“psychology for 120 years believed that the past plus the present determined the future. And by undoing memory and perception we get rosier futures. That has been a colossal failure. We’ve become very interested in both the psychology and neuroscience of how we see futures; how we envision possible scenarios and choose among them.
The most exciting development in this area is something called the “hope circuit”. It turns out there is a set of circuitry [in the brain] that turns off helplessness and panic.
So, the discovery of perceptive circuits, of human hope. … now that we can begin to identify the circuitry that subsumes hope, we may be able to stimulate it.”
Martin Seligman, ‘The Science of Resilience’ podcast