Does Thinking Positive Really Help?

Aug. 25, 2010 — -- Scientists may have found a physiological explanation for the power of positive thinking. When optimists and pessimists attempt the same task, their different attitudes are reflected in different neural activities in their brains.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology found that participants in brain-scanning experiments who thought they were doing well on a complex task had greater neural activity in a high-level area of the brain called the posterior parietal cortex (PPT).

Different neural activity was observed in the brains of participants who thought they were doing poorly.

The implication in those results is that personal attitudes may pre-program us to succeed if we are optimists, and protect ourselves against failure if we are pessimists. Does that mean that optimists are more likely to succeed, as other experiments have suggested?

Not without limitations. In the Caltech experiments, changes in how the brains "lit up" depended on how the participants thought they had performed, not on whether they were successful or not. There was no correlation between neural activity and actual performance. Optimists were just as likely to fail at the task as were pessimists, and vice versa.

That may seem contradictory, but the results suggest that while optimism may be helpful and even give someone a boost up the ladder of success, it's not likely to overwhelm a person's actual ability to perform better than someone else.

Of course, these conclusions go far beyond the limited objectives of the Caltech team of researchers, who are concentrating on understanding the neural mechanism involved in translating sensual stimuli into motor actions.

How do you duck if you see a baseball heading for your nose? Lots of questions are involved in that seemingly simple function.

"We are trying to understand the transition between the sensory input and subsequent motor actions," Igor Kagan, senior research fellow in biology at Caltech, said in a telephone interview. He is co-author of a paper in the August issue of PLoS Biology.