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The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly.
We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.
In fact, just about any time we want something—a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger—we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.
Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives—to
The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic.
the powers and limits of foresight
this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy.
The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.
acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference.
We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.
In fact, there’s really only one achievement so remarkable that even the most sophisticated machine cannot pretend to have accomplished it, and that achievement is conscious experience.
The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.
the human brain is an “anticipation machine,” and “making future” is the most important thing it does.2
All brains—human brains, chimpanzee brains, even regular food-burying squirrel brains—make predictions about the immediate, local, personal, future.
First, despite the comic quips inside the parentheses, predictions such as these do not require the brain making them to have anything even remotely resembling a conscious thought.
brains can add past to present to make future without ever thinking about any of them.
The second thing to notice is that predictions such as these are not particularly far-reaching.
the fact that brains are continuously making predictions about the immediate, local, personal future of their owners without their owners’ awareness.
It is only when your brain predicts badly that you suddenly feel avocado.
Surprise tells us that we were expecting something other than what we got, even when we didn’t know we were expecting anything at all.
psychologists can use surprise to tell them when a brain is nexting.
These predictions are remarkable in both the speed and accuracy with which they are made, and it is difficult to imagine what our lives would be like if our brains quit making them, leaving us completely “in the moment” and unable to take our next step.
Although patients with frontal lobe damage often performed well on standard intelligence tests, memory tests, and the like, they showed severe impairments on any test—even the very simplest test—that involved planning.
These patients might function reasonably well in ordinary situations, drinking tea without spilling and making small talk about the drapes, but they found it practically impossible to say what they would do later that afternoon.
that damage to certain parts of the frontal lobe can make people feel calm but that it can also leave them unable to plan—seem
The fact that damage to the frontal lobe impairs planning and anxiety so uniquely and precisely
When people are asked to report how much they think about the past, present, and future, they claim to think about the future the most.24
every eight hours of thinking includes an hour of thinking about things that have yet to happen.
thinking about the future can be pleasurable.
Studies confirm what you probably suspect: When people daydream about the future, they tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing.
Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur.
Americans of all ages expect their futures to be an improvement on their presents,31 and although citizens of other nations are not quite as optimistic as Americans, they also tend to imagine that their futures will be brighter than those of their peers.32
First, anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact.
The second reason why we take such pains to imagine unpleasant events is that fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.
Prospection can provide pleasure and prevent pain,
We want to know what is likely to happen so that we can do something about it.
Knowledge is power, and the most important reason why our brains insist on simulating the future even when we’d rather be here now, enjoying a goldfish moment, is that our brains want to control the experiences we are about to have.
people find it gratifying to exercise control—not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective—changing things, influencing things, making things happen—is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.
research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.
Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.
Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable.
feeling of control—whether real or illusory—is one of the wellsprings of mental health.
subjectivity (sub•dzėk•ti•vĭtee) The fact that experience is unobservable to everyone but the person having it.
the pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of desire.
the experiences of our former selves are sometimes as opaque to us as the experiences of other people, but more important, they tell us when this is most and least likely to be the case.
when volunteers are paying close attention to a stimulus at the precise moment that it changes, they do notice that change quickly and reliably.
unless our minds are keenly focused on a particular aspect of that experience at the very moment it changes, we will be forced to rely on our memories—forced to compare our current experience to our recollection of our former experience—in order to detect the change.
once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.
Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present, and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see.
The bottom line is this: The attentive person’s honest, real-time report is an imperfect approximation of her subjective experience, but it is the only game in town.
