[Science Solitaire] Our brains don’t really naturally see the future. It needs help.

What project would you embark on if you had ALL the money in the world?

That is the one question I always ask of any applicant applying for a role in my team. I ask that question because the power of imagination is part of one’s character. I have had the most expansive answers from creating a network of innovative schools so children can learn much better than past generations did, to new ways of growing food for everyone, to building a cool transportation system so we can do without private cars. BUT I have also had answers like “putting up a water-refilling station” (yes and just 1 and in a specific spot somewhere south of Metro Manila) or “birthing a child” (which prompted me to remind her/him of the biology that goes into reproduction to point out that nowhere in there is “cash” an actor or if to them, it meant “raising a child” – nor would it require ALL the money in the world). 

Humans are capable of such a wide range of spreading themselves into the future – vastly imaginative, crossing into seamless dimensions or as constricted as a blind mouse inside a drum. You would think that any human, into their 20s perhaps onwards, would get the drift of the nature of time to know that the future is something we could partly shape by the actions we take now. But obviously we still don’t get it. The humongous problems that we have now, for instance, the climate crisis, is something we have been warned about for decades now but why are we acting like the world is becoming so strange? 

Yes, we just do not want to admit our own part in the blame. I also remember having read that while to err is human, to blame it on others even more human. But there is another reason why and it sits on our brains. Our brains are naturally poor at imagining the future. We have to train it to be imaginative. What do scientific studies know so far?

Studies have shown that when we imagine, we rely on the past as some sort of source for basic materials to paint the future with. So what you paint the future with largely depends on the palette of your past – not just of experiences but of your own past dreams and reflections.  Seniors with memory problems have indeed shown in the study that they have difficulty imagining the future. This would also partly explain why children’s imagination are both narrow and wild in the sense that they have little past to work with but if you actively encourage their imagination, they will run away with it at rates that confound adults since very little “past” constricts their imagination. 

Another reason we are poor in projecting ourselves into the future is that we get to invest ourselves more in something if we could really see it in our heads. This is called “vividness” and studies like this have shown that the farther into the future we go, the less vivid things are and the more we discount the future in the things we do now.  There is a signature in the brain that registers how vivid things are. Scientists saw that with immediate and imminent things, that signature is clear but when we imagine the future, we lack details enough for it to become vivid enough for us to care, now.

There is also a brain part to watch when you think of yourself and a stranger. It is very active when you think of yourself and dim when you think of a stranger. But studies like this have shown that it also dims when you think of your future self. You become a stranger to yourself.

This is a very serious problem for us all. It is already terrible enough that poverty is deep and widespread around the world but to be plagued with a poverty of imagination is like turning off futures – better futures. This is why UNESCO calls for the same cultivation of literacy for imagining futures as they do for reading and writing. 

This is why after acknowledging that our brains have a natural tendency to dim the lights on the future, we have to also recognize that we can learn how to wire it to illuminate time’s arrow as it spreads out our individual or collective lifetimes. We can be future literate. 

If banks who want you to invest in your retirement can help people see their futures vividly by getting them to visualize their future selves through hypnosis, we can do it in other aspects of our futures. Visualizing is even so much easier now with all the tech at our disposal. 

This is why the arts are not peripheral BUT critical to our survival. The arts help us break away from natural (i.e. lazy) brain patterns. We have to imagine alternate ways of being and feeling alive and we can only do it through imaginative film, literature, dance, music, plays, the visual arts. The arts will shock our lazy ways of signing into our brains and cultivate grooves that could explore not just new ways of doing but also of feeling. We have to feel the future now so we could care to act now. 

Train your imagination so it could expaaaaand. Whoever you are, you are literally made of stardust. Shine and burst from within. – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire.” You can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.