Thinking Beyond Science

Human learning often boils down to one simple model: prediction error. Now largely handled by robots and AI, it works like this—every action, from mundane greetings to complex decisions, relies on an internal simulation of what’s about to happen. Picture stepping into a lift and saying hello; you expect a polite nod back. If the response veers wildly—overly effusive or icy cold—surprise hits, highlighting the gap between your model and reality.

This ties into how our brains process good versus bad news. Desirable info lights up neurons in the left prefrontal cortex’s inferior frontal gyrus. Undesired news activates its right-hemisphere counterpart. These regions strike a balance, but with two quirks: we overweight good news, fostering baseline optimism, and individual differences reveal our optimism wiring. Left-side activation is uniform for pleasant surprises, but right-side firing for bad news varies wildly—minimal in optimists who shrug it off, amplified in pessimists who dwell.

Optimism’s Double-Edged Sword

Excessive optimism drives action, adventure, and innovation—like moon landings—while linking to better health and life satisfaction. It’s a “little insanity” spurring us forward; its opposite, pessimism, breeds inaction or depression. Yet pitfalls abound. Bedtime resolve to rise early for exercise crumbles by morning, as the night-self vanishes under sleepiness and hedonistic bed-pleasure. This stems from the nucleus accumbens in the limbic system, which amps up risk-ignoring by chasing pleasure.

Adolescence exemplifies this. Brain development isn’t uniform—early-maturing reward centers like the nucleus accumbens clash with the relatively immature prefrontal cortex, which curbs impulses and weighs future costs. (Forget the myth that teen risk spikes solely from prefrontal immaturity; young kids, with even less development, take fewer risks.) The result? Heightened optimism-fueled daring.

Our brains evolved to literally ignore negative future aspects, manufacturing outsized confidence.

Biases That Shape Our Worldview

Enter the halo effect: judging one trait through the lens of others, tainting decisions in daily life, education, politics, and justice. No one escapes it. This flows from confirmation bias, our tendency to slice reality to fit preconceptions, prioritizing first impressions over facts.

Vision illustrates this vividly—it’s no passive camera but an active constructor, blending retinal data with memories, language, and sounds in the visual cortex to hypothesize scenes. Perception is imagination-painting, not photography, and we trust our illusions completely, as visual tricks prove.

Finally, theory of mind—grasping others’ mental states—emerges from a network anchored in the right temporoparietal junction. Brain location matters less than how it unveils causal machinery behind complex functions.

In essence, our prediction-driven brains bias us toward optimism, riddled with helpful flaws that propel us—yet demand self-awareness to navigate.

Source : The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides by Mariano Sigman

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32498119-the-secret-life-of-the-mind

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