I remember watching 500 Days of Summer a few weeks ago and boring Jitka about how it's just plain wrong that they didn't get it together.  Of course the men amongst my readers might counter that it's just plain wrong that I was watching such a movie in the first place, but yaboo to you.

I like to think I'm a pretty optimistic kinda guy, but sometimes it can take on the form of unrealistic optimism.  Just as in the film you can be blind to the reality of things, be that with the unrequited love in the movie, or otherwise.  We're much better at imaging happy outcomes than we are sad ones.

Some new research looks to get to the bottom of why we do this.  The researchers had participants estimate the probability of experiencing some 80 various life events.  After they gave this estimation they were given the actual probability of each event happening given their personal circumstances.  Participants were given a chance to re-estimate again later on.

Interestingly people were much more likely to revise their estimate if it was overly pessimistic than if it was overly optimistic.  They literally paid more attention to the positive feedback than to the negative feedback.

The researchers had brain scans setup during each experiment and found that different parts of the brain were used depending on whether the initial estimate was pessimistic or optimistic.  If they were too pessimistic to begin with the frontal lobes saw increased activity.  This increased activity correlated with their subsequent upgrading of their prediction.