Brain Rules for Aging Well. John Medina

leads to an important question: Should you rely on drugs in an effort to set this attitudinal shift in concrete? The movie Awakenings may be instructive here, too, as it’s based on something that really happened. The effects of L-DOPA turned out to be temporary. Robert De Niro’s character eventually returned to his catatonic state, as did all his colleagues. The movie ends with one of the saddest dances in film. Though it has done great good, L-DOPA comes, as all drugs do, with some important side effects, including hallucinations and psychoses—and in the case of encephalitis, term limits.

      Are there ways to maintain optimism (and possibly elevated dopamine) that do not require drugs? Something that yields a more permanent, more side-effect-free future? The answer, happily, is yes. It all revolves around the hidden part of what scientists mean when they say, “Don’t go there.”

      Oprah Winfrey had an unpleasant childhood, to put it mildly. She still remembered those difficult roots when she became famous, lending her rags-to-riches story authenticity. She once said: “Though I am grateful for the blessings of wealth, it hasn’t changed who I am. My feet are still on the ground. I’m just wearing better shoes.” Consistent with this attitude, Winfrey started jotting down all those blessings, a journaling habit she sustained for a decade. There are scientific reasons why it was good that she did. Winfrey probably knew this: her emphasis on gratitude ran smack into some solid cognitive neuroscience, enrobed in a body of thought called positive psychology. The research I’m describing comes from its father, Martin Seligman, who used to study trauma and depression.