Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage,” and this is also a useful metaphor for our mental world. Just as a theater production involves certain roles, so too does our mental scenario building. Imagine you have to prepare a speech for a function or a wedding. To create such a situation in your mind you need to disengage from the present situation and imagine (stage) the scenario. You need to have some idea about your self (actor), perhaps about your strengths and weaknesses in such situations. You may also need to consider who you are addressing and what their expectations might be (other actors). Depending on the particulars you imagine, this may make you feel confident or anxious. You might frame your mental event in some context, such as the venue (the set), and consider the obstacles it presents. For instance, do you need to project your voice? Do you have a podium?
Now imagine what you are actually going to say. Is it better to start formally or with a joke? Perhaps you need to consider different introductions. These scripts have to be generated (playwright) so you can cycle through the possibilities. You might choose to conduct various mental rehearsals and assess each scenario’s appeal (director).
Imagined situations trigger emotions much like their real counterparts, and we can evaluate their desirability. Generating and comparing these imaginary scenarios requires the capacity for embedded thinking that we came across in the previous chapter as a unique aspect of human language. You need to reflect on your thoughts. While going through sufficient scenarios to develop your presentation, you may need to put on hold other activities. At some point you will need to make an executive decision about when you should stop such mental simulations and start putting your plan into action (executive producer).
Of course this is not to say that there is a little theater in your head (or that the mind is populated by homunculi). The metaphor simply highlights what component capacities are involved in episodic foresight. Your successful simulation of scenarios depends on a capacity for imagination and for thinking about things other than the present. It also requires understanding of yourself and others; knowledge about how the physical world works; a creative faculty that allows you to combine imaginary actors, acts, and objects in novel ways; an ability to rehearse and reflect on options; and the power to override immediate urges to pursue more remote rewards. Mental time travel is complex, resource-intensive, and error-prone. But it is a key to how our minds conquered the world.
MENTAL TIME TRAVEL UNLOCKED A new realm of possibilities for our species. We can hatch plans and make decisions that drastically increase our chances of future survival and reproduction. By foreseeing events we can seize opportunities that lie ahead and take steps to avoid approaching disaster. We can imagine the consequences of what we are going to do before we do it—and berate others for not doing the same. We can also benefit from the past in novel ways. We can mentally revisit past events, reflect on them, and draw new conclusions. Surprise visits of a family friend will no doubt be remembered and interpreted quite differently if you subsequently find out this person had an affair with your spouse. These replays allow us to learn new lessons for the future. In this case, you may become more attuned to early signs of infidelity.
Mental time travel radically increases our opportunities to be prepared. Even foreseeing that the future is difficult to foresee can prompt us to prepare for common eventualities. Consider what is in your pocket or your handbag. Why do you carry keys, money, cards, condoms, cosmetics, or whatever is in there? You do this, for the most part, because these things may come in useful in the future. There can be little doubt that this has long been a crucial and quintessentially human survival strategy that has enabled us to thrive even in previously inhospitable habitats. Take Ötzi, the five-thousand-year-old Iceman found in the Alps over twenty years ago. He carried dozens of items (such as an axe, a dagger, a tool for working flint, a bow and arrow, medicinal fungi, and a fire-making kit) that prepared him for many eventualities. As it turned out, it did not prepare him for the arrow that struck him in the back, but having these tools while crossing the Alps surely increased his chances of surviving the perilous journey.
Many everyday behaviors are guided by foresight, from planning next weekend’s barbecue to the pursuit of a long-term career goal. Because we can consider many different future paths and their consequences, we gain a (perhaps somewhat fanciful) sense of free will. Humans can elect to pursue dramatically different skills, knowledge, and expertise. We engage in deliberate practice and study to improve our future selves. You may not think of yourself as an expert, but chances are you have become an expert in various areas—be it at your job, crosswords, sports, housekeeping, music, matchmaking, or rocket science. People differ in innate talents and the pleasure they derive from certain activities, but much of the diversity of human expertise comes from our having the potential to decide what to spend time on, what we want to get better at, and what goals we aim to achieve. Of course, our freedom to do so varies vastly in different times and situations, but the potential exists in all of us.
In some cases we can even get better at certain things by merely practicing them in our mind. As a soccer player I always loved back-flip bicycle kicks, but, given the likelihood of hurting yourself, it is best to train for them primarily in your mind. It is not hard to foresee that practicing them on concrete is probably not a good idea. People get better at moving their bodies, making music, solving problems, and generally dealing with a variety of situations through repeated mental rehearsal. Practice, whether in mind, in play, or in action, accounts for much of our varied skills.
We differ also in how much we worry about the future and the past. Some psychologists now consider this an important variable that distinguishes our personalities. Yet all of us think about the future. Sometimes we think about it so much that we forget to notice the present. As John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Neuroscientists suggest that mental time travel may be our default mode. Brain-imaging studies of subjects at rest reveal that the brain regions that light up are associated with thinking about past and future events. We seem to have to go to great lengths, such as dedicated meditation retreats, to train ourselves to be mentally in the here and now. We often look forward to times when we are not stressed about all the things we still have to do. On holiday at the beach, little could be more enticing than the idea of not having to plan a thing—although even here you may be quite happy to plan to have a few drinks after your swim and buy tickets for that gig tomorrow night. Mental time travel is a pervasive part of the human condition.
Some of our most peculiar behaviors only make sense (at least partly) in the light of mental time travel. It can illuminate such apparent biological paradoxes such as celibacy, when a person is expecting a greater reward in an afterlife, or suicide, when the future outlook is particularly bleak. It helps explain why we may acquire much more than we can currently consume, because we are keen to secure not only our present needs but our imagined future needs, too. Whereas a pride of full-bellied lions is no threat to nearby buffaloes, a group of full-bellied humans might very well be. Our at times appallingly voracious greed may stem from this concern for our future. On the brighter side, the unwavering pursuit of one’s dreams is one of the most remarkable examples of the power of the human spirit. It wasn’t only Martin Luther King Jr. who had a dream: we all, in our own way, pursue visions of the future. To explain our behavior, we need to consider our minds—minds filled with expectations and plans, hopes and fears.
Even mundane activities such as going to work reflect complex goals and our attempts at managing our future. To drive such behavior, long-term goals have to compete with more immediate temptations, and we have had to learn new ways to control our motivation. For example, my desire to play, eat, and have sex will not stop me from completing this paragraph, because I think it more important for my longer-term happiness to do my job and concentrate on writing this book—at least for a little while lon
ger. You may strike an inner bargain by rewarding your progress with the promise of satisfying a simpler wish. In my case, I have earned a fine Belgian beer tonight. Deal! This capacity to manage, or mess with, our own drive system gives us enormous behavioral flexibility. Unfortunately, it also causes us tremendous stress. We worry even about things we can do little about right now. What’s worse, we are often wrong.
WE ARE NOT CLAIRVOYANTS. THE future frequently turns out to differ from what we thought it would be. Vivid examples of plans that appeared to be a good idea at the time but turned out to be spectacular miscalculations can be found among the annual winners of the Darwin Awards. We will never know what exactly a wheelchair-driving 2010 winner was anticipating would happen when, after missing a closing elevator, he decided to impatiently ram the door until it broke down—only to fall into the now-empty shaft. Most of our foresight errors are minor by comparison, leading to inconvenience or embarrassment. You may fail to usefully imagine the future because of shortcomings in any one of the components in the theater metaphor. Stage: you may fail to disengage from the present to imagine the future—perhaps like that wheelchair driver. Actors: you may miscalculate how others will feel or act—as so often happens in pranks. Set: you may misjudge physical relations—say, when you think the boat could surely take a much heavier load. Playwright: you may fail to generate the relevant scenarios—and you later have to admit that you didn’t think of this or that. Director: you may not have practiced for the future sufficiently—leading you to look distinctly underprepared. Producer: you may end up selecting the wrong plan—d’oh! There are countless ways in which our attempted foresight can let us down.
However, we have radically improved our chances of getting it right through a wonderfully effective trick: we share our plans and predictions with others. We can transmit our mental plays and reflections to audiences around us and, in turn, consider their thoughts. In preparing a speech, it can be helpful to rehearse it not only in our mind but also in front of a friend. We can learn from others’ memory and foresight, and listen to comments on ours. Indeed, we have a deep-seated drive to broadcast our minds and to read what is on the minds of others—to foreshadow the next chapter. And we have an extraordinarily effective way of exchanging our mind travels through language—to remind you of the previous chapter. Language is ideally suited for this mental exchange, and much of human conversation is indeed about past events (who did what to whom, and what happened next) and future events (what will happen to whom, and what we are going to do about it). By exchanging our experiences, plans, and advice, we have vastly increased our capacity for accurate prediction. In Stumbling on Happiness the psychologist Dan Gilbert discusses errors and biases in our foresight and argues that the most reliable way to predict a situation is to ask people who have experienced something similar. Indeed, for much of our past the stories of our fellow tribespeople would have been all we had to go by.
Note that we can share mental scenarios even without language—through mime, dance, and acting. While there are limits to what can be communicated in these ways, this could have been a start. The more we relied on our time-traveling minds for survival, the more we stood to benefit from language as a more flexible, open-ended communication system to link with other minds. As noted earlier, the evolution of new thoughts likely preceded the evolution of the means to communicate these thoughts.
Even our young offspring are driven to understand others’ minds, and we are compelled to pass on what we have learned to the next generation. As an infant starts on the journey of life, almost everything is a first. Young children have a ravenous appetite for the stories of their elders, and in play they reenact scenarios and repeat them until they have them down pat. Stories, whether real or fantastical, teach not only specific situations but also the general ways in which narrative works. How parents talk to their children about past and future events influences children’s memory and reasoning about the future: the more parents elaborate, the more their children do.
From as early as the age of two, children begin to talk about past and future events. Yet it takes time to understand time—parents will understand the struggle of explaining to children that they will get something later. My kids, at age one and three, would have had no chance of surviving on plans of their own if stranded on a remote island. We parents pack their lunches, fetch their jackets, and prepare the weekend’s activities. Adults have a wealth of experience to draw on. Our earliest memories, however, tend to go back to only about age three. Freud referred to the lack of earlier memories as infantile amnesia, and he believed that we repress traumatic events of our early psychosexual development—those embarrassing things to do with diapers and breastfeeding may not be palatable for the sensibilities of the adult mind. The latest evidence suggests that the explanation has more to do with the maturation of essential cognitive factors of memory and mental time travel, as well as social instruction from others.
Nonetheless, even infants have some memory and anticipatory capacities. A few weeks after birth they can learn to kick a hanging mobile and do it again in a new context (procedural memory). A few months later they can imitate an action such as the making of a rattle out of three parts and retain this knowledge (semantic memory) to make rattles out of similar objects. Yet there is little indication that infants can explicitly recall particular episodes of their past (episodic memory), let alone plot events in the remote future. Although children start to talk about past and future events from age two, they initially appear to have fundamental problems in their understanding. When three-year-olds learn something new, say a new word for a color, they go on to insist that they have always known it, even if they just learned it that day. In one study we told children stories about two people, one who acquired something yesterday and one who will acquire the same thing tomorrow. When we then asked them who has the object right now, even four-year-olds struggled.
FIGURE 5.1.
My children, Timo (age three and a half) and Nina (age one and a half), on the North Island of New Zealand.
In studies less dependent on words, we have found that at least by age four children can remember a problem they only experienced once and act in prudent ways that secure its future solution. We presented children with a curious puzzle in one room and later, in a different room, gave them the option to take one of several objects back to the puzzle. Children at thirty-six months of age selected an object at random, but by forty-eight months they picked the object that would allow them to solve the puzzle. Without any prompts they figured out which object would be a handy future solution to a problem they remembered.4
By age four they may well think a lot further into the future. The day Timo passed this task, he later sat next to me, put one hand on my leg, and said, “Papa, I don’t want you to die.” Gulp—“Neither do I,” I said. He then elaborated: “When I get bigger, I will have children, and you will be a grandpa, and then you will die.” He had clearly started to ponder the existential questions that mental time travel confronts us with.
By this age children have also been shown to be able to place past and future events appropriately on spatial time lines, such as a picture of a road that recedes into the distance representing the future. The psychologist William Friedman has described how children gradually improve at judging the relative temporal positions of past and future events, such as whether last New Year’s Day or their last birthday was more recent. It takes several years before children have acquired culture-specific temporal concepts such as days, months, and years that allow them to communicate about events in a precise, shared framework.
Temporal concepts, timekeepers, and calendars have been developed to aid our orientation and planning. They allow us to coordinate our activities in ever more sophisticated ways. We pursue complex shared goals and subdivide the required labor according to our expertise. We can agree on plans, review progress, and make flexible adjustments as required. Predictably, many of our ambitious endeavors do not work out�
��just think of the attempts of detailed five-year plans for the entire communist economy of the former Soviet Union. (Yet cooperative plans allowed that same country to send the first person into space.)
Humans are constantly scheming to achieve better control of the future. Today, much of the human population is waking up to the realization that our actions have produced immense pollution and have drastically reduced biodiversity. Let us hope this realization will lead to efforts to combat this trend. Norway recently demonstrated tremendous farsightedness in constructing a “doomsday” seed bank to protect all known varieties of the world’s crops for future generations. Future planning has gone global. It seems safe to say that mental time travel is a significant human attribute, without which we would hardly have been able to change the face of the Earth—let alone control many of its other inhabitants.
The idea that our mental access to the future is crucial to the human condition is not entirely new. In Greek mythology Prometheus stole fire from heaven and gave human mortals some of the powers of the gods. The name Prometheus means “foresight.” In some versions of the myth, Prometheus not only brought fire but also taught humans the arts of civilization, such as writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and science. Foresight has given us unheralded powers.
What’s time? Now is for dogs and apes! Man has Forever!
—ROBERT BROWNING
ANIMALS HAVE NOT TAMED FIRE, nor have they mastered the arts of civilization. There is no obvious evidence that animals have ever agreed on a five-year plan. Although children’s films often feature animals solving a whodunit or thwarting the bad guys’ evil plot, Lassie, Flipper, and Babe have no real-life counterparts. Their behavior is the product of careful conditioning by trainers who use immediate rewards to get the animals to act as if they understood the narrative. On the farm or in the zoo there is little to suggest that real animals plot to take control. There is no evidence animals have invented bags to carry a variety of tools in case they might need them. They do not choose a career path and do not seem to deliberately practice in preparation for anticipated events.5 They do not show the same diversity of expertise as humans. But just because they do not act the way we do does not necessarily mean they cannot think about past and future events.
The Gap Page 12
