I spoke with Hanson about this practice, which he calls “taking in the good,” and how evolution optimized our brains for survival, but not necessarily happiness.

“Taking in the good” is the central idea of your book. Can you explain what that is as a practice and how it works in the brain?

The simple idea is that we we all want to have good things inside ourselves: happiness, resilience, love, confidence, and so forth. The question is, how do we actually grow those, in terms of the brain? It’s really important to have positive experiences of these things that we want to grow, and then really help them sink in, because if we don’t help them sink in, they don’t become neural structure very effectively. So what my book’s about is taking the extra 10, 20, 30 seconds to enable everyday experiences to convert to neural structure so that increasingly, you have these strengths with you wherever you go.

Do you want to explain how that actually works in terms of brain structure? What is the connection between having this good experience and making tangible changes in the brain?

There’s a classic saying: "Neurons that fire together, wire together." What that means is that repeated patterns of mental activity build neural structure. This process occurs through a lot of different mechanisms, including sensitizing existing synapses and building new synapses, as well as bringing more blood to busy regions. The problem is that the brain is very good at building brain structure from negative experiences. We learn immediately from pain—you know, “once burned, twice shy.” Unfortunately, the brain is relatively poor at turning positive experiences into emotional learning neural structure.

On page one of the intro you said: “Positive thinking … is usually wasted on the brain.” Can you explain how positive thinking is different from taking in the good?

That’s a central, central question. First, positive thinking by definition is conceptual and generally verbal. And most conceptual or verbal material doesn’t have a lot of impact on how we actually feel or function over the course of the day. I know a lot of people who have this kind of positive, look on the bright side yappity yap, but deep down they’re very frightened, angry, sad, disappointed, hurt, or lonely. It hasn’t sunk in. Think of all the people who tell you why the world is a good place, but they’re still jerks.

I think positive thinking’s helpful, but in my view, it’s not so much as positive thinking as clear thinking. I think it’s important to be able to see the whole picture, the whole mosaic of reality. Both the tiles that are negative, as well as the tiles that are neutral and positive. Unfortunately, we have brains that are incentivized toward seeing the negative tiles, so if anything, deliberately looking for the positive tiles just kind of levels the playing field. But deep down, I’m a little leery of the term positive thinking because I think it could imply that we’re overlooking the negative, and I think it’s important to face the negative.