Mind Games: The Failure of Imagination

We know that our actions play a major part in how happy we are. Before we act, we decide. When we go about making decisions we use our imaginations to construct a mental simulation of the future. If we like what we see, we are likely to go forward with a decision and carry it out as an action. Unfortunately, we aren’t very skilled at making decisions that lead to happy outcomes. Our brains work in ways that allow for consistent mistakes that undermine us. What’s worse, our tricky brains trip us up without us ever realizing a problem exists.

Harvard Professor of Psychology, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness illustrates the many ways in which imagination fails us. He covers three major issues in our thinking process that confound us.

It’s All in the Details

Do you trust your memories? How much? When reminiscing about the good old days with friends and family, how often are the details in sync? What did you have for lunch last Friday? Stumped? But you probably remember your first kiss. But what kind of shoes were you wearing at the time? Our memories aren’t like video cameras that record events in great detail, they work more like cheap camera phones capturing blurry snapshots. Our crafty brains compensate for the vague nature of memories by filling in details which often don’t reflect our past realities accurately. Just as we tend to subconsciously fill in the blanks with invented detail, we also tend to leave out important details that should be considered. The subconscious nature of this process gives us a false confidence in the validity of our sketchy recall. We think our memories are accurate reproductions of our past and depend upon them for decision-making uncritically. The implication here is that we make assumptions about the future based on distorted, incomplete memories which leads to distorted expectations of the future. Any good spy will tell you that you can’t execute a mission on bad intel.

Presentism

Concentrate on this picture.

While you’re still concentrating on the puppy, try to imagine your best friend’s face in detail.  

Hard, right? We use our visual cortex to see but we also use it to construct images mentally. When faced with the task of physically seeing and constructing an image mentally, our physical senses take precedence. This is why it’s easier to visualize a mental image if we close our eyes or remember the melody of a song if we clog our ears to shut out distracting sounds. We imagine the future in the same way that we imagine how a face looks. When thinking about the future we “pre-feel” the imagined situation when assessing its merits. If I play basketball on Saturday, how will it make me feel? The problem with pre-feeling is that just like with our physical senses, the present takes precedence over the imagination. How we feel when we’re thinking about the future affects what we imagine we will feel about the future. This is easy to illustrate. People who have overeaten buy less groceries than they need and regret it later. The present sensation of being full clouds our ability to imagine correctly the extent of our future hunger. If we’re thinking about playing basketball on Saturday after a grueling workout, we are likely to mistakenly pre-feel that it will be a negative experience. Gilbert puts it succinctly, “Future events may request access to the emotional areas of our brains, but current events almost always get the right of way.” “It is only natural that we should imagine the future and then consider how doing so makes us feel, but because our brains are hell-bent on responding to current events, we mistakenly conclude that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today.”

The Psychological Immune System

We’ve spoken before of the hedonic treadmill theory. It tell us that we overestimate the impact that major positive and negative events will have on us. We have a psychological immune system that buffers tragedy and mitigates overestimated pleasure. We’ll feel less bad than we think we will if we become paralyzed and less good than we think we will if we win the lottery. This kind of protection extends to how our brains interpret reality. Experiences are ambiguous and subject to all kinds of interpretation. We tend to interpret the world in ways that are charitable to us. Our achievements are due to our talent, skill and effort while our failings are circumstantial. We learn to like what we have and think less about what we don’t. Because this process happens subconsciously, we think our experience of reality is pure. When making decisions we don’t count on our psychological immune system to work its magic in the future and reinterpret reality in our favor. This prevents us from making tough decisions and encourages inaction. Our imagination is skewed. The mental simulation process doesn’t account for how things feel differently once we actually experience them.

Now what?

Gilbert says that the cumulative effect of the failings of the imagination is that we “become strangers to ourselves.” But what else could we possibly do to make decisions? Surely we can’t abstain from thinking about the future? He suggests an alternate method free from all the faults of mental predictions. Surrogation…