Our Tendency to Think the Worst: Why Does Our Self-Talk So Often Default to the Negative

Illustration by the author.

Philosophers and psychologists have long studied how the mind works, how our thinking relates to our behavior and how our beliefs impact our moods. In more recent years scientists have entered the game, examining the manner in which our very synapses fire or fail to fire, getting an inside look at the electrical impulses that zing through that grey matter we carry inside our skulls.

The nature of neurosis and how memory works are two themes that I've often pondered, and today's theme is similarly a lifelong companion. Why do our minds so frequently veer toward the negative? How is it that when something happens, or doesn't, we automatically think the worst.

The Beatles' White Album has a song that exemplifies this tendency, albeit in an almost hilarious way. Do you know which one I am talking about? It's written and sung by Ringo Starr, his first solo composition. He actually played it for the group in 1962 when he first joined The Beatles.

The song begins with the singer waiting for his girl friend to show up. When she remains absent, he thinks the worst.

I listen for your footsteps
Coming up the drive.
Listen for your footsteps
But they don't arrive.
Waiting for your knock, dear
On my old front door.
I don't hear it,
Does it mean you don't love me anymore?

Who hasn't been there? Waiting for a call. Waiting for a letter.

Illustration by the author.

In the film Immortal Beloved, Gary Oldman as Beethoven finds his wagon wheels stuck in the mud due to a heavy rain while attempting to reach a woman in waiting for a tryst. The anguish of this moment is expressed in the film score which plays the agonizing Second Movement of his Seventh Symphony.

Don't Pass Me By continues with Ringo lamenting, home alone, listening to the clock tick, and wondering where she is.

If you know the song, then you know the rest of the story. I can still remember watching my dad laugh out loud when the third verse was sung.

I'm sorry that I doubted you,
I was so unfair.
You were in a car crash,
And you lost your hair.
You said that you would be late
About an hour or two.
I said, "That's alright, I'm waiting here,
Just waiting to hear from you."

I know, it sounds awful--the car crash part--but it's sung in a country honk style that you can't take seriously. My point is that this tendency to think the worst, which my psychologist brother calls "awfulizing," is nearly universal.

THE TRIGGER for this blog post was a statement that Transition Life Coach Yana Stockman made in a talk she gave in December. She noted that we have two voices in our heads, the negative "Survival" brain and our true self.

Inc magazine recently published an article on the negativity bias. According to neuroscience our brains are actually wired to veer toward the negative as a protective device. Fortunately, we can break the spell negative thinking has on our minds. The first step is to Notice when we're doing this.

Introspection helps us recognize when we're feeding our minds with negative inputs. Next we Shift gears. That is, we choose a positive input. This can be something as simple as a choice to adopt an attitude of gratitude. After shifting we then Rewire. You can find the full article below in the Related Links.

Sometimes we can laugh at ourselves afterwards. In truth, once we get on that negative track it can take us right down a rabbit hole. Examples abound, and you no doubt have a few yourself.

Years ago I remember reading a book titled Telling Yourself the Truth, in which the author stated that much of what happens to us is directly related to our thinking. I just looked it up and the back cover blurb makes this statement: "Wrong thinking produces wrong emotions, wrong reactions, wrong behavior--and unhappiness! Learning to deal with your thoughts is the first step on the road to healthy thinking."

Much more can be said, but this enough to give you a nudge in the event your thinking is stuck in a rut.

Related Links
The Neuroscience of Breaking Out of Negative Thinking
A Visit with Transition Life Coach Yana Stockman

Neural Networks: Mark Humphries Discusses the Latest Discoveries Regarding Memory, Consciousness and Cognition

Photo by Daniel Hjalmarsson on Unsplash

I've been fascinated with how the brain works for as long as I can remember, keeping a "dream diary" from junior high till college, studying consciousness from a philosophical viewpoint in college half a century ago. During the course of a lifetime we have been repeatedly reminded that neuroscience has become remarkably advanced. For this reason, I reached out to a fellow Medium writer who specializes in this field. Not only are the topics engaging that he writes about, Dr. Mark Humphries writes about them in an engaging manner. (e.g.: How To Find Out If Your Brain Is a Computer, and end dumb arguments about metaphors.) The work he and his team are doing seems absolutely fascinating. I'm certain you will come away with the same impressions I have, that we are living in a compelling period in history.

EN: How does memory work?

Dr. Mark Humphries: Memory comes in many forms, and those forms seem to map onto different brain regions. One broad division of memory is into three: stuff that happened to you (episodic memory); stuff that you know (declarative memory); and stuff you know how to do (procedural memory). From research in psychology, we know a lot about how these kinds of memories can be manipulated in humans, and the time-scales at which they work.

But our interest lies in how the brain actually creates its representations, and uses them. And here that means understanding how neurons create, store, and recall memories. Unsurprisingly, we know much less about the nitty-gritty, because we can only capture the activity of a tiny handful of neurons at a time, relative to size of the number of neurons involved. And because we can only do this work in animals - it is tough to test memories of facts in a rat.

That said, we do have a beautiful theory of how neurons store and recall episodic memory. I give a full account of recall here and of making a memory here, but the basic idea of recalling a memory is simple. We recall an episodic memory based on some prompt - like the smell of baking bread reminding you of playing in your grandmother’s kitchen. We think the prompts coming from the world around you - the smells, the objects, the sounds - are fed into a bit of hippocampus with rather special wiring between its neurons. A specific memory is stored in that bit of hippocampus as the set of neurons that are active together; say neurons 120, 3045, and 10567 firing together mean “playing in grandmother’s kitchen as a child”. Those neurons are connected together.

The key is that the incoming prompt need only activate some of the neurons representing a single episodic memory. In our example, the neurons that represent the smell of the bread are only a few of the neurons representing the many things in that memory. So the baking smell turns on just a few of them. But, then, because those neurons are connected to all the other neurons that make up the complete memory, these other neurons are also activated - and the complete memory is recalled!

EN: Where does the “I” in self consciousness reside? In what way is consciousness connected to the brain? (For example, I have an out of body experience and see myself lying in the road after an accident.)

MH: The scientific study of consciousness waxes and wanes. While much of it remains controversial, what isn’t controversial is that we have no insight into how self-consciousness, or other forms of consciousness, arises from the firing of individual neurons. This is an ethical problem: generally speaking, the more confident we are that a species has a self-consciousness approaching ours in complexity, the less we will tolerate the kinds of experiments that record neurons in their brains.

The only way we can get a peek at brain activity in a human is via neuroimaging - fMRI, EEG etc. These are fantastic tools, but get nowhere close to neurons. fMRI is best, yet it records blood flow in volumes of tissue around neurons; and each little coloured speck in a fMRI image is somewhere around 100,000 neurons typically.

So at the moment, neuroscience is silent on where the “I” in self-conscious resides. But that experience of the “single” consciousness is made up of many elements - like memory, awareness, perception and so on. What animal studies and fMRI can show us is that brain activity related to those elements are distributed all over the brain, including in regions below cortex. So it seems likely “I” am spread over billions of neurons.

Anil Seth has just published an accessible introduction to the neuroscience of consciousness here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2398212818816019

EN: In technology we hear a lot of discussion about A.I. and “the Singularity.” What is the next “big thing” in Neuroscience?

MH: Neuroscience’s “singularity” moment will come when all the current explosive advances in technology are brought together. Right now we can record from exponentially more neurons than we could 10 years ago, and do it in awake, moving animals that are solving problems; we can trace the connections between neurons by tagging them each with a unique barcode of synthetic RNA, and finding out where that tag ends up as its gets passed along each neuron’s wires; and we can turn neurons on and off using light. Each alone is a really powerful bit of kit for advancing science.

The next big thing is then when all three of these collide: when we can trace the connections between the neurons we are recording from right now, and so work out which we want to turn on and off. With that, we can test all sorts of hypotheses that are impossible right now. Crucially, we will be able to finally reach that gold standard of science: causality. Did neuron A make neuron B fire? If we can record it and trace it and trigger it, then: yes.

EN: What was the biggest Neuroscience story of 2018?

MH: One that was totally outlandish came from Jason Shepherd’s lab back in January. As a mark of how potentially huge it was: I’m a theorist of how neurons give rise to behaviour, this work was on sub-cellular genetics, and it still blew my mind.

I’ve yet to fully digest it myself, but the rough gist is this: there is a gene called Arc that we know is involved in some types of learning, like learning a new skill. We know it’s involved because people can knock-out this specific gene from mice, and the mice cannot learn new movements. And the Arc gene often turns up in those big fishing expeditions for genes that are different in various disorders of brain development. We also know that the protein this gene makes -- the cunningly named Arc protein -- is involved in changing things at the synapse between two neurons, to make that synapse weaker or stronger. In short, this Arc gene is one part of the mechanics of how neurons change during learning.

Jason Shepherd’s lab gave us a totally new view of how this gene (and its protein) may drive learning. They showed that Arc creates a bag around its own messenger RNA (mRNA), the bit of RNA that encodes the instructions of how to make the Arc protein. And that bag is released from the neuron, letting the mRNA for Arc cross from one neuron into another. What that means is crazy: the instructions to make the Arc protein inside one neuron - to change its synapses - can be transmitted into other nearby neurons, and make the same protein there. Even if those nearby neurons have not switched on their own Arc gene.

It all suggests that we have a new, exciting avenue to explore for how brains learn: that neurons tell each other when they are changing their synapses, by passing around mRNA.

EN: How did you come to take an interest in neuroscience?

Design by Tara Austin. 

MH: I came at it via coding. Big into computers as a kid, I was interested in robots and AI. When deciding what to do at university I came across a degree called “Cognitive Science”, which married coding, neuroscience, psychology, AI, and a bit of philosophy chucked in for good measure. Sounded fantastic for someone who couldn’t decide what to do - just do everything. And I was lucky that the psychology department teaching on the degree had a really strong, deep systems neuroscience team - so we were taught neuroscience from year 1, and the deep dives into various brain systems (basal ganglia, cerebellum) and animal behaviour came as we got further in. I’ve been discussing theories for how the brain works at the level of neurons since the second year of my degree - over 20 years now!

EN: Finally, what are you currently working on that gets you excited?

MH: Like most scientists -- and certainly most theorists -- I’m most excited by what I’m about to work on, and deeply fed up with what I’m currently working on -- because the future project will of course not be full of all the dead-ends, backtracking, and mistakes in the current ones!

Still, we’ve got some cool stuff in the pipeline. One thing we’re looking at is what the prefrontal cortex knows about. The enigmatic bit of cortex that sits behind your forehead, its thought involved in learning about the complex facets of the world - what action leads to what outcome, and what needs to be held in memory in order to make sense of the world. We’ve been asking what populations of neurons in prefrontal cortex remember about what just happened when someone -- a rat in this case -- is learning a task to get reward. Specifically we’re interested if those neurons have to learn to remember -- if there are certain things that are only remembered when it becomes clear they are relevant to understanding how the world works.

The short answer so far is: the same group of prefrontal cortex neurons remember many things at the same time, some of which they can remember without learning. They remember those things from the very first time they happen (like, in our case, whether the rat chose to go right or left at a junction).

But learning only seems to happen once those memories get synchronized. The group of neurons synchronize their activity just before the rat’s “aha!” moment of learning. It’s as though the key to learning any complex action is to take the memories of the individual relevant things (“I turned right”, “I got reward”) and synchronized them (“I turned right *and* got reward”).

* * * *
Thank you Dr. Humphries. I will look forward to reading more of your writings in the year ahead. 

Humphries Lab is currently located in the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham.

Key Links
Lab website: https://www.humphries-lab.org/
Neuroscience news for all: https://medium.com/the-spike
Twitter: @markdhumphries
Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Engage it.

The Optimism Challenge

They’re spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
--Desolation Row, Bob Dylan

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Is your glass half empty or half full?

Optimism is an interesting phenomenon. Every now and then I hear motivational speakers whose words truly fire one up. You feel confident enough to wrestle a bull bare-handed. Other times, these messengers of hope strike me as peddlers with dubious motives at best. "Make a fortune flipping houses!"

Life involves risk, but can our tendency toward optimism deceive us into taking unnecessary and imprudent risks? How can we know whether our optimism is healthy or unfounded?

Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience have produced some very interesting books. One that I read recently again for the second time is Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions.  Here's another. The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, by Tali Sharot.

As I look back over my life I see numerous occasions where optimism has served me well. For example, your odds of finding a job in a tough economy increase significantly when you feel confident. On the other hand, I've also seen and experienced instances of foolishness caused by an exuberance stirred by unchecked optimism.

In The Optimism Bias author Tali Sharot's premise is that we're actually wired in the direction of optimism. You might say that our brains are wired to see the world through rose-colored glasses (hence the cover art here.) A cognitive neuroscientist, her 2012 TED Talk carry's this descriptor: Are we born to be optimistic, rather than realistic? Tali Sharot shares new research that suggests our brains are wired to look on the bright side — and how that can be both dangerous and beneficial.

* * * *
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." ~Sir Winston Churchill

This is an interesting statement. Mr. Churchill's observation is that optimism and pessimism exist apart from circumstances. That is, whatever the circumstances, people can be disposed toward hope or despair. In other words, optimism is an internal disposition, much like Little Orphan Annie who's continuous refrain was, "The sun will come out tomorrow."

* * * *
So, how can a person tell whether their optimism is founded or unfounded? Here's an example of how optimism can deceive:

Many years ago I worked for a company that manufactured a specialized technology. In an effort to increase sales they would frequently develop new products in areas that were not in precise alignment with what they produced. On one occasion they invented a machine that would purportedly make it easier for people in the industry to use the products they made. The machine, however, was expensive so they needed to forecast how many would sell in order to meet demand.

Sales forecasting is something that all companies deal with, lest they be stuck with inventory or perhaps create demand that they cannot fulfill.

When it came time to make a decision regarding the quantity of machines to produce, the president called a meeting of all the marketing and sales staff and grilled them as regards how many machines we each believed would sell. One said 500, another said 1000, etc. Then, he pulled out little pieces of paper which he handed to everyone in the room so we could write the number they really believed would sell. I wrote the number 200, because the lowest number given was 400. I figured it was a new technology and might be more difficult to sell than they realized.

There was one person in the room who had not been as wildly enthusiastic as some of the others. (I'll call him Pete.) This was, in part, because he had had experience as the kind of person we were planning to sell these machines to. When all the votes were in, the president read off the predictions. Pete had written the numeral four.

The decision was made to make the machines, but to err on the side of smaller quantities. When all was said and done, that first year the company indeed only sold four. And in all four cases the customers became frustrated with the contraptions and returned them.

Why was my "conservative" guess of 200 so wildly optimistic? Because of another defect in our social interactions: the influence of peer pressure. If my number was too low I might offend the super-optimists at the table. It takes a very strong person to stand their ground when they are out of alignment. As my brother once said, "Sometimes it's hard to be the smartest person in the room." In this case, that was Pete. He saw clearly the challenges ahead, and probably the deficiencies of the machine.

Much more could be said, but I'll close with this. It takes restraint to temper one's enthusiasm for an idea, or manage expectations when leading a team. The world we live in is out of balance. When emotion gets stirred in, our perceptions can also become distorted. Therefore, to find Aristotle's Golden Mean between optimism and realism is the Optimism Challenge.

The Mandela Effect: Is There Another You in a Parallel Universe?

This weekend a friend of mine asked if I noticed that "something has changed." I didn't understand the question. He went on to state that the world has changed in some very subtle ways and that if you weren't attuned to it you might not notice. He referred to it as The Mandela Effect.

Naturally I was curious. Google has answers for everything, so I inquired because inquiring minds want to know. Here's the first link I found, with twenty examples of the phenomenon.

Reading about The Mandela Effect brought to mind our seemingly eternal fascination with things inexplicable, from the Great Pyramids to flying saucers and UFOs. When I was young I was drawn to books like Frank Edwards' Stranger Than Science, and its sequels. The universe does have some rather baffling features, so it's only natural that our curiosity attracts us to that which appears inexplicable.

Films like The Matrix provide lingo with which we're able to talk about these things. When someone suggests that there's been "a glitch in the matrix" we have a mutual understanding of the concept that doesn't require any further explanation.

Magicians and mentalists have long known about the tricks our brain plays on us, hence they are able to pull sleights of mind that manipulate memory and sometimes unsettle us. In recent years neuroscience is just now catching up to what these mesmerizing professionals have been tapping into for ages.

So where did the term "Mandela Effect" come from? Obviously it could not have preceded Nelson Mandela so it's of fairly recent vintage as an name or title of a concept. It turns out that the relatively new tag originated with a blogger named Fiona Broome. She described the phenomenon as "what happens when someone has a clear memory of something that never happened in this reality." Ms. Broome proposes that it's not our memories that are faulty here. Rather, she suggests that there are alternate realities, parallel histories, and that our minds are crossing over through tears in the veil. For some, the Mandela Effect is a curiosity, and for others it's apparently becoming a quest.

Philosophers and mystics have long grappled with the nature of reality. How much of these current currents are just mind games? According to this article in The Sun, there are even scientists exploring the possibilities of parallel universes.

If you enjoy this kind of speculation, you might enjoy my story An Unremembered History of the World, which is the centerpiece of my book of short stories titled Unremembered Histories.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Maybe even more than you realize.