By Deborah Kotz Globe Staff

I enjoyed hearing from you this week -- e-mails, comments, tweets, and phone calls. Yesterday I spoke to a reader who complimented me on my coverage of Sheryl Crow’s benign brain tumor diagnosis. Like Crow, she too had breast cancer and was also battling a meningioma, which she said had shrunk from the chemotherapy she’d received for the breast cancer, similar to a case report that I’d mentioned in the blog post.

Many of you tweeted and commented on the optimism post, wondering if it really was possible to rewire the brain to think more positive thoughts. Some of you doubted whether we could really overcome our “rainy brain” genes, as a new book out this week calls them. As LuckyFiddlehead wrote: “This won’t work.......” (Ten of you, at last count, agreed with him.) @jonahomesMW tweeted “optimists always make me feel gloomy.” (I’m guessing pessimists do as well.)

Others, though, took a sunnier approach, preferring to talk about what makes you feel more optimistic. Kmgunder wrote that she meditates. “Meditation also helps us to poke a hole in the power of our thoughts. One can completely be pulled around by one’s thoughts. But thoughts have no power in and of themselves. They come and go like the wind.” MarieOnCape wrote that the beach for her is a form of meditation. “I just go there to be. To push all those other thoughts away and just be there with the sand, the sea, and the sky.”