Producer: All right. Welcome back to Full PreFrontal: Exposing the Mysteries of Executive Functions. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, my friend. Good to be with you. Looking forward to today’s conversation.
Sucheta: Thank you, Todd. I want to start with a journey of a mosquito net. A half a million people in Africa die of malaria. It is a huge health crisis and scientists have studied this problem and really have come with an ingenious solution, so they thought. What they did is they designed this wonderful, small meshed mosquito net and they treated it with insecticide in hopes that when people in Africa begin to use it, that will really prevent this crisis of being bitten by mosquitoes.
The mechanism work this way, that person sleeps under the net, the net has small mesh and it’s treated with insecticide. So when a person breathes out carbon dioxide, mosquitoes will be attracted to the net. But as they come closer, their cuticles touch the net which has insecticide and that eventually will cause the death and problem solved. Brilliant idea, well supported, well founded. And so many people, many companies got behind it. Billions of dollar were poured into it and they produced these mosquito nets and they dropped it in Africa. Great many people did use it just the way it was designed. However, what they did not anticipate is ingenious mind of a human being.
Mosquito nets were not just limited to be used as mosquito nets but they also became a source of innovation. Some people began to use it as bridal veils. Some began to use it as soccer balls. They even lined the chicken coop with mosquito nets. That was all well and dandy because that didn’t cause any problems. The real problem became when the fishermen I this coastal region of Africa began to use this as fishing nets. Now, unfortunately, so you can imagine, they open the packet, take the mosquito nets, join many mosquito nets together, and off the fisherman goes. Unfortunately, because they had been treated with insecticide, of course, it now created a new problem which was a problem of contamination.
So as you can see, the scientist who developed this magic bullet, so they thought, to really treat a health crisis in Africa, managed to contain that but created a new crisis of pollution. This is a common problem that we all face, that when we solve problems for ourselves, for the future, to take care of our future self, sometimes we need to do the simulation of the future. That means what will it look like if I do this? What will I look like if I do that? This is what leads us to come up with plan A then plan B. And then even plan A and B doesn’t work, then we come up with something called plan C. however, we do need a mental space where we come up with these problems and solutions for our problems. Sometimes that fails and sometimes it does work well.
We are going to have a wonderful speaker today, Professor Hal Hershfield, who’s going to talk a lot about this wonderful notion of future self.
Producer: All right. Well, this promises to be a very intriguing conversation. Very much looking forward to it so let’s get to Sucheta’s conversation with Hal Hershfield.
Sucheta: Today, we are honored to have Dr. Hal Hershfield, assistant professor of marketing at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Dr. Hershfield’s work aims to understand how thinking about time can alter people’s judgment and decision and transform their emotions. His main work examines the way that people consider their future selves and how feelings of connection to these distant selves can impact their decision-making. One of Dr. Hershfield’s most well-known discovery suggests that when people are confronted with their future selves, they experience an emotional sense of connection that can influence long-term financial and ethical decision-making. He has been a consultant to Prudential Insurance Company’s Bring Your Challenges campaign, American Greeting’s Principal Finance Group Morning Star, and many others. Meryl Lynch has implemented his face aging study in a marketing context to try to influence consumer behavior towards purchasing its products. Dr. Hershfield received the 2011 Association for Psychological Science Rising Star Award, recognizing him for being an outstanding psychological scientist in the early stages of his research career post PhD, whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signaled great potential for his continued contribution. Dr. Hershfield’s connection to behavioral science as well as behavioral economics has added tremendous value in understanding one’s own connection to future behavior. I can’t wait to welcome Dr. Hershfield to our podcast today.
Welcome to the show, Hal. I’m truly excited for what you’re going to talk about today. So let me jump right into it. The first thing I wanted to talk about, the role of prefrontal lobe and the simulation that it allows people to experience. We use many mental tools including working memory, visual imagery, for example, doing a mental plan, and moving things in that working memory to conceptualize and problem solve. The simulation, that activating the picture or experience or video of this thing that we might run into or get into helps us imagine the results. How does the mental stimulation work and what do the prefrontal cortex do?
Hershfield: I think when we talk about stimulation, there’s all sorts of types of stimulation. In fact, a lot of psychologists and philosophers who said this is the thing that really is at the center of our consciousness. This is the thing that makes us truly human — our ability to essentially stimulate other minds, stimulate other times, stimulate different possible worlds, thinking probabilistically about the world around us.
What I’m particularly interested in with regards to stimulation is the way that we can stimulate not just other minds or the times but essentially stimulate the minds of our future selves or our past selves. In other words, ourselves at different points in time. I’ve specifically looked at this on a neural level, which is to say the brain can pretty accurately detect what’s me and what’s not me.
And so this is the medial prefrontal cortex, that’s often involved in this, a portion of that. And that can essentially show higher activation patterns. So that is more blood flow to that part of the brain when we’re thinking about ourselves compared to when we’re thinking about another person. What my colleagues and I did, this was several years ago now thought I just read another paper that replicated this result and extended it, what we did is we said, “Is it possible that people think of the future self as if it is another person?” And maybe that can underlie some of the reasons why we’re often so bad at making these long-term decisions. If we think of that distant self as if it’s really separate from who we are now, as if it’s another person, well that’s not going to help us really take action today.
So we ran a study where we put people under the scanners and we had them make judgments about the self today and the self in 10 years. Another person today and another person in 10 years. Our thinking was that, “Hey, we already know that this portion of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, can detect me versus not me. Would we see a similar pattern when someone thinks about me now versus me in 10 years’ time, that is future me?” In fact, we did. We saw this similar pattern rise such that you get this difference between me and someone else. And then you see a very similar difference between me and me in 10 years on a brain level.
So we thought that was an interesting demonstration that maybe this region and set of regions, really, are not only saying what’s me and what’s not me but also underlying this difference between me today and me in the future.
Sucheta: Of course, you have gotten lot of questions about this direction of your research. It’s extremely fascinating because it’s something people can see. The research study that you just mentioned where you presented with digitally altered image of themselves but the gap between those people, these were 20-year old students and they saw themselves at age 60 or 70 and that gap was much vivid and remarkable for them to not deny that “Oh, my God. This is a person not me.”
Hershfield: Right. That’s the separate study.
Sucheta: I see. Okay.
Hershfield: Yeah. You’re right to bring that up. I think it fits right in there. So the study I was talking about was just people making judgments about themselves now and themselves in the future while they’re relying on a scanner. We essentially follow that up.
Sucheta: Without any visual imagery?
Hershfield: No visual imagery, exactly.
Sucheta: I got it. Yes. I remember that study. Yes.
Hershfield: Right. And then we follow that up by saying, “Well, maybe one way that we could actually get people to really think more effectively and more realistically about their future selves would be to present these vivid visual images of themselves at their retirement age.” That is, like you said, taking a 20-year old college student and showing them an image of themselves when they’re 65. So we age progress those images and we show that that help people act more patiently in financial decision tasks.
I think what you’re bringing up would be fascinating, which is to say, my gosh. If we could show people these vivid visual images of themselves in an older point of time and get them to really simulate that future self and just step into the shoes of their future selves, would we see some of those neural differences that ted to underlie the difference between me now and me in the future, will we see those go away? Because people could more accurately, more emotionally, more deeply, more intensely step into the shoes and see the world through the eyes of those futures selves.
Sucheta: Such a fascinating topic. Can I ask you more detailed question regarding this direction of time travel?
Hershfield: Yeah.
Sucheta: So we can travel back in time and we can travel in our future. Why did these abilities develop in humans and is there any particular reason like the evolutionary role that you can explain to our listeners that these functions came by?
Hershfield: It’s a great question that —
Sucheta: Speculation?
Hershfield: No, no, no. It really is a great question that you’re raising there. In a way, you could argue that evolutionary speaking, this is somewhat of a new unused skill. Think about it this way, we could think about metal time travels being on all different scales. So I can mentally time travel to tonight and think about what is it that I’m going to want for dinner? That is a form of mentally traveling in time. I can also think about should I start considering how much money I need to put aside my wife’s birthday present in four months? That’s a different timeframe. And then I can also, of course, sort of the canonical version is to think about who will I be and what will I be in retirement? Well, of course, that longer timeframe which could be only in the order of anywhere from of course next year to 40-50 years away, right? That’s a span of mental time travel that didn’t really make sense back when what was most important was saying “how much do we need to put away in terms of the food that we need for our family in our hunter and gather tribes.” That’s still a type of mental time travel. There are debates that have raged in the literature about whether there are certain animals that when they put food away, are they in fact mentally traveling in time? But I don’t think —
Sucheta: That’s precisely what I was referring to. When the monkeys, they saved it but they did not have this sense that what you save is what you can eat and they took away the food. Is that the —
Hershfield: Yeah. That’s exactly what I was thinking about. There are some work on birds as well when they – food. Are they doing it because they’re saving it for later or was it a response to the competitors? What does that really mean? It’s one of these questions that’s fascinating to discuss but also hard to answer, right?
Sucheta: Yeah.
Hershfield: But the ability to be able to step backward and forward in time, I think, has its roots in some of this which is to say planning, which is to say planning for whether it’s inclement weather and how that might affect our living space. Again, I’m talking about our ancestors from a long time ago or is it about thinking about future responses to predators. I think this faculty is developed with those very real stimuli in mind but they’ve been developed in our brain such that we’re often – we use a similar part of the brain to be able to step backward and forward in time. So there’s the symmetries between not only being able to look ahead in time but also to be able to look backwards. Of course, this is where our memories come from, and our ability to relive the past and feel nostalgic for it is a similar process that underlines the ability to say, prospect and think ahead in time and consider the future consequences of present decisions.
Sucheta: One of the way in my work when I work with people with executive dysfunction, I work on helping them create schemas. And so Roy Baumeister talks about this, that we can use this time travel abilities to travel through space and culture. So this experience travel, that means if you have no experience of being stranded at the airport, then you never can prepare yourself in order to be stranded at the airport. There’s a lot of people in my work who are taking poor decision. They’re impulsive. They lack the self-restraint. They lack that self-regulation. They are acting as if this is the first time they are experiencing. So I see a disconnect between their ability to jog their past experience and connect it to future possibilities where they might be in trouble.
Hershfield: Right.
Sucheta: Go ahead.
Hershfield: I was going to say I think that’s a fascinating insight. I think what this really suggest is that if executive function underlies some of these abilities to step forward in time or to stimulate the future and these future possible worlds, if that function is compromised, then it suggests that just trying to tell somebody to really think about what it will feel like, that could be one route but it might not be the most effective one. Whereas another one to do is to say create a bunch of if-then scenarios. If this happens, then I do that. And then I won’t have to do the difficult mental time travel of saying, “What will the future be like?” I just say, “If I get into this situation, then I know that this is the thing that I have to do because that’s the habit. That’s the hero’s trick. That’s the shortcut that I have been taught and that I’ve learned myself to create my most efficient personal environment.”
Sucheta: Can I quickly go in the direction of that concept of future self and emotional connection to that future self?
Hershfield: Yeah.
Sucheta: My experience from, again, my work in executive functions, that when we relate to the world, we need to have activation of our sense of who you are. And then when we interact with others, we have to take perspective of who they are. And we do this song and dance by going back and forth. Those with executive dysfunction are not able to suppress their thoughts about themselves that often and they are not able to activate thoughts about needs of others or perspectives of others or their intended actions. And so the theory of mind issue is quite impaired for them. And what I find that they are so impulsive but they become self-imposing. They become selfish-appearing or they become self-indulgent. Any thoughts about that notion of future self is really suppressing your temptation to indulge yourself of the current moment.
Hershfield: You hit on so many interesting things there. First off, I think you’re absolutely right that part of this issue comes down to the theory of mind concept. This ability to essentially understand what it is that’s happening in the minds of other. This would fall in the categories that’s difficult but necessary adult skills to acquire. Right?
Sucheta: Yes.
Hershfield: So much of child-rearing, essentially trying to get kids to understand what it is that other kids might be thinking when you behave this way., what I might be thinking when you behave this way. A lot of these long-term decision-making and even short-term decision-making but we could call it a bucket of inter-temporal decision-making. These decisions that occur over time, a lot of what that relies on is this ability to essentially develop a theory of mind for our future selves as well and to say, what will future me think and feel? When I engage in a certain action or don’t, how will I feel? What would I think about in the future? By the way, the same works in reverse when it comes to regret, just as a side note. We haven’t published anything about this but it’s my contention that so much of regret arises because we have an inability to essentially develop a theory of mind of our past. Why was it that I acted that way? Well, if I could really step inside the shows and mind of my past self, then I might understand why I did act that and I might not experience quite as much regret as I would’ve otherwise. I’m just raising that to bring up the idea of looking at how that works symmetrically with thinking about the future self.
Sucheta: Incredible. Can I get you to talk about the George Bailey Effect? This comes from the timeless film of “This Wonderful Life” where James Stewart plays this character called George Bailey and as the movie unfolds, George sees that events that would have gone some way if he was never born, and that gives him a huge perspective and a renewed appreciation for what life is. So this is an example of traveling back in time. It was exactly on regret.
Hershfield: It’s funny, I hadn’t ever thought about it this way but you’re absolutely right. When I think about that movie, I just think about hot chocolate and winter. In a way, what we would talk about that movie is we’d say it’s almost a canonical example of what’s known as counter factual reflection. Pardon the big words there but counter factual reflection is saying, this is not just thinking about the past but what’s happening in that movie and I see why you’re bringing it up is that he is thinking about what would the world be like in an alternate world, in an alternate scenario. This is a very concrete one, the ultimate scenario is a world in which George Bailey is never born, and he’s able to essentially witness that and by doing so, essentially imbues his life with more meaning and it shows just the impact that he has.
In fact, several years ago, I actually published a paper with some colleagues, Adam Galinsky and Laura Kray and Brayden King, where we showed that when you actually ask people to reflect counterfactually, they become more committed to the things that were the target of that counterfactual reflection. So if I think about what would my life be like if I hadn’t met my wife? All of a sudden – this is a different way of approaching the world and saying, what’s my life like because I met my wife? It’s saying, what path would I be on? Who would I be with? What would I be doing? All these things conditional on things being positive right now that actually can imbue more connection and more commitment to my spouse or to my company or to even my country. If I say, what would the world be like if the US never existed, et cetera?
And so I think this concept of counterfactual reflection relies on you to essentially say it relies on you to not only essentially stimulate another time, which is say, the past up until now but it also asks you to stimulate another possible world. You now have to think about the possibility of the world would be different. This is exactly the type of thing that underlies some of the decisions that we have to make about the future instead of counterfactual thinking we call prefactual thinking, which is to say what would happen if I were to forget my umbrella today? What would happen if I were to skim a little money off the top? What would happen if I were to cheat on my spouse or not? I raise all of these possibilities because a lot of these touches on ethical decision, where you say to somebody, “If you were to do this thing that might be gratifying right now, what would happen in the future versus what would happen if you didn’t do that thing?” We can go from the mundane and the banal from preparing for the weather to these big decisions about how should I act and what should I do to maybe something in the middle. What would my life be like if I did or didn’t say? What would my life be like if I did go through with this educational course or nor, et cetera? So I think what you brought up with George Bailey is a fascinating way of connecting these things together.
Sucheta: My brain is now bustling with ideas. You said so many things we can talk about. One story that comes to my mind is Gwyneth Paltrow’s movie called “Sliding Doors.” Do you remember that?
Hershfield: Yes.
Sucheta: I find that these experiences that we go into the movie theater and allow ourselves to visualize, conceptualize, or experience give us a little mental break to not having to do that to us but learn from experiences of others. To me, these mental tools that we have just been talking about are all self-regulatory tools. This if-then scenario, if this happened, then that will happen. If I take this path, then that will be the outcome. And then based on these hypothetical scenarios, we are able to take better decisions. What happens if either you don’t have that kind of working memory space because of some type of injury? What if you don’t have that visual capacity for visual imagery? Or what if you generally have problems in problem solving? Is there research that you have done or you are familiar with that you can share that causes people to then run into problems because they are just not doing this kind of time traveling back and forth?
Hershfield: Yeah. It’s a great question. There’s some older work by Anton Bashera and Antonio Dimacio and others with the Iowa Current Task which is basically a task that allows people – essentially a game where you have a – I haven’t actually described it in a while so forgive me for sounding a little rusty but it’s a game where you’re choosing cards between different decks and one deck has high risk-high reward cards in so much as you might pick a card and you could lose all the money that you have or you could gain a lot. Another deck has cards that are much lower risk but also lower reward. So the safer play over time is to choose from that deck. But people who have certain neurological damage and can’t accurately stimulate what’s in one deck or another and can’t accurately stimulate how they’ll feel if they pick a losing card often will end up going for the riskier deck repeatedly. There are situations where this could pay off, right, if the risk ends up being rewarding. But there’s also situations where it could cause a lot of damage which is a great proxy for real world decisions that carry with them a lot of risk. You could make a big risky investment that could pay off and you could look like a brilliant investor or it could really tank and you could have to explain to your shareholders why you made that decision. Or on a more personal level, I guess it’s hard to come up with specific examples there but the idea being that with the inability to essentially stimulate these other experiences and outcomes, it can be really difficult to then make the decisions that will end up causing the safest outcomes majority of the time.
Sucheta: Yeah. It’s the gambling behavior that this behavior where your risk-aversive tendencies are shut off or completely turned off. I see that in a lot of my patient population particularly with concussion or traumatic brain injury, where they are either doing the same behavior that did not get them their desired outcome again or they are taking risky decision where the benefit may be great under certain circumstances but the risk is way too high. I’ll give you a quick example.
Hershfield: Yeah.
Sucheta: I had a patient who was extremely impulsive and he, of course, lacked the ability to simulate what will happen if I do this. He was driving at a major junction in downtown Atlanta, not the safest place, and literally did not think there was any reason why he should be waiting for the light to turn red so he can cross safely. So he hopped along and then one car came and hit him. There was no traffic but that one car was not anticipating because it was 2 a.m. he as not anticipating any cars because it was 2 a.m. and then that just led to a disaster. Sometimes, I think, the risk-taking behaviors which we modulate or control through these thoughts about future which may not be way, way distant future, it could be immediate future, right?
Hershfield: Yes. In that particular case, you could say that that’s partly time travel but it’s only also partly just stimulating other possible worlds.
Sucheta: Exactly. Yes.
Hershfield: A lot of this relies on a task that’s difficult even for people with healthy non-damaged brains which is to say so many of the decisions that we make are probabilistic in nature. Many people know that if I were to walk across the street with a red light or drive across, whatever, there is a probability and it’s reasonably high enough that a car will hit me and so I don’t do it. But there are a lot of other decisions that we make where the probabilities are not as clearly defined. This is something that happened with the presidential election back in November where many analysts were saying Hillary Clinton has a 70% chance or an 80% chance of winning. What that means is to say if you were to have this election 100 times, 80 of those times, it would come out in Hillary’s favor and 20 of those times, it would come out in Donald Trump’s favor which means it’s not a surefire bet. It’s a similar thing with the NFL kicker. He has a 70% chance of making a field goal from 30 yards out which means that 7 out of 10 times he’ll make that but there are those three times where he won’t. That’s how we reason probabilistically about the world. But if part of that reasoning relies on being able to stimulate all the different possibilities and say, “Am I willing to take that risk or am I not?” But if you can’t do that stimulation, then the inputs of that simulation won’t factor into your decision about whether I should cross the street or not, whether I should invest in the stock or not, whether I should et cetera, et cetera. I think it’s a painful example but it nonetheless definitely relies on these similar cognitive capabilities.
Sucheta: I think a marriage between the two is like failure to envision and the theory of mind. I’ll give you another example, that recently, I came across this decision about president’s role in using nuclear power. Apparently, when President Roosevelt died in 1945, Truman took over and that was the first day on the job he discovered that we have nuclear bomb and he was told that this is just another weapon, bigger and better. By then, US was in war with Japan for three years and it was clear that he needed to use it. So when he envisioned using the weapon, he said, “I’m going to strictly announce to you, I’m strictly going to use this as a military weapon.” In his journal, he entered that “We will not use it on civilians. There will not be killings of women and children.” When the bomb exploded and the results he got the debriefing that 200,000 people had died and he had no capacity to vision it but then within two days, another bomb was dropped without even consulting him. You can’t prevent what you can’t envision. How realistic is this process for us to stay on top of our future with this kind of complicated variabilities?
Hershfield: I mean there’s so many factors that influence. Because we can talk about decisions that we have a lot of experience with. I would say, at the most part, many of us have made the decision to wake up early and do something we said we’re going to do or sleep in or to eat something healthy or to say that doughnut looks really good. We might have a pretty accurate representation of what’s going to happen on the other side. I’m going to feel guilty for having indulged or maybe I’ll have really enjoyed it but this is something I know. It does require you to do this simulation, this theory of mind calculation but I have experience with it. But then you talk about the realm like this with Truman and the bomb and whatnot and you say this is a scenario that we’re not prepared for and it’s very difficult to be able to really do this exercise properly. Of course, there’s a big difference between 70 years ago and today when many government decisions are in theory made with a host of intelligence but that’s not always the case.
The latest I was reading about Trump deciding to launch the airstrike on Syria suggested that there was a lengthy decision-making process and there are multiple scenarios and then there are probabilities and what would happen each scenario. We don’t know what actually happened. We don’t know what was on the other side of those decisions and how they went but I would say this is where more modern decision-makers are trying to move to, to say, “If I do this, if I do X, then what are the outcomes A, B, and C and with what probability and what will each of those outcomes lead to, et cetera?” It’s essentially like saying let’s play chess with life. Now, that’s a scenario that you can imagine requires some intense directed thought that’s done with others. That’s a completely different type of decision than a much more spur of the moment decision that we have to make on our own. So it’s difficult to compare these different scenarios because one has a lot more influence on more people, the wisdom of crowds et cetera, and the other one has just me the decision maker driving the ship, trying to figure out what to do. Both are prone to different sources of error.
Sucheta: So complicated.
Hershfield: Yeah.
Sucheta: Let me ask you then if we have solutions for this. We know future thinking and thinking about future self is such an important and integral part of our betterment towards the future outcomes. How do we change ourselves? How do we change ourselves over time or how do we change our mind? For example, we know giving up smoking or drinking or staying up late, all those things, and we don’t really commit to the changes that we know are good for us. So that failure to act that you talk about in your research. The second part, if you can help us understand, is how do we take all this knowledge to become a better person? How do I give up bad habit? How do I become less critical of others? How do I be open to complex social issues including inequalities and oppression and prejudices? The local and then the focal and then global. How do I make these changes?
Hershfield: These are million dollar questions. I would say it’s very hard to say pull hard, do these things to become a better person. But it does seem like one way to tackle this in a more realistic way, I suppose, is to say first off, what are the domains of their difficulties? Is it smoking? Is it overeating? Is it undersaving? Is it impulsive decision-making? So the first is, if it is in fact one of these things, we have to first say of the problem that I’m doing too much of something, I need to scale it back or that I’m not doing enough of something and need to increase it. Because of course, smoking means I need to stop smoking, and undersaving means I need to start saving. These are different questions that still both rely on you to essentially say how will that self on the other side of some temporal divide respond to my continued either engagement or non-engagement.
And so what I think the research that I’ve been working on with my colleagues and students suggest is that first step, of course, is just sitting down and literally thinking about and having a conversation with them, writing a letter to that future self and saying, let’s just first make that distance self salient. Let’s make it so that people recognize that there is a person on the other side of that divide who will be affected by the things that I do and okay, yeah. That will be me eventually but it’s a me who is not really present right now at the negotiation table. It’s a me who doesn’t have a voice in this thing right now.
Sucheta: Poor me.
Hershfield: Yeah. Exactly. I think that’s a big step. But then of course there are other structural things that we can do. We can say, “Well, I can have that conversation to at least start this process of taking action.” Some of it then relies on saying, what is my point of friction? Why is it really hard for me to say it? Is it because I don’t know who to talk to about this? Is it because I don’t feel like I have enough money? Some of the reasons are maybe I need my money right now because I’m not making enough to think about the future and that’s okay. We’re in a way irrational to, say, put away money when I need it right now. But then you could say, well, do I need it or does $5.50 mochaccino I bought from Starbucks or would I save $20 a month? They’re $22 a month that I just didn’t get 4 of them, one a week. That could be something. So what is the source of the friction there? Is it that I drink too much because the alcohol is out on the counter and it’s really easy to get? If that’s the case, maybe I should put it in a harder to reach place or my snack foods on the counter or if I put them buried away in the cabinet where I had to take out these things out to get to them and then maybe I’ll be – that creates some barrier between me and the action. So I get pistachios that require me to shell them rather than just pop them in my mouth, then I’ll probably eat fewer.
It’s a matter of degrees of saying first, I have to make myself aware that my continued behavior will effect this. And then I’d say, how do I structurally change things so that I either stop doing what I’m doing or how to start doing something that could help me. There’s a great book called the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg that I think really speaks to a lot of these issues as well. It’s certainly worth a read and talking about. Structuring my environment, saying why is it that I take that 3 p.m. break to get a cookie? Is it because of the cookie itself or is it because I like interacting with my —
Sucheta: Socializing.
Hershfield: And taking a break. And if that’s the case, maybe we could opt to go for a walk in a different direction away from the café where I get that cookie and now I have changed the habit. So 3 p.m. becomes a break, becomes socialization but I don’t have that extra 300 calories on top of it.
Sucheta: So it’s the investment in today and now where the change can be brought upon as you’re saying which is like reflecting in the given moment and connecting to your goals as well as your evaluating a little bit of your action. I find that in my work, what really helps is (1) I think offload that working memory burden. All these thoughts about future and what my goals are completely are clouded by what information you’re processing in the moment.
Hershfield: Absolutely.
Sucheta: So have goals right next to you always constantly and develop a habit of reviewing the goal. The second thing which I love, love, love this idea that was totally inspired by you which was actually getting students or getting my patients to write a letter from a future self to the current self and thanking the current self for all the changes the current self is going through. “I’m living a better life. I am on this beach where the sun is shining gloriously and I’m sipping on a cold drink.” So giving this visual of a pleasant journey of that future self having comfort and desired goals being met. And the third thing that I find that really helps as well is having this mini reflection of little bit in the past, little bit in the future and finding these routines and organizations and these patterns that repeat themselves so you don’t need to think twice about what am I going to do because you have committed to that action.
I really thank you so much, Hal, for your presence here and the knowledge you shared with us. It’s such an interesting, fascinating, and engaging conversation. Before I let you go, should anyone have any questions or want to learn more about your work, where should they go?
Hershfield: Yeah. That’s great. Frist off, thank you so much for having me. It was a really engaging conversation. I think the work you’re doing is incredibly important and I’m happy to know that some of my work has played or saw a part in it. If you want to contact me further, they can go to my website, HalHershfield.com or I’m on Twitter @hal_eh.
Sucheta: Fantastic. Well, thank you once again for making the time to join me on my podcast.
Hershfield: Thank you so much.
Producer: All right. Wow. What a great conversation with Hal Hershfield. What an intriguing guy. Really enjoyed that conversation, Sucheta. I was particularly intrigues by Hal’s take about the brain as a simulator.
Sucheta: Yeah. The whole idea that the prefrontal cortex came on board in terms of the evolution process and gave us this gift of seeing possibilities, and the simulation that happens which is activated and supervised by the prefrontal cortex helps us imagine results going down the future. Now, the interesting thing I think he talked about that it is a capacity to travel time without leaving the current space and the future we are talking about may not be literally future means in 40 years, 30 years. It could be literally something that happens next week. What I got out of that is that we employ our mental tools such as visual imagery, planning, hypothesizing, problem solving. And we do all that in a brain’s working desk, what we call working memory and imagine the possible ways the future might unfold. This really helps us to temper our ways, change our ways.
Producer: All right. So why do we fail to act even when we know how good it is for us?
Sucheta: It’s such a problem, isn’t it?
Producer: Mm-hmm.
Sucheta: I see that happening in many ways. The way I understood, he explained that I think it’s how do we energize the current self and connect that current self to that future self which appears to be a stranger or somebody in the distant future, lot of times our capacity to connect to that future me which appears to be intangible is not happening through our emotional system. It just is something practically we look at it and our capacity to look at it fails because we just don’t have the imagination and actual mental capacity to go that far. Because of that outcome which is supposed to benefit that future person which is me, I need to imagine that future person which is me, mental state of that future person, and imagine the condition in which the future person is operating which is a better future for that person.
Imagining a life for that me which is struggling right now because I don’t have good habits of getting up early. I don’t have good habits of eating healthy. And if change the way I do things now, I can impact my tomorrow’s me which will be enjoying healthy life. But that just doesn’t happen to us all the time because we are so wrapped in the current moment, and the current moment is very concrete and it’s right here in front of you. That’s what I gather why we fail to activate ourselves.
Producer: Fascinating. Thinking again about one’s future self, I mean just by looking ahead in time, does one feel a sense of connection to that one’s future self?
Sucheta: Yeah. I think that disconnect really comes from the distance from current self and future self. Longer the distance, less connection to that future self. So less emotional investment and more of a feeling of a stranger. Research shows that we don’t activate ourselves. We don’t sacrifice anything. We don’t offer anything for strangers. We tend to do better if we know the person. We tend to do better if the person is our friend. We tend to do better of the person is related to ourselves. The strange thing about this phenomenon of future self is that future self also becomes a stranger to us and that stranger then doesn’t generate any empathy, any compassion, any love, or any friendship, feeling. Research shows that those who find that ability to become friendly with the future self tend to do better.
What I really feel that one of the things that I got out of his talk is the best option we have is to really invest in today and now. I think that investment can pay off if we center our focus around the power of reflection. How do we reflect on our past so that we can invest better in today? How do we learn from our past behaviors and fast forward this and see if I don’t change me, I’m going to be probably the same me even tomorrow. And what the suffering I’m experiencing today is a byproduct of me not thinking about me in the past. In the past, I failed to think about my current condition and that’s why I’m exactly where I don’t want to be. More we invest in our reflection, the reflective process where we think about ourselves, think about our actions, and create a sense of continuity, only then we can create a sense of commitment and foster great sense of future-oriented progress.
Producer: All right. What a powerful way to close this entire episode. Again, what a great conversation with Hal Hershfield. So that’s it for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.