Time Warped (25 page)

If memories were fixed like videotapes, then picturing a new situation would be time-consuming. Let’s pretend that you want to picture yourself arriving by double-decker bus at a tropical beach for the wedding of Johnny Depp to your best friend. In an instant you can do this. If memories were rigid this would be a complex process. You would need to do the equivalent of finding your personally taped memories of sitting on buses and visiting your best friend, and then you’d
need to order up clips from the mind’s archive of films starring Johnny Depp and TV programmes featuring tropical beach weddings. These memories could be years, even decades apart. Once you have extracted all the necessary elements you’d then need to splice them together to invent this scene. Cognitively it sounds like hard work and would be if we had to do it this way. In fact the flexibility of our memories makes it relatively easy because we can meld all these different memories together seamlessly to invent a new imaginary scene, one which we have never even contemplated before, let alone witnessed. The flexibility of memory seems to be the key to imagining a future.
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Our millions of fragments of memories from different times of our lives are not set in stone; they can change, giving us endless, instant imaginative possibilities. Our unreliable memories might feel like a deficit, but they facilitate mental time-travel into the future.

It is obvious that we learn from experience, but taking this one step further perhaps the primary purpose of memory has nothing to do with looking back, but more to do with allowing us to look forward and imagine possible futures. This is not a new idea. Medieval illustrations of the mind from the fourteenth century depict memories like snakes feeding into the imagination and, long before this, both Aristotle and Galen described memories not as archives of our lives, but as tools for the imagination. It was in 1985 that the Swedish neuroscientist David Ingvar proposed the modern version of this idea. Since then there has been a flurry of studies on future thinking, although, as I’ve mentioned, this research is still dwarfed by the attention given to memory.

In some ways imagination is easier to study than memory
because you avoid the problems I was discussing in the last chapter, such as the necessity to check the accuracy of the memories. The beauty of the imagination is that you can ask every person in your study to picture the same thing.

Take the word ‘forest’ and think of a past memory you’d associate with it. Take a moment to imagine what you can see, what you can smell, whether you feel cold, whether you are happy or sad, who you are with and what you are doing. Now imagine a future event in a forest. What’s that forest like? Is it dark? Does it smell nice? Are you with anyone else? What emotions are you experiencing? Now compare these two images. Which is the most vivid?

Laboratory studies have found that memories for past events tend to be more graphic than thoughts of the future, and they include a greater number of sensory descriptions of how things looked, sounded or smelt. Yet we know that despite the lack of detail, cognitively it is still more demanding to imagine the future than to recall the past. It is often argued that the distant future might be sketchier because imagining it in detail would be a waste of cognitive resources. I wonder whether it is simply that we don’t have the information. I can easily imagine having lunch at home in a month’s time, but to imagine lunch at home in a decade’s time is much harder, since I don’t know where I’ll be living or what my surroundings might look like. Researchers have also found, rather neatly, that just as memories of last week are more vivid than a decade ago,
so a corresponding effect happens with future thinking; events in the near future can be imagined more acutely than those in the distant future.
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Although the past gives rise to more vibrant descriptions, when it comes to our emotional response, it is the future which is the more potent. Research shows that anticipation evokes stronger emotions than retrospection, whether positive or negative. For some the anticipation of a holiday can be almost as good as or even better than the holiday itself. Future imaginings are on the whole more optimistic and also more personal.
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Most of us believe than just a month from now we might have more money, and the further into the future we look, the more optimistic we become. Gamblers believe they’ll be luckier in the distant future, placing safe bets now and long-shots for further ahead. When students were asked to list 10 important events from the past and 10 from the future, the future events were more positive.
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You might guess that this optimism is a reflection of their age, but even up to the age of 75 most people believe their future will be better than their past.
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And if you ask people to think deliberately of negative events that might happen in the future it takes them longer to come up with those than negative events from the past.

The question remains, why emotions should be stronger when imagining the future than recalling the past? The answer could revolve around the idea of uncertainty. We know that this gives rise to more intense emotions and inevitably the future is less certain than the past. But what if the future event doesn’t involve any uncertainty and is definitely nice?

Imagine you have just opened an envelope. Inside is a letter saying you have won an all-expenses-paid skiing trip for two to the Whistler-Blackcomb Ski resort in Canada. The prize includes flights, a lift pass, ski hire, a skiing lesson and five nights in a suite with a jacuzzi at the five-star Chateau Whistler, which is just five minutes’ walk from the ski lifts.

Your first thought might be that it’s a scam, but the volunteers in this study were told to imagine it was all above board and that they had entered a local radio competition with precisely this first prize. Half the volunteers were given the scenario and asked to rate their happiness as they looked forward to the holiday. The other half were asked to imagine they had already taken the prize holiday. Then they were asked how happy it made them feel. The people who imagined it in the future felt happier than those who were reminiscing.
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This task involved no uncertainty, suggesting there might be an alternative explanation for the emotional nature of future thinking. One theory of emotions is that their purpose is to prepare us for action, ready to avoid the negative and embrace the positive. This would fit in here. We don’t need to be readied for action when it comes to the past, so memories need not have such strong emotional content as thoughts about the future.

Future thinking is clearly useful in terms of planning; it allows us to experiment with hypothetical situations before we make a decision and is key to the extraordinary ability of humans to adapt to their environments. However, the mental rehearsal of a future event can occasionally be so realistic that we become convinced we have actually done
it. Just as Elizabeth Loftus implanted false memories in the minds of her volunteers, we do the same to ourselves – like the email you assume you sent, only to discover later that you only
thought
about writing it. Considering that the same parts of the brain are recruited and similar processes are used to conjure up the past and the future, it is perhaps surprising that we don’t become confused more often. Some researchers believe that it’s the vibrancy of memories that allows us to distinguish them from future thoughts. When we do make mistakes they occur in one direction. We might believe we have already done something we only thought about, but it is very unusual to do it the other way round, to believe that a past memory was merely a daydream.

Alan Johnston’s experience as a hostage illustrates just what a powerful impact mental imagery can have. The rest of us might not harness it so consciously, but anyone who has imagined answering questions before a job interview or practised a difficult conversation with their boss is employing the strategy of mental rehearsal. In sport it is now commonplace for athletes to be taught skills in visual imagery where they picture every detail of winning. Tennis players learn between-points routines that aim to return them to the perfect frame of mind before each serve, regardless of what happened during the previous point. After a bad line-call a player with the mental strength to win will re-group, forget the past, and project themselves into the future, imagining the ace they’re about to serve. Snooker players use imagery to picture the ball gliding straight and fast to the pocket. The only time I was any good at pool was when I was
playing with a sports psychologist who was working with Olympic athletes. Whenever it was my turn he talked me through imagining the perfect pot. Remarkably it worked. After that I looked forward to the next opportunity to dazzle people with new skills at pool, but sadly, without the presence of the psychologist, my ability to imagine the perfect pot – and so to realise it – deserted me. This is why top sportspeople invest time in practising their imagery as well as their athletic techniques.

Even if you are not trying to win a game, imagery about the future can help you on an everyday basis. When people develop elaborate mental images about a future event, they are much more likely to remember to do it. So if you want to make sure you don’t forget to buy eggs on the way home you need to picture yourself going into the shop, standing in the correct aisle, looking for the medium-sized eggs, opening the lid to check they’re not broken and taking them up to the counter to pay for them. This is far more effective than saying to yourself, ‘Mustn’t forget the eggs.’ You can apply this to other situations too. If you have an exam coming up you can use your mind to improve your marks, but it is important to do it the right way. In a study one group of students spent five minutes a day in the week running up to their exam imagining the moment when they would discover they’d achieved an A. Meanwhile a second group spent their daily five minutes imagining the process of studying for the exam – imagining finding a quiet place to study and getting things ready. When the real exam results were revealed this was the group that did better.
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SUICIDE ISLAND

The conscious choice to pre-experience the future through imagery can bring many benefits, but sometimes our minds propel us into the future against our will and the consequences can be fatal. Just 10 kilometres south-west of Hong Kong Island is a much smaller island called Cheung Chau. On the Saturday when I visited the island, the fast ferry was packed with families carrying picnics and beach towels. A sign on the inside of the ferry cabin said, ‘Be considerate. Keep your voices down!’ Most people seemed too excited to take much notice.

Later on, while I sat on the waterfront promenade eating dim sum, I was struck by the combination of a Chinese scene – stalls selling traditional herbal medicines and tiny fish, laid out in lines on racks to dry in the sunshine; and a traditional British seaside resort atmosphere – children carrying buckets and spades and begging their parents for ice creams. Teenage boys cycled past on tricycles with their girlfriends on the back seats, shaded by blue-and-white striped canopies. The harbour was crammed with so many junks and fishing boats painted cobalt and green that you could barely see the blue water in between them. A short walk away at the recreation ground next to the Buddhist temple men were dismantling the bamboo-covered steel scaffolding after the annual bun festival, which features the famous ‘bun climb’. Men scramble up to the top of 20-foot-high scaffolds which are covered in sweet buns to form a giant, sticky pyramid. The climb is so precarious that after an accident in the 1970s, in which one of the towers collapsed injuring 30 people, competitors are
now required to complete a training course in basic mountaineering skills. And sadly even the buns are replicas now.

High above the tower of buns, the temple and the harbour, there are blocks of holiday flats built into the hills, half-hidden behind the trees. With sandy beaches and alleyways lined with pastel-painted cottages, this could be the perfect holiday destination. But at the start of the twenty-first century the island developed a new reputation as the place from which not everyone returns alive. A small number of people began visiting the island with a very specific plan in mind, a plan to die. The tiny community sometimes had to deal with a dozen deaths from suicide a year. For the locals, it was not only distressing to find the bodies, but bad for business. The suicide rate in Hong Kong is four times that of the UK. Experts blame the pressures of life in a competitive, crowded city combined with a common feeling that asking for help is shameful.

At Hong Kong’s oldest psychiatric hospital, a place now modernised but so infamous that people still warn each other jokingly that if they’re not careful they’ll be ‘sent to Castle Peak’, I met Angela, who had come from rural mainland China with her husband in search of work. She told me that a life of poverty and discrimination had ground her down. After her youngest daughter was born she was diagnosed with depression and the baby had to go into foster care for a year. Angela became convinced she was a bad mother and told me how in her despair she decided her children would be better off in another life – the other world, as she put it – rather than in this one. She made a decision to kill her children and then herself. Thankfully she told staff at the hospital of her plans and was given help before
she was able to try. Now in her early fifties, she told me she feels a bit happier and that she and her husband quarrel less, but that still she doesn’t have much hope for the future.

Angela’s plan was not carried out, but others continued travelling to Cheung Chau to kill themselves until the community took advice from the eminent Centre for Suicide Research at Hong Kong University. Researchers there have found that at least a third of people attempting suicide do so on impulse and have had no previous signs of mental illness. This means that if you remove their first choice of method they might never try it again. As many as 7,000 lives were saved in Britain after the switch beginning in 1958 from coal gas, which kills you if you breathe in enough of it, to the safer natural gas,
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while the suicide rate in Samoa dropped after the move from Paraquat to other less toxic types of pesticide. The residents of Cheung Chau have tried something similar. As the holidaymakers crowded down the ramp from the ferry, I noticed a couple of police officers standing quietly at the quayside. They were looking out for anyone on their own who appeared vulnerable. If they spot someone they say hello and offer them help. The holiday flats can no longer be rented by single individuals and if owners do become concerned about their tenants they knock on the door, sometimes repeatedly, asking if they can be of service. Police tour the island looking for anything suspicious. The experts say that some of those determined to end their lives will go ahead, but for the community here these steps have made a difference. Suicide is no longer such a problem there.