Future Imperfect

Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures,
only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why?

In a 1989 study by Jason P. Mitchell of Harvard University, when people were asked how much they thought about the past, present and future, they claimed to think most about the future.

However, when researchers actually counted the items that float along in the average person’s stream of consciousness, they found that only 12 per cent of their daily thoughts (or roughly one hour in every eight) were about the future.

This establishes that all of us are part-time residents of tomorrow. All brains‚ human brains, chimpanzee brains, fish brains, bird brains‚ are continuously making predictions about the immediate local and personal future.

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor, explains that they do this by using information about current events (‘I smell something’) and past events (‘The last time I smelled this smell, a big thing tried to eat me’) to anticipate the event that is most likely to happen to them next (‘A big thing is about to eat me’). However, such predictions do not require the brain making them to have anything even remotely resembling a conscious thought.

Just as a calculator can put two and two together to produce four without having any thoughts about arithmetic, brains can add past to present to make a future, without ever thinking about either.
So, rather than saying that such brains are predicting, let’s say they are ‘nexting’, i.e. expecting something to happen next, based on what is known and what has happened earlier.

Nexting is not the same as planning the future. Our ability to imagine, anticipate, and make a future is unique to the human brain and what differentiates us from animals. The human brain’s greatest achievement 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.

And don’t we use ‘nexting’ all the time as a dramatic tool? How else does a playwright or a film director surprise an audience, satisfy an audience, offer them suspense, without their ‘nexting’?
Let’s take an example. 

Read the sentence: Once upon a lime, there was a ring.. The moment your eye read the words “Once upon a..” your mind automatically completes it with the word time. Few of us would notice it; some would pass it off as a printer’s devil. Until we come to “there was a..” which the mind seeks to complete as King but encounters ‘ring’.

This is almost akin to the predictive T9 dictionary on mobile phones, which all of us are familiar with while sms-ing. It follows the predictive text.. just as our brain uses nexting.

When monkeys see a researcher drop a ball down one of several chutes, they quickly look to the bottom of that chute and wait for the ball to re-emerge. If the ball emerges from a different chute than the one in which it was deposited, the monkeys display surprise, presumably because their brains were nexting. Human babies have been shown to have similar traits.

Their brains add what they already know (the past) to what they currently see (the present) to predict what will happen next (the future). When the actual next thing is different from the predicted next thing, both monkeys and babies experience surprise, an emotion we feel when we encounter the unexpected.

Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why?

As Professor Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward.

Because we all fall into the trap of anticipating our future based on past experiences. Metaphorically we are driving our car ahead by looking into the rear-view mirror. Doesn’t make sense, does it?

So create your future by being in the present and forgetting the past. Your mind will help you determine your own positive attitude by shirking off any past burdens.

.
Thought for the Week

“When it comes to the future, 
there are three kinds of people: 
those who let it happen, 
those who make it happen, and, 
those who wonder what happened”
John M Richardson Jr.
(Professor, School of International Service, American University. Washington DC)
.

 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

First published in Gray Matter - The Hindustan Times