WASHINGTON - IMAGINE receiving a big chunk of cash in the future. Or winning a prize.

Chances are, such optimistic thoughts are coming from two places in the brain that play an important role in enabling people to, as the old song says, accentuate the positive, New York University scientists said on Wednesday.

Pinpointing the brain regions involved in optimism and positive thinking about the future, the researchers said, may also have shed light on what might be going wrong in people with depression.

The researchers used sophisticated brain imaging to track brain activity in 15 young adults - seven men and eight women - while they asked them imagine future scenarios. They included getting a lot of money, winning an award, going to a birthday party or ball game or the zoo, being lied to, the end of a romantic relationship, going to a funeral and others.

When scenarios filled with optimism were imagined, two brain regions - the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala - lit up with activity in the brain scans, the researchers said.

'What's interesting is these two regions that we saw that were involved in projecting optimistic futures are also the same two regions that we see affected in depression,' NYU professor of psychology and neural science Elizabeth Phelps, who is involved in the research, said in a telephone interview.

It had been unclear what was going wrong in these two regions that might contribute to depression. 'But our data would suggest that one of the things they're doing is making it hard to think about things optimistically. Of course, one of the primary symptoms of depression is pessimism,' Prof Phelps said.

Prof Phelps said the findings had the potential in the future to help guide new treatments for depression.

The research was published in the journal Nature. -- REUTERS