This Is Your Brain on Hope
Feeling hopeful is critical for what lies ahead
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
Over the weekend, America got a new president, one who has committed himself to science. True to his word, President-elect Joe Biden named his coronavirus advisory board, a diverse group of doctors and scientists with expertise in infectious diseases, public health, epidemiology, and vaccines.
Speaking of vaccines, yesterday Pfizer announced astounding preliminary results from its Covid-19 vaccine clinical trial. The report comes from a press release, so take it with a hefty grain of salt, but the drug company says that its vaccine is more than 90% effective at preventing Covid-19. A lot more information is needed (How many people who got the vaccine still became asymptomatically infected? What do we know about potential long-term side effects? How long does the protection last?), but it’s hard not to feel optimistic at the news.
I know, I know, this is a newsletter about the brain, not about the coronavirus (you can sign up for that one here), but having been immersed in Covid-19…
