The Human Brain Is a Time Traveler
You only get access a few times.
“What best distinguishes our species,” Seligman wrote in a Times Op-Ed with John Tierney, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” He went on: “A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise.”...
...As you walk, you remember the physical sense of unease in the room as your colleague ranted over the most meaningless offense. You imagine a meeting six months from now with a comparable eruption — only this time it’s happening in front of your boss. A small wave of stress washes over you. Perhaps he’s just not the right fit for the job, you think — which reminds you of the one time you fired an employee, five years ago. Your mind conjures the awkward intensity of that conversation, and then imagines how much more explosive a comparable conversation would be with your current employee. You feel a sensation close to physical fear as your mind runs through the scenario.
In just a few minutes of mental wandering, you have made several distinct round trips from past to future: forward a week to the important meeting, forward a year or more to the house in the new neighborhood, backward five hours to today’s meeting, forward six months, backward five years, forward a few weeks. You’ve built chains of cause and effect connecting those different moments; you’ve moved seamlessly from actual events to imagined ones. And as you’ve navigated through time, your brain and body’s emotional system has generated distinct responses to each situation, real and imagined. The whole sequence is a master class in temporal gymnastics. In these moments of unstructured thinking, our minds dart back and forth between past and future, like a film editor scrubbing through the frames of a movie....
This ability to cognitively time travel allows us to run through various future scenarios and choose the one we want to happen.
Our predictive ability, the accuracy of our predictive ability is vary important.
It goes on to offer a warning.
Having a network-connected supercomputer in your pocket at all times gives you too much to focus on. It cuts into your mind-wandering time. The downtime between cognitively active tasks that once led to REST states can now be filled with Instagram, or Nasdaq updates, or podcasts. We have Twitter timelines instead of time travel. At the same time, a society-wide vogue for “mindfulness” encourages us to be in the moment, to think of nothing at all instead of letting our thoughts wander. Search YouTube, and there are hundreds of meditation videos teaching you how to stop your mind from doing what it does naturally. The Homo prospectus theory suggests that, if anything, we need to carve out time in our schedule — and perhaps even in our schools — to let minds drift.
Daydreaming? is important for our mental development.
You only get access a few times.
“What best distinguishes our species,” Seligman wrote in a Times Op-Ed with John Tierney, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” He went on: “A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise.”...
...As you walk, you remember the physical sense of unease in the room as your colleague ranted over the most meaningless offense. You imagine a meeting six months from now with a comparable eruption — only this time it’s happening in front of your boss. A small wave of stress washes over you. Perhaps he’s just not the right fit for the job, you think — which reminds you of the one time you fired an employee, five years ago. Your mind conjures the awkward intensity of that conversation, and then imagines how much more explosive a comparable conversation would be with your current employee. You feel a sensation close to physical fear as your mind runs through the scenario.
In just a few minutes of mental wandering, you have made several distinct round trips from past to future: forward a week to the important meeting, forward a year or more to the house in the new neighborhood, backward five hours to today’s meeting, forward six months, backward five years, forward a few weeks. You’ve built chains of cause and effect connecting those different moments; you’ve moved seamlessly from actual events to imagined ones. And as you’ve navigated through time, your brain and body’s emotional system has generated distinct responses to each situation, real and imagined. The whole sequence is a master class in temporal gymnastics. In these moments of unstructured thinking, our minds dart back and forth between past and future, like a film editor scrubbing through the frames of a movie....
This ability to cognitively time travel allows us to run through various future scenarios and choose the one we want to happen.
Our predictive ability, the accuracy of our predictive ability is vary important.
It goes on to offer a warning.
Having a network-connected supercomputer in your pocket at all times gives you too much to focus on. It cuts into your mind-wandering time. The downtime between cognitively active tasks that once led to REST states can now be filled with Instagram, or Nasdaq updates, or podcasts. We have Twitter timelines instead of time travel. At the same time, a society-wide vogue for “mindfulness” encourages us to be in the moment, to think of nothing at all instead of letting our thoughts wander. Search YouTube, and there are hundreds of meditation videos teaching you how to stop your mind from doing what it does naturally. The Homo prospectus theory suggests that, if anything, we need to carve out time in our schedule — and perhaps even in our schools — to let minds drift.
Daydreaming? is important for our mental development.
