Speaker 1: Why would a man without a lottery ticket shoot himself
Speaker 1: after hearing the winning numbers? Who is the most disappointed
Speaker 1: person at the Olympics? And what does this have to
Speaker 1: do with Pan American airlines or botox? And why should
Speaker 1: you always put yourself in the shoes of future people?
Speaker 1: Welcome to enter cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes
Speaker 1: we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand
Speaker 1: why and how our lives look the way they do.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is about mental time travel. Now we've done
Speaker 1: two episodes in the past two weeks on time traveling.
Speaker 1: I started with the concept of memory, which is our
Speaker 1: way of unhooking from the here and now and putting
Speaker 1: ourselves into past time points. And in order to do this,
Speaker 1: you need this whole network of brain areas that are
Speaker 1: involved in situating you not in the world that's right
Speaker 1: in front of you, but a remembered world. This network
Speaker 1: allows you to resimulate what the spatial layout was, who
Speaker 1: was there, what your emotions were, sounds and smells. All
Speaker 1: of this is run like a simulation, and nobody else
Speaker 1: can see it. It takes place entirely in the privacy
Speaker 1: of your own skull. Then last week I talked about
Speaker 1: the other direction of time travel. Imagining possible futures. Simulation
Speaker 1: of what could happen next is one of the most
Speaker 1: important jobs of brains. We plan out what are going
Speaker 1: to say, what we're going to do, how we're going
Speaker 1: to act in a situation, what might happen to us,
Speaker 1: and on and on. And as a reminder about a
Speaker 1: couple important points I made throughout those episodes. Point one
Speaker 1: was that we spend most of our time as humans
Speaker 1: disconnected from the here and now and playing these little
Speaker 1: movies in our heads were reminiscing on the past or
Speaker 1: we're simulating the future. And point two is it turns
Speaker 1: out to actually be the same core network of brain
Speaker 1: areas that's involved both in memory and in simulation of
Speaker 1: the future. If a person gets damaged to a particular
Speaker 1: part of their brain, like the hippocampus, they can get amnesia,
Speaker 1: meaning that they can't remember anything about their past, and
Speaker 1: they also end up unable to simulate possible futures. If
Speaker 1: you ask them to imagine standing in the shopping mall
Speaker 1: in an hour from now, they just draw a blank.
Speaker 1: They can't put a simulation together. They're not seeing a
Speaker 1: little movie in their heads. So memory and future imagination
Speaker 1: use the same brain mechanisms. They are both versions of simulation.
Speaker 1: So I used to think that who you are is
Speaker 1: the sum total of your memories. But it's even more
Speaker 1: interesting than that, because I would argue now that who
Speaker 1: you are includes the sum total of your future simulations.
Speaker 1: If you're a person who envisions big goals for yourself,
Speaker 1: that makes you a bit different from someone who has
Speaker 1: pedestrian goals. Now, from the outside, you don't know what
Speaker 1: a person is simulating. On the inside, you see someone
Speaker 1: sitting at the restaurant booth next to you, sipping on
Speaker 1: their coffee, and you don't know if they're thinking deeply
Speaker 1: about their path to a Nobel prize or instead they're
Speaker 1: just thinking about wanting a bag of chips at the
Speaker 1: local gas station. In the same way that we don't
Speaker 1: act out our dreams when we're asleep, we can dream
Speaker 1: of the past and future without execution by the awake body.
Speaker 1: So now we're all set up for two days episode,
Speaker 1: and this one involves a hypothesis that I've been working
Speaker 1: on for years. And to get going, I'm going to
Speaker 1: start with a small event that happened in Liverpool, England
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety five when a man was listening to
Speaker 1: the radio. So this man had a wife and two children,
Speaker 1: and he was listening to the lottery numbers being read out. Now,
Speaker 1: he did not have a lottery ticket, but he listened
Speaker 1: to the first number and he was transfixed. Now the
Speaker 1: second number was announced, and then the third, and the fourth,
Speaker 1: and he was frozen. And after the sixth number got
Speaker 1: read out, he went and got down his gun and
Speaker 1: he shot himself. Six numbers that translated to his suicide,
Speaker 1: even though he didn't have a lottery ticket. Where the
Speaker 1: numbers some sort of code. What exactly had happened will
Speaker 1: return to Tim's story in a moment. First, I want
Speaker 1: to tell you about facial muscles. So just over one
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty years ago, a French neurologist named Guillome
Speaker 1: Duchen studied lots of patients, and he's immortalized in the
Speaker 1: names of diseases like Duschen's muscular dystrophe and several others.
Speaker 1: But somewhat less known about him is that he was
Speaker 1: obsessed with using electrodes to send zaps of electricity into
Speaker 1: facial muscles to characterize how facial expressions got made. And
Speaker 1: what he realized is that when a person smiles, it's
Speaker 1: caused by the contraction of just two very particular muscles
Speaker 1: of the face. Around the mouth. There's a muscle called
Speaker 1: the zygomaticus major, which raises the corners of the mouth
Speaker 1: and draws it back, and the muscles around the eye,
Speaker 1: called the orbicularis oculide, raise the cheeks and send out
Speaker 1: crows feet around the eyes. And so when your mouth
Speaker 1: and eyes smile at the same time, this is called
Speaker 1: smising or smiling with the eyes, and this is described
Speaker 1: as the Duchen smile. But why does this have a
Speaker 1: special name Because people eventually realized that this only happens
Speaker 1: when someone is genuinely happy. But there's another way that
Speaker 1: people sometimes smile when they're not actually happy, and this
Speaker 1: is known as a non Duchen smile, and it involves
Speaker 1: only the zygomaticus major muscle around the mouth and nothing
Speaker 1: goes on around the eyes. Now, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: several groups have researched smiles, which sounds like a really
Speaker 1: fun job, and the conclusion is that the eye muscles
Speaker 1: are only involved when someone is actually happy. In other words,
Speaker 1: the Duschen smile only occurs when there is genuine positive emotion.
Speaker 1: People have long noticed the non Dushen smile, and for
Speaker 1: a long time this was popularly called the pan Am
Speaker 1: smile after the airliner where the flight stewardesses apparently gave
Speaker 1: this same non smising smile to everyone all the time
Speaker 1: because they weren't genuinely happy. Also, bowtos can paralyze the
Speaker 1: small muscles around the eye, which means that people with
Speaker 1: botox sometimes just can't pull off a smiling with the
Speaker 1: eyes Duschen smile, and so a non dus Shen smile
Speaker 1: is sometimes called a botox smile as well. Okay, I
Speaker 1: tell you all that because of an observation that has
Speaker 1: been replicated multiple times, and that involves the question who
Speaker 1: is happiest when they receive an Olympic medal. Now, it
Speaker 1: seems like the answer is obvious. The gold medalist is
Speaker 1: the most happy, the silver medallist is the next happiest,
Speaker 1: and the bronze medallist is the least happy. But that's
Speaker 1: not what researchers find. Instead, they find that the gold
Speaker 1: and bronze medalists are the most happy, and this silver
Speaker 1: medalist is the least happy. For example, one study examined
Speaker 1: photographs from eighty four medallists from the two thousand and
Speaker 1: four Athens Olympics, and they found that at the metal ceremony,
Speaker 1: the gold and bronze medallists tended to have Duchen smiles,
Speaker 1: while the silver medallists tended to have non Duchen smiles.
Speaker 1: In other words, the silver medallists weren't really smiling joyfully.
Speaker 1: And this was actually an extension of a study that
Speaker 1: had been done a decade earlier, when three researchers gathered
Speaker 1: footage from the metal ceremonies of the nineteen ninety two
Speaker 1: Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and they got a bunch of
Speaker 1: undergraduates to rate the happiness of each medalist from one
Speaker 1: to ten, where one was agony, in ten was ecstasy.
Speaker 1: At the ceremonies where they are given the medals, the
Speaker 1: silver medallists scored an average of four point three on
Speaker 1: this happiness scale, while the bronze medalists scored a five
Speaker 1: point seven. The bronze medalists were happier, and it was
Speaker 1: obvious to everyone with the naked eye. Now this is weird, right,
Speaker 1: How could the second place winners be less happy than
Speaker 1: the third place winners? So let's unpack what's happening here.
Speaker 1: Why would a man commit suicide after hearing the lottery numbers?
Speaker 1: And why would a silver medalist be more disappointed than
Speaker 1: a bronze medallist. The key is what is known as
Speaker 1: counterfactual thinking. The brain doesn't just run simulations forwards and backwards,
Speaker 1: but it can step back to past time points and
Speaker 1: crank things forward to see what could have been now.
Speaker 1: In other words, this is not a simulation of the future,
Speaker 1: but instead a simulation of the present from a previous
Speaker 1: time point. This is called counterfactual thinking because the now
Speaker 1: that gets simulated is not factual. It's the brain's own construction,
Speaker 1: its own internal creation. But we can imagine present moments
Speaker 1: that might have been. Now. Why did the man in
Speaker 1: Liverpool shoot himself after hearing the lottery numbers? It was
Speaker 1: because he had been playing those exact numbers every week
Speaker 1: for five weeks, that sequence of six numbers, but this
Speaker 1: week he hadn't bought the ticket. As he listened to
Speaker 1: the numbers being read out, he thought those were my numbers.
Speaker 1: He envisioned the ways that his life could have changed.
Speaker 1: If he had just bought that ticket, His present would
Speaker 1: be different. He could immediately plug into a pastime point
Speaker 1: and crank the machinery forward to a potential now, a
Speaker 1: now that didn't happen, and the comparison of that now
Speaker 1: to the present was overwhelming to him. He thought about
Speaker 1: his potential now, the one he had missed. He pictured
Speaker 1: having an ability to pay those bills, to finish off
Speaker 1: his mortgage, to beat the financial struggles that he was facing,
Speaker 1: and he was haunted by this now that wasn't real,
Speaker 1: that was counterfactual, but that could have been. It felt
Speaker 1: so distant from where he was in reality, everything would
Speaker 1: be different if he had just bought that ticket. He
Speaker 1: was filled with regret, a regret so strong wrong that
Speaker 1: he chose to end his life. Now, I suggest we
Speaker 1: can understand regret from a computational point of view, in
Speaker 1: other words, an algorithm that the brain runs. The key
Speaker 1: is that for most situations, the emotion of regret acts
Speaker 1: as a learning signal. That means your brain readjusts itself
Speaker 1: based on that signal. So if you get mad at
Speaker 1: someone and say something mean and then that person stops
Speaker 1: talking with you. You might feel regret about what you've done
Speaker 1: to that relationship, because in the present moment you have
Speaker 1: lost a friendship, and your brain runs the simulation from
Speaker 1: that past time point moving forward, in which it constructs
Speaker 1: a scenario where you didn't say or do that offensive thing,
Speaker 1: and you're still friends. And you compare your actual present,
Speaker 1: which is uncomfortable and bad, to your simulated present in
Speaker 1: which every thing is warm and close, and the difference
Speaker 1: generates a signal of regret, and your brain uses that
Speaker 1: signal to learn on to hopefully improve its performance next time.
Speaker 1: Here's another example. Kids are always saying no to things
Speaker 1: that their parents want them to do, and parents, when
Speaker 1: they are thoughtful about this, will let this kind of
Speaker 1: learning signal do its own work. So the parent says, hey,
Speaker 1: it's freezing outside, put on your jacket, and the kid says,
Speaker 1: I don't want to wear a jacket. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: do it. So after some push and shove, the right
Speaker 1: thing for the parent to do is say, fine, don't
Speaker 1: do it. There will be natural consequences. So the kid
Speaker 1: goes out and after a while finds that he's really
Speaker 1: cold and uncomfortable. So he now has this learning signal
Speaker 1: that tells him, had I taken the jacket, my now
Speaker 1: would be different, I would be warm. And the regret,
Speaker 1: the regret that they feel, navigates their future behavior. I
Speaker 1: saw a quotation from the author Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote,
Speaker 1: of all the words of mice and men, the saddest
Speaker 1: r it might have been, But I slightly disagree. I
Speaker 1: would rephrase it, Of all the thoughts of mice and men,
Speaker 1: the most important r it might have been. Regret is
Speaker 1: a way for us to build different nows moving forward. Now,
Speaker 1: note that in some circumstances, you might take a past
Speaker 1: time point and crank that forward, and that imagined now,
Speaker 1: your counterfactual now is actually worse than you're real now,
Speaker 1: and in that case you experience a different emotion relief.
Speaker 1: This is what happens if you're considering investing in some
Speaker 1: stock and then you don't get around to it, and
Speaker 1: then you find out the company went out of business
Speaker 1: and the lost all their money on it. Your present
Speaker 1: now is better than it would have been, so you
Speaker 1: feel relief at the path that you took versus what
Speaker 1: you might have done, or to return to the weather.
Speaker 1: Imagine that you go for a day hike and then
Speaker 1: it rains unexpectedly, and you know you don't have an
Speaker 1: umbrella in your car, but you search around in the
Speaker 1: trunk of your car anyway, and then you find one
Speaker 1: and you feel relief. And again, this can be a
Speaker 1: learning signal because it tells your brain, hey, this was
Speaker 1: a fortunate accident, but you can make this happen more
Speaker 1: purposefully from now on. So let's return to the Olympic medalists.
Speaker 1: Why is there the happiness difference between the silver and
Speaker 1: the bronze medalist Where the silver medalist is less happy.
Speaker 1: It's because the silver medalist almost got gold but missed.
Speaker 1: He or she is running the simulation over and over
Speaker 1: of how things could have gone, and in those imagined scenarios,
Speaker 1: they're the ones standing on the top platform and getting
Speaker 1: wreathed with gold. The bronze medalist, in contrast, is just
Speaker 1: happy to be there. They know they're not good enough
Speaker 1: for gold or silver, and they can imagine plenty of
Speaker 1: scenarios where they're not on the platform at all. So
Speaker 1: the silver medallists now is worse than his other imaginary now's,
Speaker 1: while the bronze holders now is better than most of
Speaker 1: his imagined scenarios. Now, interestingly, this general observation about second
Speaker 1: place winners is not new. In eighteen ninety two, the
Speaker 1: great American psychologist William James touched on this. He wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: so we have the paradox of a man shamed to
Speaker 1: death because he is only the second pugilist or the
Speaker 1: second oarsman in the world that he is able to
Speaker 1: beat the whole population of the globe minus one is
Speaker 1: nothing end quote. So the second place winner is so
Speaker 1: close to a victory that could have been, and that
Speaker 1: is a more painful place to be. So this is
Speaker 1: mental time travel. But it's not from now to the past,
Speaker 1: which is memory, as I talked about two episodes ago.
Speaker 1: And it's not from now to the future, which is prediction,
Speaker 1: which I talked about in the last episode. But instead
Speaker 1: this is starting from past time points and simulating forward
Speaker 1: to what could have been right now now. I want
Speaker 1: to make a point that I'll return to at the end,
Speaker 1: which is that as you simulate yourself for all these
Speaker 1: different time points, this allows you to see different possibilities
Speaker 1: about who you could have been. And so in this sense,
Speaker 1: you're used to thinking about different us, different versions of
Speaker 1: yourself that might have existed. So before we dive deeper
Speaker 1: into the science, we're going to take a moment to
Speaker 1: dive into the literature. I'm going to read a story
Speaker 1: from my book of short stories. Some this story is
Speaker 1: called subjunctive. In the afterlife, you are judged not against
Speaker 1: other people, but against yourself. Specifically, you are judged against
Speaker 1: what you could have been. So the afterworld is much
Speaker 1: like the present world, but it now includes all the
Speaker 1: us that could have been. In an elevator, you might
Speaker 1: find more successful versions of yourself, perhaps the you that
Speaker 1: chose to leave your hometown three years earlier, or the
Speaker 1: you that happened to board an airplane next to a
Speaker 1: company president who then hired you. As you meet these ewes,
Speaker 1: you experience a pride of the sort you feel for
Speaker 1: a successful cousin. Although the accomplishments don't directly belong to you,
Speaker 1: it somehow feels close. But soon you fall victim to intimidation.
Speaker 1: These us are not really you. They are better than you.
Speaker 1: They made smarter choices, worked harder, invested the extra effort
Speaker 1: into pushing on closed doors. These doors eventually broke open
Speaker 1: for them and allowed their lives to splash out in
Speaker 1: colorful new directions. Such success can't be explained away by
Speaker 1: a better genetic hand. Instead, they played your cards better
Speaker 1: in their parallel lives. They made better decisions, avoided moral lapses,
Speaker 1: did not give up on love so easily. They worked
Speaker 1: harder than you did to correct their mistakes, and apologized
Speaker 1: more often. Eventually you cannot stand hanging around these better use.
Speaker 1: You discover you've never felt more competitive with anyone in
Speaker 1: your life. You try to mingle with the lesser use,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't assuage the sting. In truth, you have
Speaker 1: little sympathy for these less significant use and more than
Speaker 1: a little haughtiness about their indolence. If you had quit
Speaker 1: watching TV and gotten off the couch, you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: in this situation. You tell them when you bother to
Speaker 1: interact with them at all, but the better use are
Speaker 1: always in your face. In the afterlife. In the bookstore,
Speaker 1: you'll see one of them arm in arm with the
Speaker 1: affectionate woman who you let slip away. Another you is
Speaker 1: browsing the shelves, running his fingers over the book he
Speaker 1: actually finished writing, And look at this one jogging past outside.
Speaker 1: He's got a much better body than yours, thanks to
Speaker 1: a consistency at the gym that you never kept up.
Speaker 1: Eventually you sink into a defensive posture, seeking reasons why
Speaker 1: you wouldn't want to be so well behaved and virtuous.
Speaker 1: In any case, you grudgingly be friends some of the
Speaker 1: lesser use and go drinking with them. Even at the bar,
Speaker 1: you see the better use buying rounds for their friends,
Speaker 1: celebrating their latest good choice, And thus your punishment is
Speaker 1: cleverly and automatically regulated in the afterlife. The more you
Speaker 1: fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying
Speaker 1: selves you are forced to deal with. So that's the
Speaker 1: sense in which our constant time travel generates lots of
Speaker 1: different versions of who we could be, and presumably there's
Speaker 1: no afterlife where we meet them, but nonetheless different use
Speaker 1: exist right now, trapped in the boundaries of your skull. Now,
Speaker 1: I'll mention one interesting note about regret, one that's been
Speaker 1: noticed by psychologists and economists, and I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you this just in case you decide to open a restaurant.
Speaker 1: Don't have too many choices on the menu, because when
Speaker 1: there are too many choices, customers feel higher levels of
Speaker 1: regret after the meal is over. How do we understand this, Well,
Speaker 1: you can only choose one thing for your main meal.
Speaker 1: If there were lots of choices on the menu, then
Speaker 1: your brain keeps running simulations of Oh, I would have
Speaker 1: gotten this, and this is what the experience could have
Speaker 1: been like, or I could have gotten that, or I
Speaker 1: could have gotten that. More choices lead to more regret afterward.
Speaker 1: So compare going to the cheesecake factory, which has a
Speaker 1: twelve page menu spilling over with choices, versus you go
Speaker 1: to in an Outburger whose menu reads Hamburger cheeseburger fries.
Speaker 1: So when you're done with an in an Outburger meal,
Speaker 1: you don't really have much of anything to compare for
Speaker 1: what could have been. But after a cheesecake factory meal,
Speaker 1: your brain unconsciously churns on all the choices that it
Speaker 1: didn't take, and it might conclude, correctly or incorrectly, that
Speaker 1: one of those other choices would have been better, and
Speaker 1: then you feel slightly less happy about the choice you made.
Speaker 1: So here's where we are so far. Regret is any
Speaker 1: emotion that a companies negative outcomes to decisions for which
Speaker 1: we've been responsible. But it turns out, since we are
Speaker 1: creatures who are so good at moving around in time, mentally,
Speaker 1: we come to operate and make decisions based on anticipated regret.
Speaker 1: That is, we come to anticipate the emotional consequences of
Speaker 1: decisions we're making now. So imagine you're facing two choices.
Speaker 1: Let's say which new job to take, and one of
Speaker 1: them is a really risky startup with big dreams about
Speaker 1: where they'll go, and the other is a well established
Speaker 1: company that's a little boring but very stable. So a
Speaker 1: lot of people will gravitate toward the stable choice, and
Speaker 1: you might think, fine, I get it, they're avoiding risk.
Speaker 1: But there's a slightly richer way to view this, which
Speaker 1: is that they're avoiding anticipated regret. If one of the
Speaker 1: choices is risky and the other certain, and the startup
Speaker 1: goes out of business, you'll feel bad that you took
Speaker 1: such a big risk. But if the stable company were
Speaker 1: to go out of business, you wouldn't feel much regret
Speaker 1: because that was an unforeseen possibility. You had made the
Speaker 1: right choice by placing your chips on something that was
Speaker 1: unlikely to fail. So the simulation of the future generally
Speaker 1: drives people to choose the safer choice to avoid the
Speaker 1: possibility of feeling the really bad feelings later. This is
Speaker 1: also suggested to be why you will buy a brand
Speaker 1: that you know, even if it it's more expensive, over
Speaker 1: a brand that you don't know that's less expensive, even
Speaker 1: though it's a better deal to take the unknown brand,
Speaker 1: For many people, it feels worth it to spend the
Speaker 1: extra money because they anticipate they will have more regret
Speaker 1: if the unknown brand ends up being a bad choice.
Speaker 1: And this comes up in a thousand ways in our lives.
Speaker 1: Anticipated regret is what gets you to buy something that's
Speaker 1: on sale now instead of waiting for maybe a better
Speaker 1: sale later, because you're afraid that the sale won't last.
Speaker 1: And then you'll think, oh, man, I could have had
Speaker 1: that for ten percent off, but I waited and I
Speaker 1: missed my chance. It's not that you're experiencing regret now,
Speaker 1: it's that you're anticipating that you will feel regret in
Speaker 1: the future, and so that steers your behavior now. And
Speaker 1: this is of course what high pressure car salesmen try
Speaker 1: to do when they say I'll give you this special discount,
Speaker 1: but it only applies right now. The second you walk
Speaker 1: off this car lot, the offer goes away forever, so
Speaker 1: you simulate how you would feel if you lost this
Speaker 1: offer that's being dangled in front of you right now.
Speaker 1: The anticipation of that regret spurs you into actions so
Speaker 1: you won't have to feel bad later. So your brain
Speaker 1: simulates futures and it feels them, and often that includes
Speaker 1: questions like how bad will I feel if I lose
Speaker 1: this gamble. You don't just minimize risk, you minimize the
Speaker 1: regret that you expect to feel. But anticipated regret isn't
Speaker 1: just about avoiding risk. Sometimes you can leverage the issue
Speaker 1: of anticipation to improve your decision making. So when I
Speaker 1: was younger, if I was having a hard time making
Speaker 1: a decision between two choices, my mother would tell me
Speaker 1: to toss a coin. Heads meant that I would take
Speaker 1: the first choice, and tails meant I would take the
Speaker 1: second choice. But the coin toss wasn't the thing. The key,
Speaker 1: she told me was to toss the coin and see
Speaker 1: the result, and then see how that result felt in
Speaker 1: my gut. When you see which choice gets indicated by
Speaker 1: the coin, you might feel a tiny bit of relief,
Speaker 1: well I'm glad Atlanta that way, or you might feel
Speaker 1: instead a tinge of regret, and the second that that
Speaker 1: regret bubbles up, then you know that the other choice
Speaker 1: is the better one for you. And here's another example.
Speaker 1: Let's return to the issue of getting a kid to
Speaker 1: wear a jacket in the snow. When the parent says, look,
Speaker 1: it's natural consequences. That's one way to teach the kid,
Speaker 1: But really what they're hoping for is that the anticipated
Speaker 1: regret will be enough the kid will think about how
Speaker 1: things might feel in the future when they are shivering miserably,
Speaker 1: and that anticipated regret will be sufficient to force their
Speaker 1: hand to make the right choice now. And before we
Speaker 1: move on, I'll just mention an interesting tangent here, which
Speaker 1: is that people with psychopathy. Psychopaths generally have much lower
Speaker 1: anxiety than the general population. Why it's because one of
Speaker 1: the characteristics of psychopathy is an inability to simulate possible futures. So,
Speaker 1: just as an example, if I hook up electrodes to
Speaker 1: your tongue and then I say, okay, I'm hooking the
Speaker 1: other end to this car battery and you're going to
Speaker 1: get this terrible shock on your tongue, you will probably
Speaker 1: feel a lot of trepidation and anxiety and maybe break
Speaker 1: a sweat. But that's not what happens to somebody who
Speaker 1: is a psychopath. They just don't care. They don't get
Speaker 1: sweaty and anxious. And it's not because they're tougher than you.
Speaker 1: It's simply because their brains don't simulate the future very well. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do a whole episode on psychopaths in
Speaker 1: the near future, so if you're interested in this and
Speaker 1: what else is going on in psychopathy, please tune in
Speaker 1: for that one. But for now, I'm going to get
Speaker 1: back to normal brains. Given the fact that we simulate
Speaker 1: futures and understand how we might feel in those futures,
Speaker 1: there's an interesting trick that we can use to improve
Speaker 1: our own decision making, and that is to put ourselves
Speaker 1: in the shoes of future people looking back at us.
Speaker 1: Why because this gives us a very good way to
Speaker 1: ethically steer our own behavior. The world is full of temptations,
Speaker 1: and some of them aren't that big deal, but some
Speaker 1: of them are worth resisting. And one way you can
Speaker 1: do this is to imagine looking back on your choice
Speaker 1: from some future point, when you see how all of
Speaker 1: this played out. A friend of mine refers to this
Speaker 1: as the concept of book, bell and candle, which means
Speaker 1: something very particular in the spy world. But what he
Speaker 1: meant was, whatever you're considering doing, imagine how you would
Speaker 1: feel about this if it were written down in a
Speaker 1: book that everyone could read. Or your action causes a
Speaker 1: bell to ring such that everyone's attention turns to what
Speaker 1: you did, or a candle lights up the hidden thing
Speaker 1: you did. How would you feel if everybody could see
Speaker 1: that you've done it. The point is to put yourself
Speaker 1: in the future and imagine retrospectively that you have been caught.
Speaker 1: How would that make you feel? There are many ways
Speaker 1: of placing yourself in the future and looking back. A
Speaker 1: colleague of mine as an epidemiologist named Gary Slutkin, and
Speaker 1: many years ago he started working with gangs in Chicago
Speaker 1: to see if he could reduce the violence. Now, there
Speaker 1: are many ways of thinking about intervening to reduce violence,
Speaker 1: including tougher laws or longer prison sentences, but Gary started
Speaker 1: thinking about this differently. He noticed, for example, that these
Speaker 1: gang members don't act badly in front of their grandmothers,
Speaker 1: but they do in front of their peers, and so
Speaker 1: they're clearly able to assess a situation from different points
Speaker 1: of view. So he had an amazing idea, which was
Speaker 1: to employ former gang members who had previously been incarcerated
Speaker 1: and who wanted to reduce the violence in their own neighborhood.
Speaker 1: And they came on board as what he called the interrupters,
Speaker 1: and the idea was for them to change a gang
Speaker 1: member's behavior in the moment by making them think about
Speaker 1: the future. So he got the interrupters to intervene when say,
Speaker 1: a gang member felt he'd been wrong then he wanted
Speaker 1: to go in exact revenge, and the interrupter would say
Speaker 1: something like, hey, think about this for a minute. When
Speaker 1: you go to jail for shooting that guy who's gonna
Speaker 1: be with your girl Gary. And people think about this
Speaker 1: as reframing, but in the context of this episode, I'm
Speaker 1: casting this as anticipated regret. And this kind of time
Speaker 1: travel imagining yourself in jail and someone else being with
Speaker 1: your girlfriend was very effective in steering people's behavior. It
Speaker 1: forced people to time travel to a what if moment
Speaker 1: that otherwise they would not have visited. Now Interestingly, I
Speaker 1: want to clarify that our feelings of anticipated regret are
Speaker 1: not always a perfect steering mechanism. For us, because we
Speaker 1: often assume that our near future counterfactuals are going to
Speaker 1: be more appealing than they actually turn out to be
Speaker 1: in reality. In other words, the grass always seems greener
Speaker 1: on the other side of the temporal fence. So what
Speaker 1: does this have to do with civil wars or why
Speaker 1: the Balkan nations split off, or why the Arab Emirates
Speaker 1: came together, or why England split off from the European Union.
Speaker 1: So let me answer that by going back to one
Speaker 1: of the great classical novels of Chinese literature. It's a
Speaker 1: fourteenth century novel whose title translates to Romance of the
Speaker 1: Three Kingdoms, and this novel spends eight hundred thousand words
Speaker 1: dealing with the battles and plots, both personal and military,
Speaker 1: of different people and groups trying to achieve dominance for
Speaker 1: almost a century. It's like Game of Thrones before Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones and without the dragons. Anyhow, the key thing
Speaker 1: I want to note is the opening lines, which I've
Speaker 1: always found shockingly in sight full. The opening lines go
Speaker 1: like this, the Empire, long divided, must unite, long united,
Speaker 1: must divide. Thus has it ever been? In other words,
Speaker 1: the prediction here is that all unified countries are eventually
Speaker 1: going to decide it's better to split up, and all
Speaker 1: divided countries will eventually decide it's better to link arms
Speaker 1: into a union. This is something that characterizes world history.
Speaker 1: But why does it happen? Well, there may be lots
Speaker 1: of reasons, including economic factors and agricultural factors and political expediency.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to suggest there's a neural factor too,
Speaker 1: and that has to do with people running the counter factuals.
Speaker 1: What would it be like if we were together? Wouldn't
Speaker 1: that be terrific? Or we're all tangled up in each
Speaker 1: other's business, wouldn't things be better if we were independent?
Speaker 1: And my assertion is that we have a slight bias
Speaker 1: for concluding that it would be better whichever way we
Speaker 1: haven't experienced. Why. Well, it's because we're not perfect simulators,
Speaker 1: and so we believe that the low resolution simulation in
Speaker 1: our heads is actually a good one, even though it
Speaker 1: lacks all the blemishes of reality. So we believe that
Speaker 1: everyone will be happy and get along. And wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be great if we were unified, or wouldn't it be
Speaker 1: great if we were finally separated and we compare our
Speaker 1: sanitized simulation against reality. This is the same thing, of course,
Speaker 1: with relationships. When we're young and single, we continually fantasize
Speaker 1: about a partner that we're gonna meet. The partner always
Speaker 1: says the right thing, always makes us feel great, never
Speaker 1: has something on his or her mind that causes distractions
Speaker 1: so that they don't actually listen to you, but realize
Speaker 1: life is always more complex, for worse and for better
Speaker 1: than our imaginations can simulate. So now on to the
Speaker 1: last act we've been seeing so far. In all these
Speaker 1: episodes that we are creatures who mentally travel to different
Speaker 1: points in time. We constantly simulate ourselves in the past
Speaker 1: for memory, or simulate ourselves in the future to steer
Speaker 1: decision making, or we simulate possible now's to understand what
Speaker 1: we should have done better. And this kind of time traveling,
Speaker 1: if we do it intelligently, can allow us to steer
Speaker 1: our lives a bit better than we otherwise might. For example,
Speaker 1: as we get better at thinking about and interacting with
Speaker 1: all these different temporal versions of ourselves, we can actively
Speaker 1: cultivate our ability to simulate these well. And this is
Speaker 1: what we get out of visualization, out of actively putting
Speaker 1: ourselves in a detailed future simulation. So here's an example.
Speaker 1: I recently met a new friend named Brian Burke who's
Speaker 1: an LA filmmaker, and he'll ask people, hey, do you
Speaker 1: want to be a film director? It's not that hard,
Speaker 1: and the person might say, genuinely, I don't think I
Speaker 1: could ever do that, and he says, look, here's all
Speaker 1: you need to do to become a film director. You
Speaker 1: write a ten minute script and then you get your
Speaker 1: cell phone camera and a couple friends to shoot it,
Speaker 1: and then you do all the editing, and he says
Speaker 1: it'll suck for sure. So then you do it again.
Speaker 1: You write a new script, and you shoot it again
Speaker 1: on your cell phone, and you edit it again and
Speaker 1: it'll probably still suck. And then you do that a
Speaker 1: third time and you find you're getting a little bit
Speaker 1: better at this, and then he says at the end
Speaker 1: of that you'll be as good as most of the
Speaker 1: directors in Los Angeles. And this simple technique of walking
Speaker 1: somebody in detail through a future, this really moves and
Speaker 1: inspires people, especially people for whom it had never even
Speaker 1: struck them that they could possibly think of being a
Speaker 1: film director in their internal model. They have a job
Speaker 1: and they're doing fine at that, and they've never meaningfully
Speaker 1: considered film directing. That's a totally foreign thing that other
Speaker 1: people do. But all it takes is someone doing them
Speaker 1: the favor of walking them through some steps in the
Speaker 1: imagination what it would take to get there, and suddenly
Speaker 1: they see that it's not impossible. And this is why
Speaker 1: visualization of possible futures is so meaningful. It fleshes out
Speaker 1: what the path can look like. When someone sees the
Speaker 1: path clearly, then it doesn't seem so hard to get started.
Speaker 1: And visualization or imagination this can also steer your behavior
Speaker 1: away from certain things that you don't want to do
Speaker 1: again by making them feel real. A colleague of Mind
Speaker 1: named Jack Keene started an app to get seniors to exercise,
Speaker 1: and the idea is to use AI to show the
Speaker 1: person a picture of themselves. If they do and if
Speaker 1: they don't exercise, they see their body in good shape
Speaker 1: or not in good shape. And once it's something they
Speaker 1: can picture, then it is more real. And there are
Speaker 1: lower resolution versions of this. For example, in episode nine,
Speaker 1: I outline some ways that we can get good at
Speaker 1: navigating our future behavior, and one example I mentioned is
Speaker 1: for people who are trying to lose weight. You have
Speaker 1: them find a picture of themselves where they look more
Speaker 1: overweight than they would like to and you get them
Speaker 1: to stick that picture on the fridge and that way,
Speaker 1: every time they go to the fridge to graze, that
Speaker 1: picture reminds them of what they want to accomplish, and
Speaker 1: it does so by allowing them to see right in
Speaker 1: front of them their future if they don't modify their behavior,
Speaker 1: and getting people to think about possible futures, good and bad.
Speaker 1: This is what coaching is about. Sports coaching or life coaching.
Speaker 1: A coach's job is to expand your model of what's
Speaker 1: possible and to move you through the next steps and
Speaker 1: get your aim straight on who you could be. Generally,
Speaker 1: being able to visualize something makes it like a prediction
Speaker 1: that you can chase after, or defend against, or prepare
Speaker 1: for or whatever. It refines the simulation and makes it
Speaker 1: feel more real. So wrapping up the past three episodes,
Speaker 1: who you are is the sum total of layered time scales.
Speaker 1: When you walk down the street, you look to other
Speaker 1: people like you're just a person walking down the street,
Speaker 1: but your brain is colorful and alive with reminiscence of
Speaker 1: your past, simulations of a variety of possible futures, and
Speaker 1: all your regrets and reliefs that result from simulations of
Speaker 1: hypothetical nows, and this rich layering of time, this is
Speaker 1: what makes humans so nuanced and complex and fascinating. And
Speaker 1: as we come to learn what is happening under the hood,
Speaker 1: and we get better at taking advantage of these mechanisms,
Speaker 1: that gives us a small grip on a very powerful
Speaker 1: tool to navigate ourselves in the direction of who we
Speaker 1: would like to be. Go to Eagleman dot com slash
Speaker 1: podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send
Speaker 1: me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with
Speaker 1: questions or discussion and I'll be making an episode soon
Speaker 1: in which I address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman,
Speaker 1: and this is Inner Cosmos.