Time Warped (26 page)

It is hard to imagine what goes through the mind of
someone like Angela or the suicidal visitors to the island. Earlier in this book I was discussing how the suicidal state can skew the perception of time to the extent that it can be hard for people to envisage a future at all. But very recently it has emerged that there is one type of future imagery that suicidal people often do experience – involuntary flash-
forwards
to the future. Like a flash
back
after a trauma, the pictures appear in your mind when you least want them to and are difficult to banish. Working in the psychiatry department at Oxford University, Emily Holmes has found that at the time of greatest despair, people who are feeling suicidal often find that images of their imagined suicide intrude into their minds.
⁹⁸
One man repeatedly visualised himself deciding whether to leave a final message and then jumping from a specific cliff. The image was so detailed that he could clearly observe his own feet, the grass and the rocks below him. Several times he had left hospital and tried to reach this exact cliff top. A woman was plagued by images of herself feeling cold and damp inside a coffin.
⁹⁹
A man pictured the particular place on his daily journey where he planned to crash his car. A few found these images comforting, despite their graphic nature, but for others they were distressing. This is what one woman imagined when she was planning to jump off the top of a five-storey house. ‘I hit the road and the concrete. I imagine my brain splitting open like a pumpkin, seeing myself doing that, seeing myself flying down, hair and clothes flying backwards, head breaking into pieces, making a sound like a watermelon, a pop sound. The traffic stops and people scream, my mother comes out screaming, mother is crying, father is in shock, face so
shattered that it is unrecognisable.’ This graphic image haunted her. Some said these imaginings took over their lives.

Research on future thinking suggests that these images could have serious consequences. There is plenty of evidence that once you have imagined yourself doing something in the future, whether voting or giving blood, you are more likely to do it. It is routine for mental health professionals to ask distressed people whether they have had suicidal thoughts, but it is rare for them to ask whether they have experienced unwanted future images like these. The new discovery of these flash-forwards could even be used therapeutically, discussing the images with the suicidal person, but replacing them with different endings where they don’t kill themselves, showing that other futures are possible.

This rather grim finding demonstrates the power of future thinking. This situation is extreme, but we all find our minds drifting into the future many, many times a day. This leads us on to the question of whether thinking about the future could even be the mind’s default position.

THINKING ABOUT NOTHING

Like many students I had a go at learning to meditate. And like everyone else on my course I bought the postcard that seemed to sum up our difficulties. It featured a black-and-white cartoon drawing of a man sitting cross-legged trying to meditate. The space around him is packed with bubbles of unwanted thoughts. ‘I don’t think I’m very good at this.’ ‘Am I thinking about the right thing?’ ‘My knees hurt.’ And
then as his mind starts to wander, out come endless thoughts about the future. ‘How much longer till I can go?’ ‘How shall I get home?’ ‘What shall I eat tonight?’ ‘What shall I do for Christmas?’

The postcard is intended as an illustration of the difficulties of mastering meditation, but it is also a nice example of something else: the brain’s default network. The idea that we only use 10 per cent of our brains is a complete myth. Even when you are lying completely still apparently thinking about nothing, many parts of the brain remain active. This is where one of the most fascinating findings about our conception of the future comes in. All three of the chief areas of the brain involved in imagining the future are part of the default network. It is almost as though our brain is programmed to contemplate the future whenever it finds itself unoccupied. In meditation you are told to sit and monitor your thoughts as they come and go. If you try this, even for a moment, it is hard to escape from thoughts about the future.

Daydreaming might seem like a waste of time. We all fight our own lack of concentration, but with the exception of the rare individuals who are compulsive daydreamers, mind-wandering is a useful skill. There is a good reason why our brains invest so much effort in it. Using thought-sampling procedures, you can calculate the frequency of daydreaming. Researchers at Harvard University used an iPhone application to monitor the wandering minds of 5,000 people living in 83 different countries. The phone pages them at random intervals to ask how happy they feel at the moment, what they are doing and whether they are thinking about something other than what they’re currently doing.
It was revealed that a third of the time people’s minds were wandering. Sex was the one exception to this, where people claimed to be keeping their minds on the job (yet somehow responding to their iPhone?). Sadly, in contrast to the optimistic nature of deliberate future imaginings, unintentional mind-wandering didn’t necessarily make people happy. Half involved pleasant topics but that still didn’t make them feel good, and the daydreams that were neutral or unpleasant made them feel unhappy. So imagining the future might have its uses, but when it is unintentional, as the authors put it, ‘it comes at an emotional cost’.
¹⁰⁰

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