We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the
“wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes
us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have
been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to
predators — but none is unique to humans.
What
best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just
beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular
foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts
our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety,
whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation.
Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only
we subject them to “commencement” speeches grandly informing them that
today is the first day of the rest of their lives.
A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because
we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is
what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and
unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as
psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly,
because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re
prisoners of the past and the present.
Behaviorists
thought of animal learning as the ingraining of habit by repetition.
Psychoanalysts believed that treating patients was a matter of
unearthing and confronting the past. Even when cognitive psychology
emerged, it focused on the past and present — on memory and perception.
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But
it is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future,
not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be
understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We
learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching
memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world
not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the
unexpected.
Our
emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future
behavior. Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that
they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present
stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead.
Prospection
enables us to become wise not just from our own experiences but also by
learning from others. We are social animals like no others, living and
working in very large groups of strangers, because we have jointly
constructed the future. Human culture — our language, our division of
labor, our knowledge, our laws and technology — is possible only because
we can anticipate what fellow humans will do in the distant future. We
make sacrifices today to earn rewards tomorrow, whether in this life or
in the afterlife promised by so many religions.
Some
of our unconscious powers of prospection are shared by animals, but
hardly any other creatures are capable of thinking more than a few
minutes ahead. Squirrels bury nuts by instinct, not because they know
winter is coming. Ants cooperate to build dwellings because they’re
genetically programmed to do so, not because they’ve agreed on a
blueprint. Chimpanzees have sometimes been known to exercise short-term
foresight, like the surly male at a Swedish zoo who was observed stockpiling rocks to throw at gawking humans, but they are nothing like Homo prospectus.
If
you’re a chimp, you spend much of the day searching for your next meal.
If you’re a human, you can usually rely on the foresight of your
supermarket’s manager, or you can make a restaurant reservation for
Saturday evening thanks to a remarkably complicated feat of
collaborative prospection. You and the restaurateur both imagine a
future time — “Saturday” exists only as a collective fantasy — and
anticipate each other’s actions. You trust the restaurateur to acquire
food and cook it for you. She trusts you to show up and give her money,
which she will accept only because she expects her landlord to accept it
in exchange for occupying his building.
The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies
of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago
that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate
thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been
correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But
they actually thought about the future three times more often than the
past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved
consideration of its future implications.
When
making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels
of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a
chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they
sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as
many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.
While
most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and
anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be
the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view
of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people
actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue struggling because
they over-predict failure and rejection. Studies have shown depressed
people are distinguished from the norm by their tendency to imagine
fewer positive scenarios while overestimating future risks.
They
withdraw socially and become paralyzed by exaggerated self-doubt. A
bright and accomplished student imagines: If I flunk the next test, then
I’ll let everyone down and show what a failure I really am. 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 a 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 reconstruct their memory so that no
trace of the original is left.
The
fluidity of memory may seem like a defect, 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 the 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 ability 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 combines 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 one, 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 judgments, according to researchers in a new field called prospective psychology.
Emotions enable you to empathize 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 their 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.
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