There’s a part of our brain connected to optimism and it’s called Ventral Anterior Cingulate.
The Ventral Anterior Cingulate is the frontal part of the Cingulate Cortex, which is an extensive area of the limbic brain. This part of the brain mediates the feelings of optimism and helps control the Amygdala.
Right next to the Ventral Anterior Cingulate is the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex, which is also close to the Amygdala, the part of the brain that processes pain.
These two parts of the brain (the one related to optimism and the one related to pain) communicate closely with the Prefrontal Cortex and with each other. This communication is what influences your emotional perception of the world.
The same region (Ventral Anterior Cingulate) can be practically used to combat pessimism.
The first step is to imagine the possibility of positive future events – it’s not required of you to believe they will happen, but just that they could happen.
When you recognize that good things are possible, the Ventral Anterior Cingulate activates and it helps regulate the Amygdala.
To make it simpler, when you think about the good things that could happen, you keep under control the negative bias.
Even though we know where to find optimism in the brain…
The more I read about the brain, the clearer it becomes that we live an interesting paradox.
The average weight of an adult brain is around 1.3-1.4 kilograms, and its size… could be easily approximated. Squeeze your left and right fists and put them next to each other. That should give you an idea about how big the brain of an adult is. About the size of two fists next to each other.
The paradox is about the multitude of information the brain can accumulate and the complex functions it is responsible for, having in mind the small space required to make it all happen.
When I became aware of this paradox, I reminded myself of spirituality. And here I have a metaphor that I want to share with you.
Imagine a classroom where all kinds of things are happening but you don’t have access inside. Maybe there are 30 students, 2 students, or 500 students inside. Maybe they run, meditate, paint, or sleep. You have no idea what is going on.
All you know is there’s a classroom because I told you about it. Just as that, you know there are some students because I told you about it. But what you do know, because everyone says it and because it was proven to you scientifically, is that the access to this classroom is made through a door.
You can choose to understand this door and look at photos of this door on the Internet. There are many books written about it and you can choose to read about it, but that’s it.
I would like to go back to the complexity of our paradox and share one more thing: maybe the part of the brain where we find optimism is just a simple door. The same thing is available for any other part of the brain.
And you could think that the classroom is the mind. But it’s just a definition you put on something you don’t know about. Maybe we’ve chosen to name “mind” all the information we have access to and to believe it is ours, that we store it somewhere and we can access it. But simply because that’s how we decided to define it, it doesn’t mean it’s happening like that.
The truth is, we don’t know many things about our minds. We don’t know where the information we collect is going. But when we collect information that we try to access, we can see on brain scans that one part of the brain becomes active: the hippocampus. But again, maybe the hippocampus is just a door we open so we can access whatever is beyond us.
The paradox of understanding the things we don’t understand
This year I finished a 4-month certification in neuroscience and everything I learned there gave me the impression that I know a bit better how the brain works.
I learned how the brain behaves when you think and what it does with the information it receives from the body when the body senses something. I learned about change, goals, synchronicities, and many other things. I even received the tools I need so I could help others better understand these things.
All these so I can understand that I didn’t understand anything.
All the information I got is nothing more than definitions about things we don’t know anything about, so we can become more comfortable with not knowing.
And the paradox is that, because we think we know, we continue advancing in the direction where we think we know, and we continue making things work because we think we know. When, in fact, we have no idea.
With love and optimism,
David
