There are few accomplishments, large or small, that don’t depend to some degree on the accomplisher believing in him- or herself, and the greatest accomplishments are the most likely to rely on that person being not only optimistic but unreasonably optimistic. It’s not a good idea to believe you are Jesus, but believing you can become an NBA player—or, like Jobs, come back from the humiliating defeat of being ejected from your own company, or be a great scientist or author or actor or singer—may serve you very well indeed. Even if it doesn’t end up turning out to be true in the details of what you accomplish, belief in the self is an ultimately positive force in life. As Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”45 If you believe the dots will connect down the road, it will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path.
I’ve attempted, in writing this book, to illuminate the many ways in which a person’s unconscious mind serves them. For me, the extent to which my inner unknown self guides my conscious mind came as a great surprise. An even greater surprise was the realization of how lost I would be without it. But of all the advantages our unconscious provides, it is this one that I value most. Our unconscious is at its best when it helps us create a positive and fond sense of self, a feeling of power and control in a world full of powers far greater than the merely human. The artist Salvador Dalí once said, “Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí?”46 Dalí may have been a sweet guy or he may have been an insufferable egomaniac, but there is something wonderful about his unrestrained and unabashedly optimistic vision of his future.
The psychological literature is full of studies illustrating the benefits—both personal and social—of holding positive “illusions” about ourselves.47 Researchers find that when they induce a positive mood, by whatever means, people are more likely to interact with others and more likely to help others. Those feeling good about themselves are more cooperative in bargaining situations and more likely to find a constructive solution to their conflicts. They are also better problem solvers, more motivated to succeed, and more likely to persist in the face of a challenge. Motivated reasoning enables our minds to defend us against unhappiness, and in the process it gives us the strength to overcome the many obstacles in life that might otherwise overwhelm us. The more of it we do, the better off we tend to be, for it seems to inspire us to strive to become what we think we are. In fact, studies show that the people with the most accurate self-perceptions tend to be moderately depressed, suffer from low self-esteem, or both.48 An overly positive self-evaluation, on the other hand, is normal and healthy.49
I imagine that, fifty thousand years ago, anyone in their right mind looking toward the harsh winters of northern Europe would have crawled into a cave and given up. Women seeing their children die from rampant infections, men watching their women die in childbirth, human tribes suffering drought, flood, and famine must have found it difficult to keep courageously marching forward. But with so many seemingly insurmountable barriers in life, nature provided us with the means to create an unrealistically rosy attitude about overcoming them—which helps us do precisely that.
As you confront the world, unrealistic optimism can be a life vest that keeps you afloat. Modern life, like our primitive past, has its daunting obstacles. The physicist Joe Polchinski wrote that when he started to draft his textbook on string theory, he expected that the project would take one year. It took him ten. Looking back, had I had a sober assessment of the time and effort required to write this book, or to become a theoretical physicist, I would have shrunk before both endeavors. Motivated reasoning and motivated remembering and all the other quirks of how we think about ourselves and our world may have their downsides, but when we’re facing great challenges—whether it’s losing a job, embarking on a course of chemotherapy, writing a book, enduring a decade of medical school, internship, and residency, spending the thousands of practice hours necessary to become an accomplished violinist or ballet dancer, putting in years of eighty-hour weeks to establish a new business, or starting over in a new country with no money and no skills—the natural optimism of the human mind is one of our greatest gifts.
Before my brothers and I were born, my parents lived in a small flat on the North Side of Chicago. My father worked long hours sewing clothes in a sweatshop, but his meager income left my parents unable to make the rent. Then one night my father came home excited and told my mother they were looking for a new seamstress at work, and that he had gotten her the job. “You start tomorrow,” he said. It sounded like a propitious move, since this would almost double their income, keep them off beggars’ row, and give them the comfort of spending far more time together. There was only one drawback: my mother didn’t sew. Before Hitler invaded Poland, before she lost everyone and everything, before she became a refugee in a strange land, my mother had been a child of wealth. Sewing wasn’t anything a teenage girl in her family had needed to learn.
And so my future parents had a little discussion. My father told my mother he could teach her. They would work at it all night, and in the morning they’d take the train to the shop together and she’d do a passable job. Anyway, he was very fast and could cover for her until she got the hang of it. My mother considered herself clumsy and, worse, too timid to go through with such a scheme. But my father insisted that she was capable and brave. She was a survivor just as he was, he told her. And so they talked, back and forth, about which qualities truly defined my mother.
We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them but because of the way they perceive us. Unlike phenomena in physics, in life, events can often obey one theory or another, and what actually happens can depend largely upon which theory we choose to believe. It is a gift of the human mind to be extraordinarily open to accepting the theory of ourselves that pushes us in the direction of survival, and even happiness. And so my parents did not sleep that night, while my father taught my mother how to sew.
Acknowledgments
Caltech is one of the world’s leading centers of neuroscience, and I am lucky to count one of Caltech’s shining lights, Christof Koch, among my good friends. In 2006, just a few years after the birth of the field of social neuroscience, I began speaking to Christof about a possible book on the unconscious mind. He invited me into his lab as a guest, and for much of the next five years I observed as Christof, his students and postdocs, and fellow faculty members, especially Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Rangel, and Mike Tyszka, studied the human mind. Over those years, I read and digested more than eight hundred academic research papers. I sat in on seminars on subjects such as the neuroscience of memory, concept cells in the human visual system, and the cortical structures that allow us to identify faces. I volunteered for experiments in which fMRI images were made of my brain as I looked at photos of junk food, and as I listened to strange sounds projected into my ear. I took courses such as the wonderful “Brains, Minds, and Society,” “The Neurobiology of Emotion,” and “The Molecular Basis of Behavior.” I attended conferences on topics such as “The Biological Origins of Human Group Behavior.” And, with few exceptions, I attended the weekly Koch lab lunches, where I feasted on great food, and listened to discussions of the latest cutting-edge advances and gossip in neuroscience. Through it all, Christof and his colleagues in the Caltech neuroscience program have been generous with their time, inspiring with their passion, and patient with their explanations. I think neither Christof nor I could have imagined, when I first approached him, that he would be investing as much effort as he did teaching neuroscience to a physicist. I owe this book to his mentorship and generosity of spirit.