Chuck Bryan

It's possible that these people who are recalling their childhood are the optimists are recalling their childhood in more favorable terms and the pessimists are calling them in less favorable terms.

And there has to be like a word for when the thing you're studying acts as a confounding factor in the study of itself.

Could not find it to save the life of me.

So if you're a researcher out there and you know what that is, tell me because I've been dying.

But that's essentially what they were saying.

They still said, no, this study still stands, but they at least did acknowledge that it's possible.

It was the thing being studied.

Optimism was influencing the study itself.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

There's got to be a certain bias, like a blank bias, you know.

Blank bias.

Good enough.

If you're wondering about the brain itself, like just your physical brain, your noodle, as they say, they have found differences, obviously, in optimist and pessimist brains and how they're built, like your gray matter volume, but also how they activate.

And there was a study again from this year in twenty twenty five.

And I thought this is pretty interesting, where optimists share patterns, like the wonder machine lights up in kind of the same way when optimists imagine future events, whereas when pessimists imagine future events, they may all be imagining something negative, but it's all individual to that person and how the MRI machine lights up.

I think this is maybe the most interesting thing that has been turned up about this so far.

Yeah, it is.

It's just like groupthink versus like, no, I have a personal negative outlook that's only mine.

Yeah.