a cool mental trick to make yourself more creative (…and totally hot and fit and rich…)

I’m in freaking Scotland.

(Edinburgh is stunning, but Mike Myers is in my head, shouting “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” Over and over again. Help me.)

I joined my boyfriend at TEDGlobal and he told me about something interesting he picked up in one of the presentations — I’m assuming it was by Keith Chen — about how your weight and money problems might be to blame on your grammar.

It goes something like this. Different languages have different ways of talking about the future. Some languages, like English, use a future tense (“They will be having wild animal sex”) to indicate that the action hasn’t happened yet, while other languages, like Mandarin, use present tense (“They have wild animal sex”) and depend not on grammar but context (“next Wednesday at midnight while swinging from the neighbor’s trapeze”) to establish that the action hasn’t happened yet.

Chen, an economist, divides countries into those with a future tense and those without and discovers an intriguing correlation. Countries that speak a language with a future tense — like English — tend to smoke more, save less, exercise less, and are more likely to be overweight.

Language structures our way of thinking about the future, and the future tense serves to distance us from the future — the future is happening somewhere out there — while the present tense keeps the future close to us — the future is happening here and now.

While correlation is not causation, this falls in line with some other stuff I’ve read. We think about things in the future more abstractly. If I ask you what you’ll be doing tomorrow, chances are you’ll tell me about your kid’s playdate and the report due at work and how you need to buy a new dress for that wedding you’re forced to go to on Friday because your girlfriend ignored all your advice and is marrying the fool. If I ask you what you’ll be doing ten years from now, chances are you’ll tell me about dreams, hopes and goals.

One of the things you learn as a writer is how important it is to take what’s abstract and ground it in specific, concrete things a person can see and touch — in order to make it real for the reader.

When it’s real, the reader cares. The reader feels a sense of urgency.

When it’s abstract, it remains a vague intellectual notion that the reader might appreciate, but can’t embrace emotionally.

Here’s the thing: to truly move a person, to get a person to change their behavior, you have to reach them emotionally as well as intellectually. Reason alone won’t cut it. I know that smoking causes cancer. So long as cancer remains this vague abstract notion — because it exists somewhere out there in the ether of the future (“I will have lung cancer if I don’t stop smoking”) — it doesn’t seem relevant to what I need in the here and now, to ease the craving and relieve stress (and hey, I can always quit tomorrow). If, on the other hand, a diagnosis of cancer were to push itself right in my face (“I have lung cancer”) what I need in the ‘here and now’ suddenly changes.

(This was actually one of the ways I managed to quit smoking: by imagining that I was creating cancer in my body every time I puffed on a cigarette.)

In my last post I talked about how your vision for the future can act as context for your present. You can pull your future close to you in a way that motivates you to move away from something (cancer, poverty) or toward something (a fit, vibrant, drop-dead body, a million dollars in the bank). You find ways to turn the abstract into something concrete and real. Wanting to get a better body is one thing; wanting to get a better body in time for your wedding is something else. The closer that wedding gets, the more real it seems, the more motivated you are to make your workout instead of excuses.

It can work the other way, too. If you’re stuck on a problem, put some mental distance between it and you. Imagine the problem is happening ten years from now. Or maybe it’s happening in Alaska. Or China. Or Mars. The more distance you can get on it, the more abstractly — and creatively — you can think about it. You shift from the emotional to the intellectual part of your brain, you can see the forest for the trees, you can examine that forest from different angles and find new pathways in.

It’s why a change in location can be a surprisingly effective way to blast through a creative block or solve that pesky plot problem or come to a decision about your love life. A shift in geography can bring a shift in perspective, and sometimes that’s all we need.