Why would a man without a lottery ticket shoot himself after hearing the winning numbers? Who is the most disappointed person at the Olympics? And what does this have to do with Pan American airlines or botox? And why should you always put yourself in the shoes of future people? Welcome to enter cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about mental time travel. Now we've done two episodes in the past two weeks on time traveling. I started with the concept of memory, which is our way of unhooking from the here and now and putting ourselves into past time points. And in order to do this, you need this whole network of brain areas that are involved in situating you not in the world that's right in front of you, but a remembered world. This network allows you to resimulate what the spatial layout was, who was there, what your emotions were, sounds and smells. All of this is run like a simulation, and nobody else can see it. It takes place entirely in the privacy of your own skull. Then last week I talked about the other direction of time travel. Imagining possible futures. Simulation of what could happen next is one of the most important jobs of brains. We plan out what are going to say, what we're going to do, how we're going to act in a situation, what might happen to us, and on and on. And as a reminder about a couple important points I made throughout those episodes. Point one was that we spend most of our time as humans disconnected from the here and now and playing these little movies in our heads were reminiscing on the past or we're simulating the future. And point two is it turns out to actually be the same core network of brain areas that's involved both in memory and in simulation of the future. If a person gets damaged to a particular part of their brain, like the hippocampus, they can get amnesia, meaning that they can't remember anything about their past, and they also end up unable to simulate possible futures. If you ask them to imagine standing in the shopping mall in an hour from now, they just draw a blank. They can't put a simulation together. They're not seeing a little movie in their heads. So memory and future imagination use the same brain mechanisms. They are both versions of simulation. So I used to think that who you are is the sum total of your memories. But it's even more interesting than that, because I would argue now that who you are includes the sum total of your future simulations. If you're a person who envisions big goals for yourself, that makes you a bit different from someone who has pedestrian goals. Now, from the outside, you don't know what a person is simulating. On the inside, you see someone sitting at the restaurant booth next to you, sipping on their coffee, and you don't know if they're thinking deeply about their path to a Nobel prize or instead they're just thinking about wanting a bag of chips at the local gas station. In the same way that we don't act out our dreams when we're asleep, we can dream of the past and future without execution by the awake body. So now we're all set up for two days episode, and this one involves a hypothesis that I've been working on for years. And to get going, I'm going to start with a small event that happened in Liverpool, England in nineteen ninety five when a man was listening to the radio. So this man had a wife and two children, and he was listening to the lottery numbers being read out. Now, he did not have a lottery ticket, but he listened to the first number and he was transfixed. Now the second number was announced, and then the third, and the fourth, and he was frozen. And after the sixth number got read out, he went and got down his gun and he shot himself. Six numbers that translated to his suicide, even though he didn't have a lottery ticket. Where the numbers some sort of code. What exactly had happened will return to Tim's story in a moment. First, I want to tell you about facial muscles. So just over one hundred and sixty years ago, a French neurologist named Guillome Duchen studied lots of patients, and he's immortalized in the names of diseases like Duschen's muscular dystrophe and several others. But somewhat less known about him is that he was obsessed with using electrodes to send zaps of electricity into facial muscles to characterize how facial expressions got made. And what he realized is that when a person smiles, it's caused by the contraction of just two very particular muscles of the face. Around the mouth. There's a muscle called the zygomaticus major, which raises the corners of the mouth and draws it back, and the muscles around the eye, called the orbicularis oculide, raise the cheeks and send out crows feet around the eyes. And so when your mouth and eyes smile at the same time, this is called smising or smiling with the eyes, and this is described as the Duchen smile. But why does this have a special name Because people eventually realized that this only happens when someone is genuinely happy. But there's another way that people sometimes smile when they're not actually happy, and this is known as a non Duchen smile, and it involves only the zygomaticus major muscle around the mouth and nothing goes on around the eyes. Now, as it turns out, several groups have researched smiles, which sounds like a really fun job, and the conclusion is that the eye muscles are only involved when someone is actually happy. In other words, the Duschen smile only occurs when there is genuine positive emotion. People have long noticed the non Dushen smile, and for a long time this was popularly called the pan Am smile after the airliner where the flight stewardesses apparently gave this same non smising smile to everyone all the time because they weren't genuinely happy. Also, bowtos can paralyze the small muscles around the eye, which means that people with botox sometimes just can't pull off a smiling with the eyes Duschen smile, and so a non dus Shen smile is sometimes called a botox smile as well. Okay, I tell you all that because of an observation that has been replicated multiple times, and that involves the question who is happiest when they receive an Olympic medal. Now, it seems like the answer is obvious. The gold medalist is the most happy, the silver medallist is the next happiest, and the bronze medallist is the least happy. But that's not what researchers find. Instead, they find that the gold and bronze medalists are the most happy, and this silver medalist is the least happy. For example, one study examined photographs from eighty four medallists from the two thousand and four Athens Olympics, and they found that at the metal ceremony, the gold and bronze medallists tended to have Duchen smiles, while the silver medallists tended to have non Duchen smiles. In other words, the silver medallists weren't really smiling joyfully. And this was actually an extension of a study that had been done a decade earlier, when three researchers gathered footage from the metal ceremonies of the nineteen ninety two Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and they got a bunch of undergraduates to rate the happiness of each medalist from one to ten, where one was agony, in ten was ecstasy. At the ceremonies where they are given the medals, the silver medallists scored an average of four point three on this happiness scale, while the bronze medalists scored a five point seven. The bronze medalists were happier, and it was obvious to everyone with the naked eye. Now this is weird, right, How could the second place winners be less happy than the third place winners? So let's unpack what's happening here. Why would a man commit suicide after hearing the lottery numbers? And why would a silver medalist be more disappointed than a bronze medallist. The key is what is known as counterfactual thinking. The brain doesn't just run simulations forwards and backwards, but it can step back to past time points and crank things forward to see what could have been now. In other words, this is not a simulation of the future, but instead a simulation of the present from a previous time point. This is called counterfactual thinking because the now that gets simulated is not factual. It's the brain's own construction, its own internal creation. But we can imagine present moments that might have been. Now. Why did the man in Liverpool shoot himself after hearing the lottery numbers? It was because he had been playing those exact numbers every week for five weeks, that sequence of six numbers, but this week he hadn't bought the ticket. As he listened to the numbers being read out, he thought those were my numbers. He envisioned the ways that his life could have changed. If he had just bought that ticket, His present would be different. He could immediately plug into a pastime point and crank the machinery forward to a potential now, a now that didn't happen, and the comparison of that now to the present was overwhelming to him. He thought about his potential now, the one he had missed. He pictured having an ability to pay those bills, to finish off his mortgage, to beat the financial struggles that he was facing, and he was haunted by this now that wasn't real, that was counterfactual, but that could have been. It felt so distant from where he was in reality, everything would be different if he had just bought that ticket. He was filled with regret, a regret so strong wrong that he chose to end his life. Now, I suggest we can understand regret from a computational point of view, in other words, an algorithm that the brain runs. The key is that for most situations, the emotion of regret acts as a learning signal. That means your brain readjusts itself based on that signal. So if you get mad at someone and say something mean and then that person stops talking with you. You might feel regret about what you've done to that relationship, because in the present moment you have lost a friendship, and your brain runs the simulation from that past time point moving forward, in which it constructs a scenario where you didn't say or do that offensive thing, and you're still friends. And you compare your actual present, which is uncomfortable and bad, to your simulated present in which every thing is warm and close, and the difference generates a signal of regret, and your brain uses that signal to learn on to hopefully improve its performance next time. Here's another example. Kids are always saying no to things that their parents want them to do, and parents, when they are thoughtful about this, will let this kind of learning signal do its own work. So the parent says, hey, it's freezing outside, put on your jacket, and the kid says, I don't want to wear a jacket. I'm not gonna do it. So after some push and shove, the right thing for the parent to do is say, fine, don't do it. There will be natural consequences. So the kid goes out and after a while finds that he's really cold and uncomfortable. So he now has this learning signal that tells him, had I taken the jacket, my now would be different, I would be warm. And the regret, the regret that they feel, navigates their future behavior. I saw a quotation from the author Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote, of all the words of mice and men, the saddest r it might have been, But I slightly disagree. I would rephrase it, Of all the thoughts of mice and men, the most important r it might have been. Regret is a way for us to build different nows moving forward. Now, note that in some circumstances, you might take a past time point and crank that forward, and that imagined now, your counterfactual now is actually worse than you're real now, and in that case you experience a different emotion relief. This is what happens if you're considering investing in some stock and then you don't get around to it, and then you find out the company went out of business and the lost all their money on it. Your present now is better than it would have been, so you feel relief at the path that you took versus what you might have done, or to return to the weather. Imagine that you go for a day hike and then it rains unexpectedly, and you know you don't have an umbrella in your car, but you search around in the trunk of your car anyway, and then you find one and you feel relief. And again, this can be a learning signal because it tells your brain, hey, this was a fortunate accident, but you can make this happen more purposefully from now on. So let's return to the Olympic medalists. Why is there the happiness difference between the silver and the bronze medalist Where the silver medalist is less happy. It's because the silver medalist almost got gold but missed. He or she is running the simulation over and over of how things could have gone, and in those imagined scenarios, they're the ones standing on the top platform and getting wreathed with gold. The bronze medalist, in contrast, is just happy to be there. They know they're not good enough for gold or silver, and they can imagine plenty of scenarios where they're not on the platform at all. So the silver medallists now is worse than his other imaginary now's, while the bronze holders now is better than most of his imagined scenarios. Now, interestingly, this general observation about second place winners is not new. In eighteen ninety two, the great American psychologist William James touched on this. He wrote, quote, so we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world that he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing end quote. So the second place winner is so close to a victory that could have been, and that is a more painful place to be. So this is mental time travel. But it's not from now to the past, which is memory, as I talked about two episodes ago. And it's not from now to the future, which is prediction, which I talked about in the last episode. But instead this is starting from past time points and simulating forward to what could have been right now now. I want to make a point that I'll return to at the end, which is that as you simulate yourself for all these different time points, this allows you to see different possibilities about who you could have been. And so in this sense, you're used to thinking about different us, different versions of yourself that might have existed. So before we dive deeper into the science, we're going to take a moment to dive into the literature. I'm going to read a story from my book of short stories. Some this story is called subjunctive. In the afterlife, you are judged not against other people, but against yourself. Specifically, you are judged against what you could have been. So the afterworld is much like the present world, but it now includes all the us that could have been. In an elevator, you might find more successful versions of yourself, perhaps the you that chose to leave your hometown three years earlier, or the you that happened to board an airplane next to a company president who then hired you. As you meet these ewes, you experience a pride of the sort you feel for a successful cousin. Although the accomplishments don't directly belong to you, it somehow feels close. But soon you fall victim to intimidation. These us are not really you. They are better than you. They made smarter choices, worked harder, invested the extra effort into pushing on closed doors. These doors eventually broke open for them and allowed their lives to splash out in colorful new directions. Such success can't be explained away by a better genetic hand. Instead, they played your cards better in their parallel lives. They made better decisions, avoided moral lapses, did not give up on love so easily. They worked harder than you did to correct their mistakes, and apologized more often. Eventually you cannot stand hanging around these better use. You discover you've never felt more competitive with anyone in your life. You try to mingle with the lesser use, but it doesn't assuage the sting. In truth, you have little sympathy for these less significant use and more than a little haughtiness about their indolence. If you had quit watching TV and gotten off the couch, you wouldn't be in this situation. You tell them when you bother to interact with them at all, but the better use are always in your face. In the afterlife. In the bookstore, you'll see one of them arm in arm with the affectionate woman who you let slip away. Another you is browsing the shelves, running his fingers over the book he actually finished writing, And look at this one jogging past outside. He's got a much better body than yours, thanks to a consistency at the gym that you never kept up. Eventually you sink into a defensive posture, seeking reasons why you wouldn't want to be so well behaved and virtuous. In any case, you grudgingly be friends some of the lesser use and go drinking with them. Even at the bar, you see the better use buying rounds for their friends, celebrating their latest good choice, And thus your punishment is cleverly and automatically regulated in the afterlife. The more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with. So that's the sense in which our constant time travel generates lots of different versions of who we could be, and presumably there's no afterlife where we meet them, but nonetheless different use exist right now, trapped in the boundaries of your skull. Now, I'll mention one interesting note about regret, one that's been noticed by psychologists and economists, and I'm going to tell you this just in case you decide to open a restaurant. Don't have too many choices on the menu, because when there are too many choices, customers feel higher levels of regret after the meal is over. How do we understand this, Well, you can only choose one thing for your main meal. If there were lots of choices on the menu, then your brain keeps running simulations of Oh, I would have gotten this, and this is what the experience could have been like, or I could have gotten that, or I could have gotten that. More choices lead to more regret afterward. So compare going to the cheesecake factory, which has a twelve page menu spilling over with choices, versus you go to in an Outburger whose menu reads Hamburger cheeseburger fries. So when you're done with an in an Outburger meal, you don't really have much of anything to compare for what could have been. But after a cheesecake factory meal, your brain unconsciously churns on all the choices that it didn't take, and it might conclude, correctly or incorrectly, that one of those other choices would have been better, and then you feel slightly less happy about the choice you made. So here's where we are so far. Regret is any emotion that a companies negative outcomes to decisions for which we've been responsible. But it turns out, since we are creatures who are so good at moving around in time, mentally, we come to operate and make decisions based on anticipated regret. That is, we come to anticipate the emotional consequences of decisions we're making now. So imagine you're facing two choices. Let's say which new job to take, and one of them is a really risky startup with big dreams about where they'll go, and the other is a well established company that's a little boring but very stable. So a lot of people will gravitate toward the stable choice, and you might think, fine, I get it, they're avoiding risk. But there's a slightly richer way to view this, which is that they're avoiding anticipated regret. If one of the choices is risky and the other certain, and the startup goes out of business, you'll feel bad that you took such a big risk. But if the stable company were to go out of business, you wouldn't feel much regret because that was an unforeseen possibility. You had made the right choice by placing your chips on something that was unlikely to fail. So the simulation of the future generally drives people to choose the safer choice to avoid the possibility of feeling the really bad feelings later. This is also suggested to be why you will buy a brand that you know, even if it it's more expensive, over a brand that you don't know that's less expensive, even though it's a better deal to take the unknown brand, For many people, it feels worth it to spend the extra money because they anticipate they will have more regret if the unknown brand ends up being a bad choice. And this comes up in a thousand ways in our lives. Anticipated regret is what gets you to buy something that's on sale now instead of waiting for maybe a better sale later, because you're afraid that the sale won't last. And then you'll think, oh, man, I could have had that for ten percent off, but I waited and I missed my chance. It's not that you're experiencing regret now, it's that you're anticipating that you will feel regret in the future, and so that steers your behavior now. And this is of course what high pressure car salesmen try to do when they say I'll give you this special discount, but it only applies right now. The second you walk off this car lot, the offer goes away forever, so you simulate how you would feel if you lost this offer that's being dangled in front of you right now. The anticipation of that regret spurs you into actions so you won't have to feel bad later. So your brain simulates futures and it feels them, and often that includes questions like how bad will I feel if I lose this gamble. You don't just minimize risk, you minimize the regret that you expect to feel. But anticipated regret isn't just about avoiding risk. Sometimes you can leverage the issue of anticipation to improve your decision making. So when I was younger, if I was having a hard time making a decision between two choices, my mother would tell me to toss a coin. Heads meant that I would take the first choice, and tails meant I would take the second choice. But the coin toss wasn't the thing. The key, she told me was to toss the coin and see the result, and then see how that result felt in my gut. When you see which choice gets indicated by the coin, you might feel a tiny bit of relief, well I'm glad Atlanta that way, or you might feel instead a tinge of regret, and the second that that regret bubbles up, then you know that the other choice is the better one for you. And here's another example. Let's return to the issue of getting a kid to wear a jacket in the snow. When the parent says, look, it's natural consequences. That's one way to teach the kid, But really what they're hoping for is that the anticipated regret will be enough the kid will think about how things might feel in the future when they are shivering miserably, and that anticipated regret will be sufficient to force their hand to make the right choice now. And before we move on, I'll just mention an interesting tangent here, which is that people with psychopathy. Psychopaths generally have much lower anxiety than the general population. Why it's because one of the characteristics of psychopathy is an inability to simulate possible futures. So, just as an example, if I hook up electrodes to your tongue and then I say, okay, I'm hooking the other end to this car battery and you're going to get this terrible shock on your tongue, you will probably feel a lot of trepidation and anxiety and maybe break a sweat. But that's not what happens to somebody who is a psychopath. They just don't care. They don't get sweaty and anxious. And it's not because they're tougher than you. It's simply because their brains don't simulate the future very well. Now, I'm going to do a whole episode on psychopaths in the near future, so if you're interested in this and what else is going on in psychopathy, please tune in for that one. But for now, I'm going to get back to normal brains. Given the fact that we simulate futures and understand how we might feel in those futures, there's an interesting trick that we can use to improve our own decision making, and that is to put ourselves in the shoes of future people looking back at us. Why because this gives us a very good way to ethically steer our own behavior. The world is full of temptations, and some of them aren't that big deal, but some of them are worth resisting. And one way you can do this is to imagine looking back on your choice from some future point, when you see how all of this played out. A friend of mine refers to this as the concept of book, bell and candle, which means something very particular in the spy world. But what he meant was, whatever you're considering doing, imagine how you would feel about this if it were written down in a book that everyone could read. Or your action causes a bell to ring such that everyone's attention turns to what you did, or a candle lights up the hidden thing you did. How would you feel if everybody could see that you've done it. The point is to put yourself in the future and imagine retrospectively that you have been caught. How would that make you feel? There are many ways of placing yourself in the future and looking back. A colleague of mine as an epidemiologist named Gary Slutkin, and many years ago he started working with gangs in Chicago to see if he could reduce the violence. Now, there are many ways of thinking about intervening to reduce violence, including tougher laws or longer prison sentences, but Gary started thinking about this differently. He noticed, for example, that these gang members don't act badly in front of their grandmothers, but they do in front of their peers, and so they're clearly able to assess a situation from different points of view. So he had an amazing idea, which was to employ former gang members who had previously been incarcerated and who wanted to reduce the violence in their own neighborhood. And they came on board as what he called the interrupters, and the idea was for them to change a gang member's behavior in the moment by making them think about the future. So he got the interrupters to intervene when say, a gang member felt he'd been wrong then he wanted to go in exact revenge, and the interrupter would say something like, hey, think about this for a minute. When you go to jail for shooting that guy who's gonna be with your girl Gary. And people think about this as reframing, but in the context of this episode, I'm casting this as anticipated regret. And this kind of time travel imagining yourself in jail and someone else being with your girlfriend was very effective in steering people's behavior. It forced people to time travel to a what if moment that otherwise they would not have visited. Now Interestingly, I want to clarify that our feelings of anticipated regret are not always a perfect steering mechanism. For us, because we often assume that our near future counterfactuals are going to be more appealing than they actually turn out to be in reality. In other words, the grass always seems greener on the other side of the temporal fence. So what does this have to do with civil wars or why the Balkan nations split off, or why the Arab Emirates came together, or why England split off from the European Union. So let me answer that by going back to one of the great classical novels of Chinese literature. It's a fourteenth century novel whose title translates to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and this novel spends eight hundred thousand words dealing with the battles and plots, both personal and military, of different people and groups trying to achieve dominance for almost a century. It's like Game of Thrones before Game of Thrones and without the dragons. Anyhow, the key thing I want to note is the opening lines, which I've always found shockingly in sight full. The opening lines go like this, the Empire, long divided, must unite, long united, must divide. Thus has it ever been? In other words, the prediction here is that all unified countries are eventually going to decide it's better to split up, and all divided countries will eventually decide it's better to link arms into a union. This is something that characterizes world history. But why does it happen? Well, there may be lots of reasons, including economic factors and agricultural factors and political expediency. But I'm going to suggest there's a neural factor too, and that has to do with people running the counter factuals. What would it be like if we were together? Wouldn't that be terrific? Or we're all tangled up in each other's business, wouldn't things be better if we were independent? And my assertion is that we have a slight bias for concluding that it would be better whichever way we haven't experienced. Why. Well, it's because we're not perfect simulators, and so we believe that the low resolution simulation in our heads is actually a good one, even though it lacks all the blemishes of reality. So we believe that everyone will be happy and get along. And wouldn't it be great if we were unified, or wouldn't it be great if we were finally separated and we compare our sanitized simulation against reality. This is the same thing, of course, with relationships. When we're young and single, we continually fantasize about a partner that we're gonna meet. The partner always says the right thing, always makes us feel great, never has something on his or her mind that causes distractions so that they don't actually listen to you, but realize life is always more complex, for worse and for better than our imaginations can simulate. So now on to the last act we've been seeing so far. In all these episodes that we are creatures who mentally travel to different points in time. We constantly simulate ourselves in the past for memory, or simulate ourselves in the future to steer decision making, or we simulate possible now's to understand what we should have done better. And this kind of time traveling, if we do it intelligently, can allow us to steer our lives a bit better than we otherwise might. For example, as we get better at thinking about and interacting with all these different temporal versions of ourselves, we can actively cultivate our ability to simulate these well. And this is what we get out of visualization, out of actively putting ourselves in a detailed future simulation. So here's an example. I recently met a new friend named Brian Burke who's an LA filmmaker, and he'll ask people, hey, do you want to be a film director? It's not that hard, and the person might say, genuinely, I don't think I could ever do that, and he says, look, here's all you need to do to become a film director. You write a ten minute script and then you get your cell phone camera and a couple friends to shoot it, and then you do all the editing, and he says it'll suck for sure. So then you do it again. You write a new script, and you shoot it again on your cell phone, and you edit it again and it'll probably still suck. And then you do that a third time and you find you're getting a little bit better at this, and then he says at the end of that you'll be as good as most of the directors in Los Angeles. And this simple technique of walking somebody in detail through a future, this really moves and inspires people, especially people for whom it had never even struck them that they could possibly think of being a film director in their internal model. They have a job and they're doing fine at that, and they've never meaningfully considered film directing. That's a totally foreign thing that other people do. But all it takes is someone doing them the favor of walking them through some steps in the imagination what it would take to get there, and suddenly they see that it's not impossible. And this is why visualization of possible futures is so meaningful. It fleshes out what the path can look like. When someone sees the path clearly, then it doesn't seem so hard to get started. And visualization or imagination this can also steer your behavior away from certain things that you don't want to do again by making them feel real. A colleague of Mind named Jack Keene started an app to get seniors to exercise, and the idea is to use AI to show the person a picture of themselves. If they do and if they don't exercise, they see their body in good shape or not in good shape. And once it's something they can picture, then it is more real. And there are lower resolution versions of this. For example, in episode nine, I outline some ways that we can get good at navigating our future behavior, and one example I mentioned is for people who are trying to lose weight. You have them find a picture of themselves where they look more overweight than they would like to and you get them to stick that picture on the fridge and that way, every time they go to the fridge to graze, that picture reminds them of what they want to accomplish, and it does so by allowing them to see right in front of them their future if they don't modify their behavior, and getting people to think about possible futures, good and bad. This is what coaching is about. Sports coaching or life coaching. A coach's job is to expand your model of what's possible and to move you through the next steps and get your aim straight on who you could be. Generally, being able to visualize something makes it like a prediction that you can chase after, or defend against, or prepare for or whatever. It refines the simulation and makes it feel more real. So wrapping up the past three episodes, who you are is the sum total of layered time scales. When you walk down the street, you look to other people like you're just a person walking down the street, but your brain is colorful and alive with reminiscence of your past, simulations of a variety of possible futures, and all your regrets and reliefs that result from simulations of hypothetical nows, and this rich layering of time, this is what makes humans so nuanced and complex and fascinating. And as we come to learn what is happening under the hood, and we get better at taking advantage of these mechanisms, that gives us a small grip on a very powerful tool to navigate ourselves in the direction of who we would like to be. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion and I'll be making an episode soon in which I address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.

Why would a man without a lottery ticket shoot himself after hearing the winning numbers? Who is the most disappointed person at the Olympics? And what does this have to do with Pan American airlines or botox? And why should you always put yourself in the shoes of future people? Welcome to enter cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about mental time travel. Now we've done two episodes in the past two weeks on time traveling. I started with the concept of memory, which is our way of unhooking from the here and now and putting ourselves into past time points. And in order to do this, you need this whole network of brain areas that are involved in situating you not in the world that's right in front of you, but a remembered world. This network allows you to resimulate what the spatial layout was, who was there, what your emotions were, sounds and smells. All of this is run like a simulation, and nobody else can see it. It takes place entirely in the privacy of your own skull. Then last week I talked about the other direction of time travel. Imagining possible futures. Simulation of what could happen next is one of the most important jobs of brains. We plan out what are going to say, what we're going to do, how we're going to act in a situation, what might happen to us, and on and on. And as a reminder about a couple important points I made throughout those episodes. Point one was that we spend most of our time as humans disconnected from the here and now and playing these little movies in our heads were reminiscing on the past or we're simulating the future. And point two is it turns out to actually be the same core network of brain areas that's involved both in memory and in simulation of the future. If a person gets damaged to a particular part of their brain, like the hippocampus, they can get amnesia, meaning that they can't remember anything about their past, and they also end up unable to simulate possible futures. If you ask them to imagine standing in the shopping mall in an hour from now, they just draw a blank. They can't put a simulation together. They're not seeing a little movie in their heads. So memory and future imagination use the same brain mechanisms. They are both versions of simulation. So I used to think that who you are is the sum total of your memories. But it's even more interesting than that, because I would argue now that who you are includes the sum total of your future simulations. If you're a person who envisions big goals for yourself, that makes you a bit different from someone who has pedestrian goals. Now, from the outside, you don't know what a person is simulating. On the inside, you see someone sitting at the restaurant booth next to you, sipping on their coffee, and you don't know if they're thinking deeply about their path to a Nobel prize or instead they're just thinking about wanting a bag of chips at the local gas station. In the same way that we don't act out our dreams when we're asleep, we can dream of the past and future without execution by the awake body. So now we're all set up for two days episode, and this one involves a hypothesis that I've been working on for years. And to get going, I'm going to start with a small event that happened in Liverpool, England in nineteen ninety five when a man was listening to the radio. So this man had a wife and two children, and he was listening to the lottery numbers being read out. Now, he did not have a lottery ticket, but he listened to the first number and he was transfixed. Now the second number was announced, and then the third, and the fourth, and he was frozen. And after the sixth number got read out, he went and got down his gun and he shot himself. Six numbers that translated to his suicide, even though he didn't have a lottery ticket. Where the numbers some sort of code. What exactly had happened will return to Tim's story in a moment. First, I want to tell you about facial muscles. So just over one hundred and sixty years ago, a French neurologist named Guillome Duchen studied lots of patients, and he's immortalized in the names of diseases like Duschen's muscular dystrophe and several others. But somewhat less known about him is that he was obsessed with using electrodes to send zaps of electricity into facial muscles to characterize how facial expressions got made. And what he realized is that when a person smiles, it's caused by the contraction of just two very particular muscles of the face. Around the mouth. There's a muscle called the zygomaticus major, which raises the corners of the mouth and draws it back, and the muscles around the eye, called the orbicularis oculide, raise the cheeks and send out crows feet around the eyes. And so when your mouth and eyes smile at the same time, this is called smising or smiling with the eyes, and this is described as the Duchen smile. But why does this have a special name Because people eventually realized that this only happens when someone is genuinely happy. But there's another way that people sometimes smile when they're not actually happy, and this is known as a non Duchen smile, and it involves only the zygomaticus major muscle around the mouth and nothing goes on around the eyes. Now, as it turns out, several groups have researched smiles, which sounds like a really fun job, and the conclusion is that the eye muscles are only involved when someone is actually happy. In other words, the Duschen smile only occurs when there is genuine positive emotion. People have long noticed the non Dushen smile, and for a long time this was popularly called the pan Am smile after the airliner where the flight stewardesses apparently gave this same non smising smile to everyone all the time because they weren't genuinely happy. Also, bowtos can paralyze the small muscles around the eye, which means that people with botox sometimes just can't pull off a smiling with the eyes Duschen smile, and so a non dus Shen smile is sometimes called a botox smile as well. Okay, I tell you all that because of an observation that has been replicated multiple times, and that involves the question who is happiest when they receive an Olympic medal. Now, it seems like the answer is obvious. The gold medalist is the most happy, the silver medallist is the next happiest, and the bronze medallist is the least happy. But that's not what researchers find. Instead, they find that the gold and bronze medalists are the most happy, and this silver medalist is the least happy. For example, one study examined photographs from eighty four medallists from the two thousand and four Athens Olympics, and they found that at the metal ceremony, the gold and bronze medallists tended to have Duchen smiles, while the silver medallists tended to have non Duchen smiles. In other words, the silver medallists weren't really smiling joyfully. And this was actually an extension of a study that had been done a decade earlier, when three researchers gathered footage from the metal ceremonies of the nineteen ninety two Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and they got a bunch of undergraduates to rate the happiness of each medalist from one to ten, where one was agony, in ten was ecstasy. At the ceremonies where they are given the medals, the silver medallists scored an average of four point three on this happiness scale, while the bronze medalists scored a five point seven. The bronze medalists were happier, and it was obvious to everyone with the naked eye. Now this is weird, right, How could the second place winners be less happy than the third place winners? So let's unpack what's happening here. Why would a man commit suicide after hearing the lottery numbers? And why would a silver medalist be more disappointed than a bronze medallist. The key is what is known as counterfactual thinking. The brain doesn't just run simulations forwards and backwards, but it can step back to past time points and crank things forward to see what could have been now. In other words, this is not a simulation of the future, but instead a simulation of the present from a previous time point. This is called counterfactual thinking because the now that gets simulated is not factual. It's the brain's own construction, its own internal creation. But we can imagine present moments that might have been. Now. Why did the man in Liverpool shoot himself after hearing the lottery numbers? It was because he had been playing those exact numbers every week for five weeks, that sequence of six numbers, but this week he hadn't bought the ticket. As he listened to the numbers being read out, he thought those were my numbers. He envisioned the ways that his life could have changed. If he had just bought that ticket, His present would be different. He could immediately plug into a pastime point and crank the machinery forward to a potential now, a now that didn't happen, and the comparison of that now to the present was overwhelming to him. He thought about his potential now, the one he had missed. He pictured having an ability to pay those bills, to finish off his mortgage, to beat the financial struggles that he was facing, and he was haunted by this now that wasn't real, that was counterfactual, but that could have been. It felt so distant from where he was in reality, everything would be different if he had just bought that ticket. He was filled with regret, a regret so strong wrong that he chose to end his life. Now, I suggest we can understand regret from a computational point of view, in other words, an algorithm that the brain runs. The key is that for most situations, the emotion of regret acts as a learning signal. That means your brain readjusts itself based on that signal. So if you get mad at someone and say something mean and then that person stops talking with you. You might feel regret about what you've done to that relationship, because in the present moment you have lost a friendship, and your brain runs the simulation from that past time point moving forward, in which it constructs a scenario where you didn't say or do that offensive thing, and you're still friends. And you compare your actual present, which is uncomfortable and bad, to your simulated present in which every thing is warm and close, and the difference generates a signal of regret, and your brain uses that signal to learn on to hopefully improve its performance next time. Here's another example. Kids are always saying no to things that their parents want them to do, and parents, when they are thoughtful about this, will let this kind of learning signal do its own work. So the parent says, hey, it's freezing outside, put on your jacket, and the kid says, I don't want to wear a jacket. I'm not gonna do it. So after some push and shove, the right thing for the parent to do is say, fine, don't do it. There will be natural consequences. So the kid goes out and after a while finds that he's really cold and uncomfortable. So he now has this learning signal that tells him, had I taken the jacket, my now would be different, I would be warm. And the regret, the regret that they feel, navigates their future behavior. I saw a quotation from the author Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote, of all the words of mice and men, the saddest r it might have been, But I slightly disagree. I would rephrase it, Of all the thoughts of mice and men, the most important r it might have been. Regret is a way for us to build different nows moving forward. Now, note that in some circumstances, you might take a past time point and crank that forward, and that imagined now, your counterfactual now is actually worse than you're real now, and in that case you experience a different emotion relief. This is what happens if you're considering investing in some stock and then you don't get around to it, and then you find out the company went out of business and the lost all their money on it. Your present now is better than it would have been, so you feel relief at the path that you took versus what you might have done, or to return to the weather. Imagine that you go for a day hike and then it rains unexpectedly, and you know you don't have an umbrella in your car, but you search around in the trunk of your car anyway, and then you find one and you feel relief. And again, this can be a learning signal because it tells your brain, hey, this was a fortunate accident, but you can make this happen more purposefully from now on. So let's return to the Olympic medalists. Why is there the happiness difference between the silver and the bronze medalist Where the silver medalist is less happy. It's because the silver medalist almost got gold but missed. He or she is running the simulation over and over of how things could have gone, and in those imagined scenarios, they're the ones standing on the top platform and getting wreathed with gold. The bronze medalist, in contrast, is just happy to be there. They know they're not good enough for gold or silver, and they can imagine plenty of scenarios where they're not on the platform at all. So the silver medallists now is worse than his other imaginary now's, while the bronze holders now is better than most of his imagined scenarios. Now, interestingly, this general observation about second place winners is not new. In eighteen ninety two, the great American psychologist William James touched on this. He wrote, quote, so we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world that he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing end quote. So the second place winner is so close to a victory that could have been, and that is a more painful place to be. So this is mental time travel. But it's not from now to the past, which is memory, as I talked about two episodes ago. And it's not from now to the future, which is prediction, which I talked about in the last episode. But instead this is starting from past time points and simulating forward to what could have been right now now. I want to make a point that I'll return to at the end, which is that as you simulate yourself for all these different time points, this allows you to see different possibilities about who you could have been. And so in this sense, you're used to thinking about different us, different versions of yourself that might have existed. So before we dive deeper into the science, we're going to take a moment to dive into the literature. I'm going to read a story from my book of short stories. Some this story is called subjunctive. In the afterlife, you are judged not against other people, but against yourself. Specifically, you are judged against what you could have been. So the afterworld is much like the present world, but it now includes all the us that could have been. In an elevator, you might find more successful versions of yourself, perhaps the you that chose to leave your hometown three years earlier, or the you that happened to board an airplane next to a company president who then hired you. As you meet these ewes, you experience a pride of the sort you feel for a successful cousin. Although the accomplishments don't directly belong to you, it somehow feels close. But soon you fall victim to intimidation. These us are not really you. They are better than you. They made smarter choices, worked harder, invested the extra effort into pushing on closed doors. These doors eventually broke open for them and allowed their lives to splash out in colorful new directions. Such success can't be explained away by a better genetic hand. Instead, they played your cards better in their parallel lives. They made better decisions, avoided moral lapses, did not give up on love so easily. They worked harder than you did to correct their mistakes, and apologized more often. Eventually you cannot stand hanging around these better use. You discover you've never felt more competitive with anyone in your life. You try to mingle with the lesser use, but it doesn't assuage the sting. In truth, you have little sympathy for these less significant use and more than a little haughtiness about their indolence. If you had quit watching TV and gotten off the couch, you wouldn't be in this situation. You tell them when you bother to interact with them at all, but the better use are always in your face. In the afterlife. In the bookstore, you'll see one of them arm in arm with the affectionate woman who you let slip away. Another you is browsing the shelves, running his fingers over the book he actually finished writing, And look at this one jogging past outside. He's got a much better body than yours, thanks to a consistency at the gym that you never kept up. Eventually you sink into a defensive posture, seeking reasons why you wouldn't want to be so well behaved and virtuous. In any case, you grudgingly be friends some of the lesser use and go drinking with them. Even at the bar, you see the better use buying rounds for their friends, celebrating their latest good choice, And thus your punishment is cleverly and automatically regulated in the afterlife. The more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with. So that's the sense in which our constant time travel generates lots of different versions of who we could be, and presumably there's no afterlife where we meet them, but nonetheless different use exist right now, trapped in the boundaries of your skull. Now, I'll mention one interesting note about regret, one that's been noticed by psychologists and economists, and I'm going to tell you this just in case you decide to open a restaurant. Don't have too many choices on the menu, because when there are too many choices, customers feel higher levels of regret after the meal is over. How do we understand this, Well, you can only choose one thing for your main meal. If there were lots of choices on the menu, then your brain keeps running simulations of Oh, I would have gotten this, and this is what the experience could have been like, or I could have gotten that, or I could have gotten that. More choices lead to more regret afterward. So compare going to the cheesecake factory, which has a twelve page menu spilling over with choices, versus you go to in an Outburger whose menu reads Hamburger cheeseburger fries. So when you're done with an in an Outburger meal, you don't really have much of anything to compare for what could have been. But after a cheesecake factory meal, your brain unconsciously churns on all the choices that it didn't take, and it might conclude, correctly or incorrectly, that one of those other choices would have been better, and then you feel slightly less happy about the choice you made. So here's where we are so far. Regret is any emotion that a companies negative outcomes to decisions for which we've been responsible. But it turns out, since we are creatures who are so good at moving around in time, mentally, we come to operate and make decisions based on anticipated regret. That is, we come to anticipate the emotional consequences of decisions we're making now. So imagine you're facing two choices. Let's say which new job to take, and one of them is a really risky startup with big dreams about where they'll go, and the other is a well established company that's a little boring but very stable. So a lot of people will gravitate toward the stable choice, and you might think, fine, I get it, they're avoiding risk. But there's a slightly richer way to view this, which is that they're avoiding anticipated regret. If one of the choices is risky and the other certain, and the startup goes out of business, you'll feel bad that you took such a big risk. But if the stable company were to go out of business, you wouldn't feel much regret because that was an unforeseen possibility. You had made the right choice by placing your chips on something that was unlikely to fail. So the simulation of the future generally drives people to choose the safer choice to avoid the possibility of feeling the really bad feelings later. This is also suggested to be why you will buy a brand that you know, even if it it's more expensive, over a brand that you don't know that's less expensive, even though it's a better deal to take the unknown brand, For many people, it feels worth it to spend the extra money because they anticipate they will have more regret if the unknown brand ends up being a bad choice. And this comes up in a thousand ways in our lives. Anticipated regret is what gets you to buy something that's on sale now instead of waiting for maybe a better sale later, because you're afraid that the sale won't last. And then you'll think, oh, man, I could have had that for ten percent off, but I waited and I missed my chance. It's not that you're experiencing regret now, it's that you're anticipating that you will feel regret in the future, and so that steers your behavior now. And this is of course what high pressure car salesmen try to do when they say I'll give you this special discount, but it only applies right now. The second you walk off this car lot, the offer goes away forever, so you simulate how you would feel if you lost this offer that's being dangled in front of you right now. The anticipation of that regret spurs you into actions so you won't have to feel bad later. So your brain simulates futures and it feels them, and often that includes questions like how bad will I feel if I lose this gamble. You don't just minimize risk, you minimize the regret that you expect to feel. But anticipated regret isn't just about avoiding risk. Sometimes you can leverage the issue of anticipation to improve your decision making. So when I was younger, if I was having a hard time making a decision between two choices, my mother would tell me to toss a coin. Heads meant that I would take the first choice, and tails meant I would take the second choice. But the coin toss wasn't the thing. The key, she told me was to toss the coin and see the result, and then see how that result felt in my gut. When you see which choice gets indicated by the coin, you might feel a tiny bit of relief, well I'm glad Atlanta that way, or you might feel instead a tinge of regret, and the second that that regret bubbles up, then you know that the other choice is the better one for you. And here's another example. Let's return to the issue of getting a kid to wear a jacket in the snow. When the parent says, look, it's natural consequences. That's one way to teach the kid, But really what they're hoping for is that the anticipated regret will be enough the kid will think about how things might feel in the future when they are shivering miserably, and that anticipated regret will be sufficient to force their hand to make the right choice now. And before we move on, I'll just mention an interesting tangent here, which is that people with psychopathy. Psychopaths generally have much lower anxiety than the general population. Why it's because one of the characteristics of psychopathy is an inability to simulate possible futures. So, just as an example, if I hook up electrodes to your tongue and then I say, okay, I'm hooking the other end to this car battery and you're going to get this terrible shock on your tongue, you will probably feel a lot of trepidation and anxiety and maybe break a sweat. But that's not what happens to somebody who is a psychopath. They just don't care. They don't get sweaty and anxious. And it's not because they're tougher than you. It's simply because their brains don't simulate the future very well. Now, I'm going to do a whole episode on psychopaths in the near future, so if you're interested in this and what else is going on in psychopathy, please tune in for that one. But for now, I'm going to get back to normal brains. Given the fact that we simulate futures and understand how we might feel in those futures, there's an interesting trick that we can use to improve our own decision making, and that is to put ourselves in the shoes of future people looking back at us. Why because this gives us a very good way to ethically steer our own behavior. The world is full of temptations, and some of them aren't that big deal, but some of them are worth resisting. And one way you can do this is to imagine looking back on your choice from some future point, when you see how all of this played out. A friend of mine refers to this as the concept of book, bell and candle, which means something very particular in the spy world. But what he meant was, whatever you're considering doing, imagine how you would feel about this if it were written down in a book that everyone could read. Or your action causes a bell to ring such that everyone's attention turns to what you did, or a candle lights up the hidden thing you did. How would you feel if everybody could see that you've done it. The point is to put yourself in the future and imagine retrospectively that you have been caught. How would that make you feel? There are many ways of placing yourself in the future and looking back. A colleague of mine as an epidemiologist named Gary Slutkin, and many years ago he started working with gangs in Chicago to see if he could reduce the violence. Now, there are many ways of thinking about intervening to reduce violence, including tougher laws or longer prison sentences, but Gary started thinking about this differently. He noticed, for example, that these gang members don't act badly in front of their grandmothers, but they do in front of their peers, and so they're clearly able to assess a situation from different points of view. So he had an amazing idea, which was to employ former gang members who had previously been incarcerated and who wanted to reduce the violence in their own neighborhood. And they came on board as what he called the interrupters, and the idea was for them to change a gang member's behavior in the moment by making them think about the future. So he got the interrupters to intervene when say, a gang member felt he'd been wrong then he wanted to go in exact revenge, and the interrupter would say something like, hey, think about this for a minute. When you go to jail for shooting that guy who's gonna be with your girl Gary. And people think about this as reframing, but in the context of this episode, I'm casting this as anticipated regret. And this kind of time travel imagining yourself in jail and someone else being with your girlfriend was very effective in steering people's behavior. It forced people to time travel to a what if moment that otherwise they would not have visited. Now Interestingly, I want to clarify that our feelings of anticipated regret are not always a perfect steering mechanism. For us, because we often assume that our near future counterfactuals are going to be more appealing than they actually turn out to be in reality. In other words, the grass always seems greener on the other side of the temporal fence. So what does this have to do with civil wars or why the Balkan nations split off, or why the Arab Emirates came together, or why England split off from the European Union. So let me answer that by going back to one of the great classical novels of Chinese literature. It's a fourteenth century novel whose title translates to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and this novel spends eight hundred thousand words dealing with the battles and plots, both personal and military, of different people and groups trying to achieve dominance for almost a century. It's like Game of Thrones before Game of Thrones and without the dragons. Anyhow, the key thing I want to note is the opening lines, which I've always found shockingly in sight full. The opening lines go like this, the Empire, long divided, must unite, long united, must divide. Thus has it ever been? In other words, the prediction here is that all unified countries are eventually going to decide it's better to split up, and all divided countries will eventually decide it's better to link arms into a union. This is something that characterizes world history. But why does it happen? Well, there may be lots of reasons, including economic factors and agricultural factors and political expediency. But I'm going to suggest there's a neural factor too, and that has to do with people running the counter factuals. What would it be like if we were together? Wouldn't that be terrific? Or we're all tangled up in each other's business, wouldn't things be better if we were independent? And my assertion is that we have a slight bias for concluding that it would be better whichever way we haven't experienced. Why. Well, it's because we're not perfect simulators, and so we believe that the low resolution simulation in our heads is actually a good one, even though it lacks all the blemishes of reality. So we believe that everyone will be happy and get along. And wouldn't it be great if we were unified, or wouldn't it be great if we were finally separated and we compare our sanitized simulation against reality. This is the same thing, of course, with relationships. When we're young and single, we continually fantasize about a partner that we're gonna meet. The partner always says the right thing, always makes us feel great, never has something on his or her mind that causes distractions so that they don't actually listen to you, but realize life is always more complex, for worse and for better than our imaginations can simulate. So now on to the last act we've been seeing so far. In all these episodes that we are creatures who mentally travel to different points in time. We constantly simulate ourselves in the past for memory, or simulate ourselves in the future to steer decision making, or we simulate possible now's to understand what we should have done better. And this kind of time traveling, if we do it intelligently, can allow us to steer our lives a bit better than we otherwise might. For example, as we get better at thinking about and interacting with all these different temporal versions of ourselves, we can actively cultivate our ability to simulate these well. And this is what we get out of visualization, out of actively putting ourselves in a detailed future simulation. So here's an example. I recently met a new friend named Brian Burke who's an LA filmmaker, and he'll ask people, hey, do you want to be a film director? It's not that hard, and the person might say, genuinely, I don't think I could ever do that, and he says, look, here's all you need to do to become a film director. You write a ten minute script and then you get your cell phone camera and a couple friends to shoot it, and then you do all the editing, and he says it'll suck for sure. So then you do it again. You write a new script, and you shoot it again on your cell phone, and you edit it again and it'll probably still suck. And then you do that a third time and you find you're getting a little bit better at this, and then he says at the end of that you'll be as good as most of the directors in Los Angeles. And this simple technique of walking somebody in detail through a future, this really moves and inspires people, especially people for whom it had never even struck them that they could possibly think of being a film director in their internal model. They have a job and they're doing fine at that, and they've never meaningfully considered film directing. That's a totally foreign thing that other people do. But all it takes is someone doing them the favor of walking them through some steps in the imagination what it would take to get there, and suddenly they see that it's not impossible. And this is why visualization of possible futures is so meaningful. It fleshes out what the path can look like. When someone sees the path clearly, then it doesn't seem so hard to get started. And visualization or imagination this can also steer your behavior away from certain things that you don't want to do again by making them feel real. A colleague of Mind named Jack Keene started an app to get seniors to exercise, and the idea is to use AI to show the person a picture of themselves. If they do and if they don't exercise, they see their body in good shape or not in good shape. And once it's something they can picture, then it is more real. And there are lower resolution versions of this. For example, in episode nine, I outline some ways that we can get good at navigating our future behavior, and one example I mentioned is for people who are trying to lose weight. You have them find a picture of themselves where they look more overweight than they would like to and you get them to stick that picture on the fridge and that way, every time they go to the fridge to graze, that picture reminds them of what they want to accomplish, and it does so by allowing them to see right in front of them their future if they don't modify their behavior, and getting people to think about possible futures, good and bad. This is what coaching is about. Sports coaching or life coaching. A coach's job is to expand your model of what's possible and to move you through the next steps and get your aim straight on who you could be. Generally, being able to visualize something makes it like a prediction that you can chase after, or defend against, or prepare for or whatever. It refines the simulation and makes it feel more real. So wrapping up the past three episodes, who you are is the sum total of layered time scales. When you walk down the street, you look to other people like you're just a person walking down the street, but your brain is colorful and alive with reminiscence of your past, simulations of a variety of possible futures, and all your regrets and reliefs that result from simulations of hypothetical nows, and this rich layering of time, this is what makes humans so nuanced and complex and fascinating. And as we come to learn what is happening under the hood, and we get better at taking advantage of these mechanisms, that gives us a small grip on a very powerful tool to navigate ourselves in the direction of who we would like to be. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion and I'll be making an episode soon in which I address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.