live longer, what could the mechanism possibly be? Is it because optimism makes us live in different ways, or could the happy thoughts themselves make a difference?
The fact that people who are buoyantly optimistic also tend to be resilient in the face of adversity provides one clue as to how optimism is associated with longevity. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, has found that resilient people use optimistic thoughts and positive emotions as a way to cope with difficult situations. She explains why this is effective with her “broaden and build” theory. The central concept is that positive emotions broaden the range of ideas we have for dealing with adverse situations. In a typical experiment people were given a temporary boost of “positivity”: they were given a bag of brightly colored candy or shown funny video clips. When then asked to write down what kinds of things they would like to do if they had a spare half hour, those in a positive mood came up with far more ideas than those who had watched a scary movie. This makes sense, since one of the functions of negative emotions like fear is to narrow our attention down to a potential threat. In contrast, positive emotions tend to expand and widen our attention, and they generally lead us to more creativity. The message here is that if you want a successful brainstorming session, get people into a happy and relaxed mood first, and the ideas will flow far more easily.
I find support for this broadening effect of positive emotions in a simple experiment we run in laboratory classes. We raise or lower our students’ mood states by showing them short clips of either a comedy or a sad movie. Following the video clip, everyone is given a range of puzzles and problems. Those in a positive mood are usually better at solving the puzzles than those in a darker mood. Put simply, when we are feeling positive emotions, like joy and happiness, our thoughts get more expansive, and this enables us to become more creative, enabling us to “think outside the box.”
This broadening effect of positive emotions can be very useful in helping us deal with difficulties in a more creative way. This can be seen in the burgeoning of compassion and togetherness that occurred in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York City. Fredrickson interviewed several people immediately after the attacks and found that, while there was grief and sadness, there was also a profound thankfulness to be alive. Indeed, she noticed that people who were able to express at least some positive emotions were more resilient and far less likely to slip into despair than those who were overcome by negativity.
Apart from the immediate benefits, according to Fredrickson, this aspect of good moods also allows us to build a range of personal resources that help us to cope with adversity in the longer term—good friends, hobbies, a pleasant physical environment, and so on—all of which are crucial when the bad times dawn. This is why optimistic people fared better following the 2001 terrorist attacks and almost certainly why Danner’s optimistic nuns lived an average of ten years beyond their gloomier sisters.
Prospective studies that follow people for a number of years also find that optimism is linked with better health and stronger resilience in a crisis. A study led by Mika Kivimaki and colleagues at the University of Helsinki in Finland assessed levels of optimism and pessimism in 5,000 people and then followed them for about three years. Some people experienced a major trauma, such as the death or serious illness of a family member. The levels of optimism people reported before the life-changing event turned out to be one of the best predictors of health and well-being afterward. The more optimistic we are, then, the healthier we are.
Anecdotal evidence supports this view. Take the example of Thomas Edison, who got a phone call in the early hours to say that his factory was on fire, with $120 million worth of equipment and building already destroyed. Even worse, his insurance company was quick to point out that it could cover only a small portion of the loss. Far from being distraught, Edison invited his friends and family to join him watching his beloved New Jersey factory and laboratories go up in flames. Friends were incredulous that he seemed calm in the face of the rapidly unfolding disaster. Once he had established that no one had been injured and that life was not in danger, he even seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. Edison saw the blaze as a fantastic opportunity to set about redesigning a new and better site.
Following the disaster, Edison quickly gathered a team together to redesign the factory along with a new suite of research labs. Reconstruction began just weeks after the fire, and within a year the new factory was up and running and making a profit. Proving Churchill’s dictum, he saw opportunity rather than disaster. Resilience and an ability to keep going in the face of disaster is a hallmark of optimism that stems directly from a sunny-brain style.
This affective mindset also comes in handy when dealing with the normal problems of everyday life. In tough financial times, such as during economic recessions, people often find it difficult to make basic decisions: Do we sell our house now or wait for things to improve? Should I take some extra courses and wait for the job market to improve? If we allow ourselves to get overwhelmed by self-doubt and pessimism, we tend to get stuck, unable to do anything. Optimists take problems like this in their stride and look to the future with hope and confidence.
The evidence is growing that this is not just down to thinking positively, but also because optimism leads us to engage in activities that put us in the way of opportunity, which in turn gives us the resilience not to accept defeat.
Madam C. J. Walker is an example. Born in 1867 on a plantation in Louisiana, this daughter of former slaves was orphaned by the age of seven, married at fourteen, and divorced by the time she was twenty. Against all the odds, she became America’s first self-made millionaire and was an inspiring social activist dedicated to improving the lot of both women and black people in America. She founded a successful company that made hair-care products, and she was in many ways a pioneer of the modern cosmetics industry. As beautifully told by her great-great-granddaughter, Madam Walker’s rags-to-riches story was fueled primarily by her irrepressible can-do attitude. Setbacks were tackled head-on with tireless energy. Friends and colleagues said that she would brush aside the deep-seated racism and sexism she encountered throughout her life. She walked a path paved with a deep-seated and unshakable belief in the goodness of people and hope for the future. Her story reminds us that optimism is not so much about feeling happy, nor necessarily a belief that everything will be fine, but about how we respond when times get tough. Optimists tend to keep going, even when it seems as if the whole world is against them.
It’s difficult to measure this kind of persistence in the lab, but Suzanne Segerstrom, a University of Kentucky psychologist, figured out a clever way of doing this with her graduate student Lise Solberg. Using the LOT-R, they measured dispositional optimism in fifty-four students and then presented them with eleven anagrams to solve in a twenty-minute period. The trick was that the first anagram (GGAWIL) was impossible to solve, and then it was followed by ten anagrams that varied in difficulty from moderate to very difficult. This maximized the early perception of difficulty. These are exactly the conditions under which we would expect optimism to have the strongest effects on persistence. The results were notable: the pessimists stuck with the first anagram for about a minute before giving up, but the optimists spent twice as long, trying to work out the impossible anagram for more than two minutes before giving up and moving on to the next.
Intriguingly, the team also found that this greater persistence on the task was also related with a surge of stress hormones and increases in physiological arousal. These costs muddy the water with regard to the links between optimism and better health. How can increased physiological stress be reconciled with the notion that optimism has benefits for our health?
The answer comes from another study conducted by Segerstrom. Testing large numbers of law students in their first year of study, she found that the optimists had greater physiological stress and poorer immune system functioning. This turned out to be due to the optimistic students being more likely to engage in conflicting goals. Law school is highly demanding, and socializing and making new friends often conflict with spending long hours studying in the library. Optimists were far more likely to do both and therefore burn themselves out, with the inevitable adverse consequences on their health.
The intriguing finding, though, was that these short-term costs disappeared in the second year of study, when the students’ immune functioning returned to normal. As a result of their increased engagement during the previous year, those who had worked the hardest now achieved the most, not only in their exams but also in building a supportive network of friends and colleagues. The short-term costs followed by longer-term gains helps to reconcile the apparently complex pattern of results on optimism and physical health. This is supported by the results of a meta-analysis—a study of studies—that was completed in 2009 and found strong evidence that optimism is associated with better physical health in the longer term.
Given optimists’ greater persistence, it comes as no surprise to find that optimism is also linked with success. In the business world, optimism is advantageous, since the ability to deal with failures is often required. While it might seem strange to link optimism with failure, without optimism it’s virtually impossible for budding entrepreneurs to put their plans into action. Setting up a business is all about maintaining a belief that things will work out, even though there are likely to be many hurdles and obstacles to overcome. Former British prime minister Winston Churchill, no stranger to adversity himself, said, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” This is why Thomas Edison, whose optimism was magnetic to those around him, constantly encouraged his workers to never give up. On one occasion, having realized that he had tried out more than 10,000 different ways to develop an electric lamp, he famously proclaimed: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
All these traits can be seen in abundance in the story of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Back in 1994 he had a eureka moment when he stumbled on a website that said the use of the web was growing by more than 2,000 percent a year. There must be a way of making money out of such growth, he thought. Going through many options, it dawned on Bezos that an online bookstore was perfect. While there is a physical limit to how many books can be stored in a bookstore or warehouse, an online store has the advantage of no limits—millions of books could be made instantly available with pictures and excerpts. And so Amazon.com was born.
Start-up costs were high, and the naysayers soon began to gather. Even though the online bookstore took off quickly, it was several years before Amazon started to turn a profit. Commentators warned Bezos that the company would fail. When Barnes & Noble entered the same market a couple of years later, most thought that Amazon was finished. A prominent investment analyst firm even declared the company “Amazon.toast.” Bezos himself was undeterred.
With a dedication to making Amazon an easy-to-use and completely customer-focused website, the company has gone from strength to strength. According to Bezos himself, one of his best assets, and the key to his success, is a sense of optimism. “Optimism is an essential ingredient for doing anything hard,” he says. This is why optimists, who cope better with failure, are often the most successful.
An optimistic mindset brings more than individual benefits; it can also be highly infectious and is frequently the instigator of social change. Instead of meandering meekly along the course that one’s background and family set out, an optimistic outlook often impels people to break boundaries. Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in a South African jail, never gave up hope. While no one could accuse him of being unrealistic, he also had a deep sense of optimism. He just knew deep in side himself that apartheid would crumble. Where most of us would have lost heart and given up, he never lost faith that justice would one day be done. Eventually it was, and people all around the world joined together to watch black South Africans vote for the first time ever and give Mandela a landslide victory in the presidential elections.
Another unlikely world leader, also fueled by optimism, addressed the US Democratic National Convention in 2004 and challenged delegates to aim for a politics of hope rather than a politics of cynicism. He pointed out that he himself was the most unlikely of senators. His father had been a goat herder in Kenya, eventually emigrating to study in the United States, where he married the daughter of an oil worker. He was not talking about “blind optimism,” he said, or “the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t talk about it.” He was painting a larger canvas in thinking about the “hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!”
That skinny kid with the funny name has now made it to the White House, and alongside Barack Obama’s many abilities, there’s little doubt that his constant hope and optimism played a part in getting him to where he is today. A friend of mind was at Obama’s presidential acceptance speech in Chicago in November 2008, and he recounted the energy that seemed to pervade the crowd. “The excitement and sense of hope was palpable,” he told me. “Everybody was swept along on a wave of togetherness and a real optimism that things finally really were getting better.” International surveys conducted at the time showed that this wave of optimism not only swept around America but also engulfed the entire world.
Optimism is infectious because hope against the odds is one of the most inspirational characteristics of the human spirit. Shirin Ebadi is a case in point. Growing up in Tehran in the 1950s, her childhood was spent in a family that she describes as “filled with kindness and affection.” Studying law at Tehran University, she was the first woman in Iran to be appointed a judge. Following the Islamic Revolution in February 1979, she was dismissed along with all other female lawyers in the country and assigned to secretarial work, since, according to the Revolutionary Council, woman were “not suited” to such roles. Unemployed for many years, Ebadi never gave up. She finally regained a license to practice law in 1992. She took on many controversial cases and continues to tirelessly pursue social justice for the women and children of Iran. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, she is now one of the leading human rights campaigners in the world, even though she still remains unappreciated by her own government.
The kind of optimistic mindset, and ability to act, that unites such disparate people as Shirin Ebadi, Nelson Mandela, Jeff Bezos, Thomas Edison, and Michael J. Fox is what drives the human race forward. It’s this sense of hope and resilience that’s likely to have helped us walk out of Africa and spread around the globe millions of years ago, the only species to thrive in almost every climate. Without the ability to persist, it’s hard to imagine how human societies could bounce back from disasters. Think of the devastation following the tsunami in Japan, or the floods in New Orleans, or the bombed-out cities lying in ruins across Europe after the Second World War. The rebuilding efforts that take place after these catastrophic events are based on people working together in a spirit of hope and optimism that allows human societies to flourish.