Click Here to Read: Neural Responses Reveal Our Optimistic Bent. Why adjusting our expectations to reality is so difficult By Andrea Anderson in the Scientific American on April 10, 2012.
Areas in the prefrontal cortex spring to action when we learn our risk of misfortune is lower than we thought. If the risk is higher, the right inferior frontal gyrus responds. Image: From “How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality,” by Tali Sharot, Christoph W. Korn and Raymond J. Dolan, in Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 14; 2011