Unemployment, divorce, debt, Alzheimer’s disease, and any number of misfortunes rarely appear in our predictions. Bright chances are you’ll imagine an optimistic one, where you’re successful at work, have better relationships, are financially secure, and have stable health. Instead, according to researchers, the core function of this system is to imagine the future.īrain imaging studies show that the same brain structures that get used when we recollect our past get engaged when we think of the future.Ĭlose your eyes and imagine a future. And the neural system that enables us to do this may not have been developed for that purpose at all. The episodes we recollect from the past are not always accurate. This summary includes key lessons and takeaways from the book. It’s a collection of quotes from the book and my own thoughts. This is my book summary of The Optimism Bias by Tali Sharot. If we learn how to use this bias to our benefit, we can reduce stress and anxiety and instead, motivate ourselves to act and be more productive. Without it, we would never get out of bed. This bias is the reason why we take actions that make our lives better, like studying, taking up a job, getting married, and making friends. She received her Ph.D from New York University.The optimism bias is the tendency to overestimate the chances of encountering positive events in the future and underestimate the chances of experiencing negative events. She was a speaker at TED’s annual conference 2012 and held fellowships from the British Academy and Wellcome Trust. Sharot’s work has been used by businesses to improve leadership skills, rethink messaging and refine strategy. She has also written essays for Time (cover story), The New York Times and the Guardian among others.ĭr. This work has been the subject of features in many outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, the BBC and others. Her papers have been published in top scientific journals including Nature, Science and Nature Neuroscience. They are constantly being shaped by the future.” In her own work, she’s interested in how our natural optimism actually shapes what we remember, and her interesting range of papers encompasses behavioural research (how likely we are to misremember major events) as well as medical findings - like searching for the places in the brain where optimism lives. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot wants to know why: What is it about our brains that makes us overestimate the positive? She explores the question in her book The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, reviewing findings from both social science and neuroscience that point to an interesting conclusion: “our brains aren’t just stamped by the past. Optimism bias is the belief that the future will be better, much better, than the past or present. Both of which received the British Psychological Society Book award. Tali Sharot is the author of “The Influential Mind” and “The Optimism Bias”. Sharot is dedicated to answering such questions with an aim at identifying ways to encourage behavioural change that enhance well-being.ĭr. Sharot combines research in psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience to reveal the forces that shape our decisions, beliefs and inaccurate expectations of the future and how those can be altered (or sustained).īoth a visiting professor at MIT and an associate professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London where she directs the Affective Brain Lab, Dr. She is a neuroscientist by trade, but Dr. Tali Sharot is a leading expert on human decision-making, optimism and emotion.
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