Optimism vs Pessimism and the Brain

S

SamEyeAm

Mannikin
As Mr. Ligotti suggests it's tough being a pessimist in a society full of optimists. The way I see it, pessimism includes taking a cold hard look at things the optimist can't or won't consider. My father used to bristle whenever I would be critical of anything American. He simply did not want to hear it. I mean, why not? Isn't there always room for improvement? I tried over the years to get my head around things like climate denialism and could never understand how people could hold a stance like that given all the evidence.

All that said I just recently I came across the work of Dr Iain McGilchrist - a Psychiatrist and Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins. McGilchrist's first book "The Master and His Emissary" shines a new light on our divided brain that I think has broad implications for understanding the neurological structures that contribute to our world views. Simply put, as we've evolved the hemisphere's have fallen out of balance. With the narrowly focused and self serving left hemisphere asserting dominance over the more open and contextualized right. The corpus callosum, which sits in between often inhibits or blocks communication from one side to the other. Could this be how denial takes place? I may be off base but I think there are some interesting insights here.

If this is of interest to anyone here's a short video that summarizes his findings:

Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain | TED Talk
 
I read Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary a while back, it's a good book.

I think the left / right hemisphere distinctions can be a bit overstated in some discussions, but the general distinction between two types of thinking makes broad sense. Alongside split-brain experiments, another interesting case is Jill Bolte-Taylor's experience of a left-hemisphere stroke, which she talks about in a TED talk titled "My Stroke of Insight."

I think pessimism belongs to the more rational type of thinking (left-hemisphere in this view). I think you could frame it as reducing the value of life in general to a calculus of suffering, on which grounds existence is hard to justify. This rational argument comes into conflict with a wider sense of meaning, where life and our experiences have a value to the individual which is ultimately non-rational.

I do think you have a point here, and perhaps certain types of denialism come from this non-rational type of thinking overriding logical considerations. Maybe that's the opposite way round to the general thrust of McGilchrist's book, which is more concerned about the rational dominating everything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
 
Good call on linking McGilchrist's book and schema to the matter of pessimism vs. optimism. I sense there's much potential here. And in any case, McGilchrist is simply a fascinating thinker and scholar whose core insight is truly helpful and clarifying on a broad scale.
 
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