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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Cecilia Ergueta

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Cecilia Ergueta

We Aren't Built to Live in the Moment - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...re-is-always-on-your-mind.html

memory perception emotion psychology brain science

shared by Cecilia Ergueta on 22 May 17 - No Cached
  • Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.
  • Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities
  • Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Your brain engages in the same sort of prospection to provide its own instant answers, which come in the form of emotions. The main purpose of emotions is to guide future behavior and moral judgments, according to researchers in a new field called prospective psychology. Emotions enable you to empathize with others by predicting their reactions.
  • paid special attention to unexpected novelties because that was how they learned to avoid punishment and win rewards.
  • If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past,
  • If Homo prospectus takes the really long view, does he become morbid? That was a longstanding assumption in psychologists’ “terror management theory,” which held that humans avoid thinking about the future because they fear death. The theory was explored in hundreds of experiments assigning people to think about their own deaths. One common response was to become more assertive about one’s cultural values, like becoming more patriotic.
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