
Tali Sharot
The Optimism
“Being optimist helps us to live a better life and is also good for our health.”
One of the world’s leading experts of the mechanisms that regulate brain activity. A successful researcher that deals, in a very special and peculiar way, with the implications of optimism on mental structures. An author that, in her recent book The Optimism Bias manages to deliver technical and scientific notions with an uncommon immediacy.

ABOUT TALI SHAROT
Tali Sharot graduated at the Tel Aviv University twice, once in Psychology and once in Economics, but she is also a neuroscientist for the New York University. She is presently working with the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at the University College in London. Her research focuses chiefly on the way emotions, motivation and social dynamics influence our expectations, that is, have an effect on our decisions and modify our memories.
By analyzing the memory mechanisms, the neuroscientis focuses on the mechanisms that regulate emotional memories. Sharot wants to understand why the memories of some events with a strong emotional value are more vivid and less volatile than memories pertaining to banal events? Why is it easier to remember something happened many years ago than remembering a more mundane, everyday event happened last night? Her research has also demonstrated the strong link between an optimistic aptitude and the emotional memories. People with this “psychological condition” always see the bright side of everything because their brain refuses to clash with a negative situation. Sharot has managed to observed the activity of the frontal lobes that, in optimist subjects, stop working when they find themselves having to process information leading to an image of the future which is less positive than how they'd like it to be.
Her work has created a special interest in the scientific world and it has been published on the best specialist journals and on other well known magazines too. This study has quickly caught the attention of all media.
She is regarded as one of the major experts of the “tricks” our brain uses to see everything through rose colored glasses, tricks she describes and explains in her book The Optimism Bias. Because rose colored glasses give you that extra boost.
Her research has received prizes and awards, scholarships and praise from the colleagues of the Wellcome Trust and British Academy.