New article on Nautilus Magazine

A quick update: Nautilus Magazine has just published a new short article written by yours truly. It's about an intriguing new experimental result in psychology: for some reason, optimists have similar brain activity to each other, while each pessimist's neurons fire differently.

The article is titled "How Optimists Are Alike," and you can read it here.

Nautilus articles are paywalled: if you're subscribed to Nautilus, I hope you'll enjoy the read. You might also like these other two articles I wrote a while back about aphantasia: 1, 2.

There's one study result I found particularly interesting but couldn't explore fully in today's article due to space constraints. It turns out optimists aren't optimistic because they see positive events more positively than pessimists—they're optimistic because they think about negative events in a more abstract, distant way. Pessimists, on the other hand, seem to visualize negative events as vividly as the positive ones. Perhaps that is enough to make all the difference. ●