So our minds are constantly on the go, imagining possible futures, but why doesn’t the brain instead take the opportunity to rest when it has the chance? If we were always focused on upcoming events and concrete plans, this tendency to dwell on the future might make sense, but often we conjure up situations that would be life-changing but highly unlikely – so why do we do it? Daydreams can undoubtedly help us to plan for future eventualities, but Moshe Bar from Harvard Medical School takes it a step further. He believes the reason for daydreaming is indirect – that daydreaming creates memories for events that haven’t happened in order that we can then use those memories if we need to. Anyone who goes on a plane wonders what might happen if it were to crash. Bar’s idea is that if a plane did actually crash, the memories of all those daydreams from previous flights would come into play and might help save you.101
The evidence is mounting to suggest that our minds are skewed towards thinking about the future. In one study people had to imagine themselves living either in the present, 10 years ago or 10 years hence, and then decide as fast as possible whether a list of events on different dates would then have occurred in the past or in the future. They were much faster when it came to events in the future, even, and this is where it gets interesting, if they were imagining themselves living 10 years ago.102 This suggests we constantly lean towards future thinking. Add to this the strength of emotions connected with future thinking and the finding that it appears to be the brain’s default mode when unoccupied, and it seems clear to me that the future is the most dominant time-frame when it comes to our experience of time. Our inclination is to pitch ourselves forward in time. We take our ability to imagine the future for granted, barely even considering it to be a skill, yet this imaginative construction process has been described as being near the ‘apex of human intellectual abilities’.103 It is our ability to time-travel mentally that gives us the experience of mental reality. It roots us.
AN ERRONEOUS FUTURE
There is just one problem. We may be forward thinking, but that doesn’t mean we are good at predicting the future or imagining it objectively. The future is a time-frame we find difficult to grasp accurately. In his extensive research, the American psychologist Dan Gilbert has discovered that we make various types of errors when contemplating the future. The first is caused by the way we meld memories from the past to imagine the future. This memory remix allows us extensive imagination, but it causes us to base our ideas of the future on the past without any evidence that it will be the same. If you know you are due to go to hospital you will think back to the last time you visited a hospital and assume that it will be similar, even if the previous visit took place in a different hospital in a different town a decade earlier. Financial experts warn that previous performance of an investment fund should not be taken as an indication of future performance, yet how many people would really take this information at face value and deliberately seek to invest in a fund that has performed badly in the past? The nature of memory skews our thoughts. Our cognitive processes favour the extreme, the first and the most recent. So when we imagine the future it is examples of these kinds of events which come to mind, while the typical is ignored.104
There’s a second problem. When we simulate a future event in our minds we tend only to consider the chief features, the parts we consider integral to the experience. So if you’re heading out of a city for a country walk and a pub lunch you might imagine yourself crossing stiles, walking along lanes wondering what it’s like to live in a pretty cottage like that, climbing a hill, descending into a green valley and stopping for lunch in a cosy pub in the village. You might be right. It might be just like this. But the outing will also include some less attractive parts, which tend to be omitted from your advance picture of the day – queuing in traffic to get out of the city, stopping for petrol, searching for somewhere to park, getting lost on the walk perhaps, and then arriving at the pub and discovering there are no free tables. This focus on what we consider to be the chief features of a possible future event leads us to consider only the best bits. For a negative event we do the opposite. We dread all of it, focusing on the bad bits, when some of it will be fine. Visiting the doctor for a physical examination might not be very pleasant, but neither is every part of the visit unpleasant. Some of it is neutral; reading a magazine in the waiting room, hanging up your coat, chatting with the doctor, arranging another appointment with the receptionist. As a proportion of the whole experience the duration of the examination might be short, yet beforehand it’s the only part you envisage, causing you to overestimate your emotional reactions. You could argue that at least nothing’s as bad as we fear, that we’ll be pleasantly surprised later on, but the same phenomenon can lead us to make some strange, even wrong, decisions. This is known as the ‘Impact Bias’.
We expect the best of good events and the worst of the bad. We imagine that if something grave happens to us, we won’t be able to cope, and that if something positive happens it will make us so happy that our lives will be transformed. But in both cases we will still be the same people we are now. After the initial phase, good or bad, our emotions will subside and we will feel only a little better or worse than now. This is because of the way we view time in the future – to consider an event in real time would take too long, so we truncate it, imagining more of the early moments. If you are moving in with a partner you picture the fun of the first year living together and sorting out the flat, not the more routine life of the fifth or tenth year. Daniel Gilbert has researched people’s ideas about what life would be like if they had the glorious elation of winning the lottery or the appalling experience of becoming paralysed.105 People imagine that if they won the lottery they’d have the elation of champagne celebrations, posing with a giant cardboard cheque for millions, test-driving sports cars and taking all their friends on holiday. Non-stop fun. In the case of disability they imagine the shattering shock, the loss of their job, the work of converting their home. Everything ruined. When imagining either situation people tend to focus on the initial impact, yet assume these feelings will be long-lasting. They forget that they will adjust. Some of these initial sensations of either joy or despair will wear off. If you get that longed-for promotion, researchers have found that the extra happiness it brings lasts for only about three months. After that you become accustomed to your new life and have experienced some of the disadvantages of the new job as well as realising that many of the previous irritants are still there. You still commute. You still have to get up early. You still have one annoying colleague. Likewise if you are forced to change jobs and leave the one you loved, then after a while you adjust to that too. Gilbert has found that even with a serious disability, although the transition period might be devastating, in the mid- to long-term most people cope better than they had anticipated. They end up not far below their original happiness levels and if they were fairly happy in the first place they might well still end up a lot happier than the lottery winner who was less happy to start off with and whose joy gradually wears off.
There is a whole list of real-life examples where people have overestimated their feelings in the future. People moving from the mid-west of the USA to California predicted that they would be happier in their new homes, believing the sunny weather would transform their lives. Sadly it didn’t; the weather is just one factor contributing to well-being in life. When another group of people had just received good news – test results revealing that they did not have HIV as they’d feared – they didn’t feel as elated as they’d expected.106
Dan Gilbert and his colleagues invent hypothetical scenarios and get people to imagine how they would feel if they happened. Sometimes the situations are everyday – their team wins or loses a game of baseball – sometimes they are more serious. Gilbert asks a mother of two to imagine how she might feel in seven years’ time if one of her children had died now. She predicts that will feel dreadful all the time, forgetting that although her experience would be horrendous,
and although life will never be the same again, there would be some moments of joy with her other child.107
Curiously these studies have occasionally forecast real events. In the year 2000 people were asked to imagine their emotions on hearing the news that the Space Shuttle Columbia had been destroyed, killing a dozen astronauts.108 In their version it crashed into the Mir space station, but it was another three years until the space shuttle really did explode, killing all seven crew members. The same study asked them to envisage the USA toppling Saddam Hussein in a second Gulf War. Again they were three years ahead of the real event.
To sum up so far, future thinking is crucial and might even be the brain’s default position, but our judgements are skewed by a tendency to concentrate on the initial and chief features of an event and to base our predictions on our most extreme past experiences, rather than the more typical. And just like the children with the pretzels, who found it hard to imagine that they could possibly feel anything but thirsty the following day, even as adults we find it hard to discount the way we feel in the present. When people are not hungry they say they’re not keen on the idea of spaghetti Bolognese for breakfast, but pose the same question when they do feel hungry and suddenly the idea of an evening meal for breakfast becomes more appealing. The mind can generate very convincing simulations of the future, but they are not perfect, especially when it comes to their emotional content. We are simply not very good at predicting how we’ll feel in the future, which can lead to some unfortunate decisions.
BAD CHOICES
The way we hold the future in mind has important consequences for decision-making. The Impact Bias affects the choices we make, as can errors in our predictions about what makes us happy. If we decide to move house we become convinced that our future happiness depends on finding the right home, in the right location. In fact our happiness in that house will be far more dependent on the relationship we have with our partner or housemates.109 Likewise if someone announces they are leaving their current job for another that pays a bit better, most of their friends will consider it to be a logical move, despite the fact that our well-being is influenced more by our colleagues and the atmosphere at work, than by a small pay rise.
You have two projects to complete – one is easy because it’s in English, but the topic is the history of social psychology, something which doesn’t especially appeal to you (although I can’t think why not – it’s interesting, genuinely). The second project is harder because it is written in French, but it concerns romantic love, so you might even learn something useful. One project is due in next week, the other in two months’ time. You can choose which project to do first, but whichever you select you will only receive the instructions one week before the deadline. Which would you do first?
When this study was conducted with students in Israel, with the projects either in Hebrew (the easy option) or in English (the difficult option), the overwhelming preference was to do the easy but dull project first and to save the interesting but trickier option for later.110 When they contemplated the future, people didn’t seem to worry about how long the project might take. They were convinced that in the future they would have more time, so it wouldn’t matter. I’ve already discussed how our optimism increases the further into the future we transport ourselves and nowhere is this more evident than with time itself. Despite all the evidence from past experience, we are always certain that in the future we will have more spare time. 111
Students were given two lecture options for the following year. They could attend an interesting lecture on the other side of town or a boring lecture in the hall next door. Most opted for the interesting lecture. No surprise there perhaps. But if they were told the lecture was tomorrow instead of next year they reversed their decision. Once they took the practicalities into account they realised they had too much to do to travel across town and so they chose the dull, but convenient, lecture instead.112 Although we know intellectually that every activity we choose comes at the expense of other ways we might use those hours, this only seems to matter to us in the near future; in the distant future we simplify the situation and omit crucial elements, forgetting that in a year’s time we will be just as busy.
This optimism that we have more time in the future is fascinating, because we never seem to learn that it’s not true. So we postpone going to the gym today because we’re too busy, but sincerely intend to go tomorrow. We retain a constant optimism about our future selves. We’ll be better. We’ll be more organised. And therefore we’ll have more time. A year from now we picture ourselves as consistent, methodical people who could easily fit in some extra activities. But when we consider ourselves next week, we know we couldn’t possibly take anything else on. In the near future we take into account the circumstances that might thwart us – but the person we see in the distant future appears unaffected by anything as ordinary as a broken-down train. We even use simpler adjectives to describe ourselves in the future.113 This rosy view of the future causes us to try repeatedly to cram more into a week than is possible. If someone asks me to give a talk in Wales some time next year, I might say yes, thinking that I’ll arrange my work so that I have a free day to take the three-hour train journey to Wales. It seems like a good idea until the date approaches and my diary is so full that I wish I’d never agreed to it. Yet if someone asked me if I could go to Wales to give a talk next week I know immediately that I must decline. This optimism about free time in the future can lead to procrastination.
It is often assumed that procrastination is simply caused by laziness and a lack of focus. In fact we sincerely believe that in the future, even next week, we will have fewer demands on our time. Tasks need not be tedious for us to procrastinate. Companies are pleased to offer hugely discounted online vouchers to use in the future because they know that even when the voucher is for something as pleasurable as a good meal, the chances are that many of us will never get round to spending it. Suzanne Shu demonstrated this in a study where people claimed to prefer vouchers with distant deadlines, but were in reality much less likely to spend them than vouchers that expired in two weeks.114 She also found that visitors to cities do more sightseeing in three weeks than those living there do in three years – because they have a deadline. When there’s no deadline people don’t see the sights because they continue to believe that they’ll have more free time to do so at a later date. We’ve all done it. For nearly a decade I had the chance, as a result of my partner’s job, to go and see Prime Minister’s Questions from the press gallery at the House of Commons, but somehow I was always busy on a Wednesday. It wasn’t until the very last Wednesday that a pass was available to me that I finally went, even though it was something I very much wanted to do. In a study in Chicago, Shu even discovered that long-term residents who were moving away for good were trying to intersperse their packing with hurried sightseeing because they had never seen their own city.
FIVE YEARS TO REACH THE WORD ‘ANT’
In 1857 the Philological Society of London made an announcement – the formation of the Unregistered Words Committee, which would collect all the English words currently absent from the available dictionaries. Five months later the Dean of Westminster Richard Chenevix Trench went a step further when he delivered a two-part paper calling for a complete re-examination of the history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. This would be the finest dictionary every created. By 1860 the plans were in place and it was announced that the dictionary would be ready within two years. It’s fair to say that there were some unavoidable delays. A young man named Herbert Coleridge had begun work on the dictionary, starting with words beginning with A–D, but was taken ill with tuberculosis, reputedly exacerbated by sitting in damp clothes at a meeting of the Philological Society itself.115 Just two weeks after presenting the society with the first set of words, he died. After that things moved slowly. In 1879 a deal was struck to publish the dictionary with the Oxford University Press, with a new completion date set for 10
years later. But after five years they had only got as far as the word ‘ant’. Nobody had anticipated the work involved in tracing the history of words across seven centuries while keeping up to date with a language that was constantly evolving. Decades of research followed until finally in 1928 the complete Oxford English Dictionary was finished. Immediately considered out of date, revisions began at once.
Even compared with the over-runs which blight government procurement of new computer systems or public buildings, a prediction of two years for a project that took 71 is some underestimate. Yet looking from the outside it seems obvious that the task was so substantial that even the longer 10-year deadline was over-optimistic. We have the advantage of hindsight of course, but our position as outsiders brings us a second advantage – an unexpected degree of skill at predicting how long someone else’s project will take to complete. When a friend tells us of their disappointment that their kitchen is still not ready despite the builders’ promises at the start, we are not at all surprised. Yet this skill deserts us when it comes to our own projects. This tendency to underestimate how long a task will take is called the ‘Planning Fallacy’. The cause rests once again in the key feature of future thinking that I’ve already discussed – the lack of detail. The further into the future we look, the more we ignore the details, but, and this is where it becomes more curious, we do consider the details when contemplating someone else’s future. When reflecting on another person’s project we consider both the length of time similar tasks have taken them and the factors that might disrupt them – illness, unexpected visits from friends, tiredness, etc. When estimating how long our own project will take us we ignore all this information and focus only on the features of this singular task.116 The beauty of the study which best demonstrated this was that for once it didn’t use hypothetical situations, where you can never be certain that this is how people would behave in real life. Instead they tested students who were trying to finish their theses. They found that they were much better at predicting how long other students’ theses would take. When it came to their own they did on occasion refer to past projects, but not to enable them to make a more accurate prediction, rather to justify their optimism. They seemed to forget all the occasions in the past where their good intentions had been disrupted by unexpected events.
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