31/03/2023
“Episodic future thinking” or EFT is often described as “mental time travel” — your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.
Filling in the blanks takes considerable effort. But that’s precisely why this kind of imagination is so powerful. Instead of simply remembering what it knows, your brain has to invent a new possibility. It draws on past experiences, current hopes and fears, and your intuitions about what might possibly change in 10 years.
Then, after you’ve made this new memory, something amazing happens: What was previously unimaginable to your brain is now imaginable. You can revisit this new memory whenever you want and examine how it makes you feel. Does it spark positive or negative emotions? These pre-feelings can help you decide: Should you change what you’re doing today to make this future more or less likely? And because you invented this memory, you can change it whenever you want.
Scientists call this form of imagination “episodic future thinking,” or EFT. EFT is often described as a kind of “mental time travel” because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.
EFT isn’t an escape from reality. It’s a way of playing with reality, to discover risks and opportunities you might not have considered. EFT is not a daydream in which you fantasize about waking up in a world where your problems are magically solved. It is a way of connecting who you are today with what you might really feel and do in the future.
An important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call “clues to the future,” concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out.
Because EFT allows us to pre-feel different possible futures, it’s a powerful decision-making, planning and motivational tool. It helps us decide: Is this a world I want to wake up in? What do I need to do to be ready for it? Should I change what I’m doing today to make this future more or less likely?
According to fMRI studies, EFT involves heightened activity and increased connectivity between 11 distinct brain regions. Compare this to remembering a past event, which activates 6 of the 11 regions of the brain.
There are three major kinds of sense making that happen when you engage in mental time travel to your future. First, your brain has to do what cognitive scientists call “scene construction” — mentally building the future world. Think of this as crafting the stage set, cast and props for a theatrical play.
During EFT, your brain goes on a hunt for realistic details and plausible ideas. To do this, it activates the hippocampus, the seat of memory and learning, and digs through your memories, plus any other facts and ideas you’ve stored away. Depending on what kind of future you’re imagining, the hippocampus identifies the most relevant stuff and retrieves and recombines it into a new scene.
Whatever you see in your future will always come from information your brain has already perceived and processed. Ideally, as you get better at imagining the unimaginable, you’ll incorporate not just obvious ideas and events but also surprising things that could be important in your future.
Another important part of imagination training is to try out new behaviors that could prove useful in the future. I call these micro-actions — taking no more than five minutes to do something today you’ve never done before.
That’s why an important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call “clues to the future,” concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out. When you have a hippocampus full of clues, your brain will have better data to draw on, and the scenes you construct will be way more interesting.
https://ideas.ted.com/mental-time-travel-is-a-great-decision-making-tool-this-is-how-to-use-it/