Researchers have begun successfully testing therapies designed to break this pattern by training sufferers to envision positive outcomes (imagine passing the test) and to see future risks more realistically (think of the possibilities remaining even if you flunk the test).
Most prospection occurs at the unconscious level as the brain sifts information to generate predictions. Our systems of vision and hearing, like those of animals, would be overwhelmed if we had to process every pixel in a scene or every sound around us. Perception is manageable because the brain generates its own scene, so that the world remains stable even though your eyes move three times second. This frees the perceptual system to heed features it didn't predict, which is why you're not aware of a ticking clock unless it stops. It's also why you don't laugh when you tickle yourself: You already know what's coming next.
Most prospection occurs at the unconscious level as the brain sifts information to generate predictions. Our systems of vision and hearing, like those of animals, would be overwhelmed if we had to process every pixel in a scene or every sound around us. Perception is manageable because the brain generates its own scene, so that the world remains stable even though your eyes move three times second. This frees the perceptual system to heed features it didn't predict, which is why you're not aware of a ticking clock unless it stops. It's also why you don't laugh when you tickle yourself: You already know what's coming next.
Behaviorists used to explain learning as the ingraining of habits by repetition and reinforcement, but their theory couldn't explain why animals were more interested in unfamiliar experiences than familiar ones. It turned out that even the behaviorists’ rats, far from being creatures of habit, paid special attention to unexpected novelties because that was how they learned to avoid punishment and win rewards.
The brain's long-term memory has often been compared to an archive, but that's not its primary purpose. Instead of faithfully recording the past, it keeps rewriting history. Recalling an event in a new context can lead to new information being inserted in the memory. Coaching of eyewitnesses can cause people to reconstruction their memory so that no trace of the original is left.
The fluidity of memory may seem like a defeat, especially to a jury, but it serves a larger purpose. It's a feature, not a bug, because the point of memory is to improve our ability to face the present and future. To exploit the past, we metabolize it by extracting and recombining relevant information to fit novel situations.
The brain's long-term memory has often been compared to an archive, but that's not its primary purpose. Instead of faithfully recording the past, it keeps rewriting history. Recalling an event in a new context can lead to new information being inserted in the memory. Coaching of eyewitnesses can cause people to reconstruction their memory so that no trace of the original is left.
The fluidity of memory may seem like a defeat, especially to a jury, but it serves a larger purpose. It's a feature, not a bug, because the point of memory is to improve our ability to face the present and future. To exploit the past, we metabolize it by extracting and recombining relevant information to fit novel situations.
This link between memory and prospection has emerged in research showing that people with damage to the brain's medial temporal lobe lose memories of past experiences as well as the abilities to construct rich and detailed simulations of the future. Similarly, studies of children’s development show that they're not able to imagine future scenes until they've gained the ability to recall personal experiences, typically somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5.
Perhaps the most remarkable evidence comes from recent brain imaging research. When recalling a past event, the hippocampus must combine three distinct pieces of information － what happened, when it happened and where it happened － that are each stored in a different part of the brain. Researchers have found that the same circuitry is activated when people imagine a novel scene. Once again, the hippocampus combine three kinds of records (what, when and where), but this time it scrambles the information to create something new.
Even when you're relaxing, your brain is continually recombining information to imagine the future, a process that researchers were surprised to discover when they scanned the brains of people doing specific tasks like mental arithmetic. Whenever there was a break in the task, there were sudden shifts to activity in the brain's “default” circuit, which is used to imagine the future or retouch the past.
Perhaps the most remarkable evidence comes from recent brain imaging research. When recalling a past event, the hippocampus must combine three distinct pieces of information － what happened, when it happened and where it happened － that are each stored in a different part of the brain. Researchers have found that the same circuitry is activated when people imagine a novel scene. Once again, the hippocampus combine three kinds of records (what, when and where), but this time it scrambles the information to create something new.
Even when you're relaxing, your brain is continually recombining information to imagine the future, a process that researchers were surprised to discover when they scanned the brains of people doing specific tasks like mental arithmetic. Whenever there was a break in the task, there were sudden shifts to activity in the brain's “default” circuit, which is used to imagine the future or retouch the past.
This discovery explains what happens when your mind wanders during a task: It's simulating future possibilities. That's how you can respond so quickly to unexpected developments. What may feel like a primitive intuition, a gut feeling, is made possible by those previous simulations.
Suppose you get an email invitation to a party from a colleague at work. You're momentarily stumped. You vaguely recall turning down a previous invitation, which makes you feel obliged to accept this ond, but then you imagine having a bad time because you don't like him when he's drinking. But then you consider you've never invited him to your place, and you uneasily imagine that turning this down would make him resentful, leading to problems at work.
Methodically weighing these factors would take a lot of time and energy, but you're able to make a quick decision by using the same trick as the Google search engine when it replies to your query in less than a second. Google can instantly provide a million answers because it doesn't start from scratch. It's continually predicting what you might ask.
Suppose you get an email invitation to a party from a colleague at work. You're momentarily stumped. You vaguely recall turning down a previous invitation, which makes you feel obliged to accept this ond, but then you imagine having a bad time because you don't like him when he's drinking. But then you consider you've never invited him to your place, and you uneasily imagine that turning this down would make him resentful, leading to problems at work.
Methodically weighing these factors would take a lot of time and energy, but you're able to make a quick decision by using the same trick as the Google search engine when it replies to your query in less than a second. Google can instantly provide a million answers because it doesn't start from scratch. It's continually predicting what you might ask.
Your brain engages in the same sort of prospection to provide its own instant answers, which come in the form of emotions. The main purpose of emotions is to guide future behavior and moral judgements, according to researchers in a new field called prospective psychology. Emotions enable you to emphasize with others by predicting their reactions. Once you imagine how both you and your colleague will feel if you turn down his invitation, you intuitively know you'd better reply, “Sure, thanks.”
If Homo prospectus takes the really long view, does he become morbid? That was a longstanding assumption in psychologists' “terror management theory,” which held that humans avoid thinking about the future because they fear death. The theory was explored in hundreds of experiments assigning people to think about their own deaths. One common response was to become more assertive about one's cultural values, like becoming more patriotic.
But there's precious little evidence that people actually spend much time outside the lab thinking about their deaths or managing the terror of mortality. It's certainly not what psychologists found in the study tracking Chicagoans' daily thoughts. Less than 1 percent of their thoughts involved death, and even those were typically about other people's deaths.
Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn't dwell on the past: There's nothing he can do about it. He became Homo sapiens by learning to see and shape his future, and he is wise enough to keep looking straight ahead.
If Homo prospectus takes the really long view, does he become morbid? That was a longstanding assumption in psychologists' “terror management theory,” which held that humans avoid thinking about the future because they fear death. The theory was explored in hundreds of experiments assigning people to think about their own deaths. One common response was to become more assertive about one's cultural values, like becoming more patriotic.
But there's precious little evidence that people actually spend much time outside the lab thinking about their deaths or managing the terror of mortality. It's certainly not what psychologists found in the study tracking Chicagoans' daily thoughts. Less than 1 percent of their thoughts involved death, and even those were typically about other people's deaths.
Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn't dwell on the past: There's nothing he can do about it. He became Homo sapiens by learning to see and shape his future, and he is wise enough to keep looking straight ahead.
