Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (7 page)

I have no way of knowing what story you told yourself about your dream job, but I do know that you drew on your past experiences to imagine your future. Repeatedly and rapidly, you compared and combined pieces of your past to create something better. You pictured likable people around you (leaving behind the jerks at your old job). You thought about the resources that would make the job better (for most people, these include more pay, more freedom, and a greater sense of meaning).

You no doubt felt positive emotions when you saw yourself in your new role: maybe excitement and pride, serenity and joy, or a feeling of security. These emotions aren’t just a feel-good by-product. They actually work as cognitive guides that lead you to invest in certain lines of thought and to avoid others. They help you convert general information about “good jobs” into an image of the job that would be the best fit for you. And they begin to arouse the motivation you’ll need to make your dream job real.

I know all this about your thought processes, because, like all other card-carrying psychologists, I studied natural experiments of sorts that revealed how the brain worked.
For example, accounts of the injuries and complicated recovery of a patient known as “KC” taught us much about how prospection, the act of looking forward, works. KC became
an amnesiac after a motorcycle crash. Deprived of his past, he remained stuck in time, unable to mentally travel into the future.

Today, neuroscientists go well beyond their own observations to give us a real-time report on what is going on inside our skulls. Using technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), they monitor blood flow, oxygen consumption, and electrical activity in precise areas of the brain. With that information, they can track a hopeful thought, such as landing a good job in the next year, along what I like to call the
prospection pipeline
. This is the path we take from thinking about the future to developing and executing the plans that make that future a reality. It’s a trip through the unique and shared functions of relatively old and relatively new parts of our brains, all working together in incredibly complex ways.

As I discussed previously, we build our hopes from memories. To imagine a good job in the future, we can use a past job for contrast. For example, when I conducted my own “dream job” thought experiment, I didn’t have to go in on Saturdays and Sundays, because I drew on the seven years of my high school and college life when I worked almost every weekend. I had a flash memory of driving to my old job on a quiet Saturday morning and used that to prospect a different future.

This work is done in a brain area called the hippocampus, two tiny seahorse-shaped structures that face each other between your temples. We take snapshots of our experiences and then move them around as needed.
The most meaningful episodes, both good and bad, tend to be the ones that stick, and we gradually tie them together into an ongoing story of our lives called “autobiographical memory.”

But these memories are not only our personal résumé—they also help to create the next story. You could not have formed the detailed images of your dream job or felt the emotions connected with it without images from your past. Your ability to imagine depends on your ability to remember. In some cases, we can also remember things we
imagined
in the past as vividly as actual events.

This “prospecting” function of the hippocampus is so important that some researchers now think its primary evolutionary role may have been to anticipate the future by creating simulations of what an animal might encounter. For prehistoric humans, a good memory for past dangers increased their chances of surviving similar situations in the future—and getting enough to eat by remembering where the sweetest fruits grew.

In a typical study using brain scans, research participants are asked to either recall a past event or imagine an event to occur in the next year. Once they have this image vividly in mind, they alert the researcher by pressing a button. Whether they are remembering the past or preliving the future, the hippocampus lights up.
When we anticipate a new situation
or are faced with a challenge, we automatically scan our memory for guidelines, and then we mentally practice how we would deal with the threats and challenges.
Training in our brain’s simulator is less risky than going into novel situations unprepared.

Okay, the dream job exercise activated your hippocampus (meaning that blood surged to bring it more oxygen and its electrical charge increased). The image of your new job expanded and became more vivid, and you essentially created a new memory, one of the future.
Now the prospection pipeline leads to another brain structure, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (or rACC). The rACC sits about an inch behind the center of your forehead, and it works with the amygdala, one of the oldest parts of the brain, a center that triggers reactions to emotions. The amygdala is best known for spurring us to act when we are threatened, but it also triggers us to act on the feelings and drives that energize our vision.

Your rACC tracks how important and meaningful each of your mental images and goals are—how much they matter to you at the moment. It helps you let go of goals that don’t matter anymore or aren’t in your best interests and links you to goals that warrant your resources. It pushes you to make smart choices.

This is the part of my brain that nudged me toward reality and helped me recognize that I wasn’t young or talented enough to pursue one version of my dream job—shortstop for the Boston Red Sox. The rACC was also at work when Jerome Groopman was trying to figure out whether he should experiment with more treatment for the back injury that caused him so much pain. Groopman had to sort through the best- and worst-case scenarios for the future and align these scenarios with his feelings, his years-long emotional battle with pain. Only then could he choose hope.

The final key station along the brain’s prospection pipeline is the youngest part, the prefrontal cortex. It lights up when college students are asked to think about the courses and credits they need to graduate, when CEOs are challenged to develop and execute a vision for their company, and when you are asked to think about how you will search for that dream job.
The prefrontal cortex functions as the brain’s command center, carrying out the executive functions needed to convert vision to reality. It gathers and coordinates information from many other parts of the brain, develops strategies for reaching a goal, and executes the plan. It moderates the constant interplay between our emotions and our cognitive functions, and it also processes social cues from the world around us. All this is necessary for us to be able to develop and follow a course of action to the outcome we desire.

One recent study of prefrontal cortex functioning stands out for the way it reinforces the importance of hope. Suzanne Peterson, business professor at Arizona State University, used EEG technology to tap into the minds of fifty-five business and community leaders as they created visions for their organizations’ future. The leaders were first given a hope test and then asked specifically to think about how their organizations would grow, how growth would align with their core values, and how they would better serve clients. The electrical activity of their brains was mapped as each individual envisioned the future; then all the maps were compared. Every executive showed prefrontal activity, but those who had previously tested low in hope showed more activity on the right side—the side associated with negative outlooks and behaviors. Those who came up with the most positive plans for the future showed more activity on the left prefrontal cortex, where prospection, our hopeful vision, becomes pathways—hope in action. Take your index finger and point to the middle of your left eyebrow. Now move your finger up about an inch. There you are.

In the prefrontal cortex, we attach ourselves to the future through a goal that matters to us. Our hopeful brain then helps us marshal and manage information that is relevant to the desired event (including recognizing any obstacles to this goal) and it produces an elevated feeling that firms up our commitment to the future and attracts others to us. Ultimately, the hopeful brain tells us to reach out for more resources and support.

Hope is not just a personal resource. It’s one of the most important ways we create our families, our communities, and our society. Thanks to our big frontal lobes, we humans outstrip every other species in the size and complexity of our social networks. And from the moment we’re born (in some cases, even before), our brains and minds are shaped by the bonds we form with those closest to us.

Emotions are as contagious as the common cold. We often feel someone’s anger or sadness or indifference even before they say a word, and our own mood shifts in response. But when we’re “in sync,” our motions and gestures start to mirror those of other people. Our breathing becomes coordinated and physical markers like heart rate align. We feel engaged, safe,
good
. We’re attracted to hopeful people because being around them makes us more energized and hopeful ourselves.

Brain scientists can now tell us why this happens.
They’ve begun to map systems of “mirror neurons” that appear throughout our brains. These neurons are precise mimics; they fire whenever we see someone making a movement just as if we were making the same movement ourselves. From the slightest clues, they pick up others’ intentions and emotions. They also respond when we mentally rehearse an action. This instantaneous mirroring is going on all around us all the time. As little kids watching the big kids on the playground, we really were learning how to be like them. Now when we encounter people with big goals and high hope, our brains are primed to follow them.

For decades the most striking object in my hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana, was a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Standing seven feet tall, carved from gleaming white marble, he was magnificent, but this did not make him immune to the pranks of local teens. Many Sunday mornings, the noble emperor was adorned with vestiges of Saturday night’s fun. Passing him on the way home from church, we’d conclude that Hadrian had had a great time—given the beer can in his hand and the plastic leis around his neck. After a while, I began to think of him as our town’s drunk uncle. You know the type—you love him but you just don’t know how he’ll turn up.

Then the statue’s owner, a local bank, decided to insure Hadrian in case a joke went too far. The insurance company required an appraisal. And that’s when we all found out that Uncle Hadrian was a one-of-a-kind, original marble statue from ancient Greece, carved around 150 AD, and worth nearly $1 million.

I sometimes think of the Hadrian statue whenever I and other people fail to value the gifts, talents, and capacities that make us unique. It took more than 1.5 million years for us humans to develop the neurobiological hardware, consciousness of self and time, and flexible thinking needed to hope. Yet as I once did, we focus on IQ or other markers of success and take hope for granted. In the following chapter, I will offer some hard data to convince you that hope matters in your daily life.

O
NE DAY
in 1975, Chuck Magerl pulled a book off a library shelf and made what to most people would have been a trivial discovery. In a thesis on midwestern industries, Chuck read that two brothers had once run a brewery just a couple of miles from where he sat in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas.
The Walruff Brewery had been one of more than ninety local breweries operating statewide in the late 1800s. But Prohibition got an early start in Kansas, and the state legislature—with voter approval—shut them down in 1881. The Walruffs hung on longer than most, earning their place as the last legal beer makers in Kansas for more than one hundred years.