Always Looking Up

"This again is a very interesting and personal book. As you mention, he developed Parkinson’s and was aware from a very early age that it was going to end his acting career. He writes in the book that there was no way he could continue his movie career with the kinds of problems that Parkinson’s brought. But one of the interesting things he makes clear is that in spite of all that he absolutely believed he would be able to deal with it, even though it meant that he might have to come up with a different career. Yes, and I think it illustrates very nicely that he is not the kind of optimist that Barbara Ehrenreich is talking about – he didn’t just think everything is going to be wonderful. He knew very well that things weren’t going to be wonderful, but he knew that he would be able to deal with it. I have been working for the last four or five years to research exactly that. In my book, I try to see whether we can shift from a more rainy brain state to a more sunny brain state. The good news is that there is scientific evidence that we can do that. The slightly less good news is that it isn’t easy. It isn’t just about having happy thoughts. But if we put the effort in, it is possible. There are a couple of techniques. One of them is mindfulness-based therapy, which is basically meditation. A lot of studies have been done looking at what changes in people’s brains, usually over an eight-week period. They will be trained in meditation techniques that they can do at home as well. It does tend to be linked to that, but it is more meditation. You learn to breathe deeply and to calm yourself, and there is no question that the research shows that those kinds of techniques do change your brain over an eight-week period, which is a pretty long period. The other technique, which I have been looking at in particular detail, is called CBM – Cognitive Bias Modification. We know that pessimists have a negative bias in their attention, which means that they will home in at a very subconscious level to negative information. We have a technique, which we put on a computer, which is almost like retraining their brains to home in on the more positive information. The general technique is that we flash up two images. Let’s say you have a negative image and a positive image, the two images are played briefly on the computer screen, and then a target is displayed that they have to respond to. It could be something like a little blue square on the left or right side of the screen. Over hundreds of trials we set it up so the target always appears behind the positive image, so that gradually their brains learn to instinctively be drawn towards the positive. When I did this test with Michael J Fox, as one of life’s optimists he was already drawn to the more positive images. But what we found is if we took a bunch of pessimistic students and put them through this training quite regularly, there is no question that when you measure their brain states before and after you do start to see changes. So you can change your brain state into a more optimistic mind frame – but it takes a lot of effort, either through computerised tasks or meditation."